So I was talking with HannahTheUsulFan (the guy thinking of reviving HATIC) and we're working together to see if we can come up with a better way to extract assets from the Hannah games. Specifically, I'm being roadblocked ATM by extracting the swimming sprites from HATPC, because I can't find any way to separate them from the water texture cleanly. Here's what we have so far, and any suggestions would be appreciated.
The ideal solution (for both of us) would be some way to extract all the textures from the game code or from the running game. I haven't found anything that can do that, but I have found something that can extract some of the textures and all of the sound files from the .dcr game files. Unfortunately, it seems to have only gotten a few of the textures, only the ones in JPEG form. The tool that was able to pull that off was Ravioli Game Tools: http://www.scampers.org/steve/sms/other.htm
We've looked around to see if any tools could extract the rest of the assets, but so far, no dice.
Another option that would help me with my situation (and HannahTheUsulFan when he comes up on the same issue) would be some way to make the water in HATPC/HATIC invisible so that the swimming textures can be extracted or some other way to cause the swimming textures to appear without the water. The uploader won't allow you to mess with the "water" line, but I understand it that you guys have a way to circumvent the uploader, so that's one avenue to check out. Also, you guys know a lot about HATPC glitches, so it you know of any glitch that makes water invisible or lets you swim in air, that would be a big help.
I uploaded a cave on krotest that uses an airpocket that allows half of Hannah to be sticking out while swimming, maybe that works? Also, if you press up while standing on the metal crates the swim animation appears for a brief moment.
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Spoiler:
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Another thing. I'm fairly sure from my analysis thus far that there's only one swimming sprite and it's just rotated to represent swimming up and down (relative to your speed). That makes things simpler, since I just have to get the sprite while Hannah is level and rotate it when I display it.
That shockwave error idea does work.
Crash the game however you want, few dozen dynamites exploding next to the edge of the map is quick and easy. Bad tutorial message works too. However you want.
Move the screen around, minimize it or whatever, and everything will turn white except sprites and the hud.
So does the game stay frozen after you pull off the trick? That would limit me to getting one frame of animation at a time, but I'd eventually be able to get them all.
If the trick is too tricky to pull off, if possible, I wonder if we can reprogram the splash animation far away from Hannah, so the frames for the animation are easier to extract? Just wondering.
That should be a workable solution at least. The shockwave error thing, not the video camera thing. I'm pretty sure I know enough to pull it off, I just need to swim horizontally into a number 6-9 in a non-tutorial level, then repeat the trick until I get all the frames of the swim animation.