Unravelling the Secrets of "Normality" (1996)

Unravelling the Secrets of "Normality" (1996) (Read 5049 times) ANALYZE

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Broken Pencil

#101 August 03, 2014, 04:26:39 pm

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Oh yeah... Smart.

Also, has anyone ever tried ripping the sky texture? I want to use it for a video in a program.
(3d movie maker)
EDIT: I think we're going to need denzquix. I'll PM him.

Last Edit: August 03, 2014, 04:28:07 pm by Broken Pencil

"Spoo-eee!"

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denzquix

#102 August 03, 2014, 04:39:16 pm

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Here's the sky texture from Kent's apartment:

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Broken Pencil

#103 August 03, 2014, 04:53:31 pm

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Thank you!

EDIT: Messed around with the thing a bit, and...
http://liambrocklehurst.com/uploader/files/275/Normality%20skyline.pdn
It's a paint.net file, with layers of the buildings, sky, and cloud.

decided to make something:

You can download the PDN file here:
http://liambrocklehurst.com/uploader/files/275/syline%20edit%201.pdn

Last Edit: August 03, 2014, 11:40:23 pm by Broken Pencil

"Spoo-eee!"

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denzquix

#104 December 16, 2014, 10:33:32 pm

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been adding a bunch of stuff I found for this thread to The Cutting Room Floor wiki:

http://tcrf.net/Normality
http://tcrf.net/Proto:Normality
http://tcrf.net/Prerelease:Normality

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bonzi_buddy

#105 December 17, 2014, 06:08:00 am

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:O Wow! Our very own denzquick is famous! A-autograph p-please.

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Crowley9

#106 February 02, 2015, 04:22:34 am

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Any progress in the video format front?

Also, hello, fellow Finnish person above!

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SkaZz

#107 July 27, 2015, 08:03:36 pm

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Hi,
can you help me to traslate this game into spanish? Years ago, a friend built for me an app for change LANG.DAT. But I need modify fonts and graphics with text. Can you built an app for decode/encode files?

Thanks

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Crowley9

#108 October 20, 2015, 06:41:00 pm

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And now, a stubborn attempt from me to keep this alive.

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EdvardPedersen

#109 April 14, 2016, 10:01:09 pm

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I just started implementing some of this stuff for fun, you can see the progress at https://github.com/EdvardPedersen/NormalityLib (not very far along yet).

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denzquix

#110 April 17, 2016, 04:07:21 pm

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That's great, thank you!

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Crowley9

#111 May 13, 2016, 03:18:31 pm

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Progress, excellent!

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elvisish

#112 April 27, 2018, 08:41:56 pm

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Normality is one of my favourite games of all time, I've played it ever since I got it brand-new back in '96 when I was 9, I absolutely still love it to this day! Is there a full resource viewer available to view textures, sounds, midis and dialogs? Would love it if the devs want to come back and tell some more stories of the development days!

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denzquix

#113 May 03, 2018, 01:38:32 pm

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I did start doing a browser-based extractor tool a while ago:

https://radishengine.github.io/denormalize/

...drag and drop a MGL or DAS file from the "MAPS" folder onto the drag and drop zone to see extracted sprites and textures.

Unfortunately there are some things that I don't think have an extractable file format, it seems like they could have been hard-coded into the game.

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elvisish

#114 May 07, 2018, 02:20:46 pm

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Quote from: denzquix on May 03, 2018, 01:38:32 pm

I did start doing a browser-based extractor tool a while ago:

https://radishengine.github.io/denormalize/

...drag and drop a MGL or DAS file from the "MAPS" folder onto the drag and drop zone to see extracted sprites and textures.

Unfortunately there are some things that I don't think have an extractable file format, it seems like they could have been hard-coded into the game.

Absolutely incredible! I'm having such a great time looking through the textures, love the little descriptions. Could this extractor be downloaded as either an exe or whatever it was written in (.py or a java script)? Just in case the site ever goes offline it would be amazing to have this tool available for generations to come!

Besides the main text font, I'm also keen on seeing the other font files that are in the GFX folder if they're ever possible to be read, I guess those would be for the menus?

PS: Would be great if the filenames could correspond to the material name for saving! (which I did with a browser downloader)

Last Edit: May 09, 2018, 05:04:32 pm by elvisish

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denzquix

#115 May 11, 2018, 09:14:27 am

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It's a pure JavaScript application, so it runs entirely in the browser and doesn't require any special server-side stuff, it only needs static files. It's also a public GitHub project, so you can download a snapshot of all the files as a ZIP: https://github.com/radishengine/denormalize/archive/master.zip

I finally took a look at the fonts. They are MGL-compressed in the standard way, but the actual data is raw pixel data. That means there's no way to tell how big each character is supposed to be, so there's no easy way to display the characters in a sensible way.

What I did instead is import the decompressed font data into GIMP as "Raw image data" doing trial-and-error with different widths until it looked right. So, here are the Normality fonts as four (very very tall) PNG images:

https://imgur.com/a/CMPR3qZ

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Ragnar

#116 May 13, 2018, 07:08:43 pm

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wish I had as much devotion to rando projects as you guys have *looks at 100+ releases on Bandcump* o-oh

http://djsaint-hubert.bandcamp.com/

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elvisish

#117 May 27, 2018, 04:32:56 pm

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Quote from: denzquix on May 11, 2018, 09:14:27 am

It's a pure JavaScript application, so it runs entirely in the browser and doesn't require any special server-side stuff, it only needs static files. It's also a public GitHub project, so you can download a snapshot of all the files as a ZIP: https://github.com/radishengine/denormalize/archive/master.zip

I finally took a look at the fonts. They are MGL-compressed in the standard way, but the actual data is raw pixel data. That means there's no way to tell how big each character is supposed to be, so there's no easy way to display the characters in a sensible way.

What I did instead is import the decompressed font data into GIMP as "Raw image data" doing trial-and-error with different widths until it looked right. So, here are the Normality fonts as four (very very tall) PNG images:

https://imgur.com/a/CMPR3qZ

Sorry for the delay, been changing jobs and not had a lot of time to internet! I did a manual extraction job by capturing frames from dosbox, boy I wish I'd had this strip a month ago! Thanks so much for that, there's a lot of characters I would have missed and lots from the other fonts that are hard to extract. really appreciate it!

How are the voice files? I've always wondered if there's any un-heard speech hidden and unused in the resources.

EDIT: one other thing I'd love to see are the Save/Load, Quit To Dos and Options background images. There's usually text over them so it's hard to see the original background images. Can these be extracted by the tool from the non-map resources?

Last Edit: May 27, 2018, 09:26:26 pm by elvisish

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denzquix

#118 May 29, 2018, 02:51:50 pm

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Quote from: elvisish on May 27, 2018, 04:32:56 pm

How are the voice files? I've always wondered if there's any un-heard speech hidden and unused in the resources.

You can check out some unused speech in the TCRF.net entry I wrote (there's some more on the demo page).

The speech samples are stored uncompressed in DIGI/SOUND.RAW. Using Audacity, try Import > Raw Data... on this file with these settings:

Encoding: Unsigned 8 bit PCM
Byte order: No endianness
Channels: 1 channel (Mono)
Start offset: 0
Amount to import: 100% (or less if you just want to try it out, there's several hours' worth in there and it takes a little time to import)
Sample rate: 11025hz

There doesn't seem to be any metadata in this file about where these samples should start and stop, and some of them even seem to use a different sample rate to the rest (this is another case where I assume the info must be hardcoded into the program somewhere...) so unfortunately there's no easy way to automatically separate the speech lines into individual samples that I can see.

Last Edit: May 29, 2018, 03:01:04 pm by denzquix

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dada

#119 November 21, 2021, 11:43:21 pm

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Reviving this ancient topic because I've been looking into this game again recently, trying to pick up where denzquix left off. I might eventually start looking into the map data format, but it's pretty hard and I don't have any reverse engineering experience, but mostly I'm focused on getting more stuff for the TCRF article.
There's actually quite a lot of interesting stuff I've found out. One thing I'm doing right now is just going through all the exported textures and visually checking to see which ones are unused. I've also done a dig into old game magazines and found some interesting differences in the pre-release copies they used to make screenshots. Right now I'm just banking it up until I've finished going through all of it.

Also, I found a Windows 95 screensaver and extracted the assets from it: https://archive.org/details/NormalityWin95Screensaver

By the way, I guess denzquix probably doesn't check this forum anymore, but if anyone is interested he's actually like one of the more prolific uploaders on the Internet Archive and has a *ton* of stuff archived: https://archive.org/details/@denzquix

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