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

Also, in case anyone doesn't know it, the HATPC game code lives at http://swf.neopets.com/games/g349_v9_99392.dcr and the HATIC game code at http://images.neopets.com/games/g473_v22_85913.dcr

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.

Invalid water types crash during loading.

Maybe you can stick Hannah partially out of water and piece the sprites together idk.

I'll have to give that a try. Depends on how much of you has to be in the water for the swimming animation to start.

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.

Code:

If you can cause a shockwave error, terrain and water will be invisible if you minimize the tab and open it back up

How exactly do I pull that off, Yimmy? Like, how do you force a shockwave error and what do you mean by minimizing the tab?

@Krotomo - I think I just might be able to pull something off with that trick. I'll give it a shot.

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.

1 frame at a time yeah.

you may mount a video camera in front of your monitor as you play HATPC and extract the low-resolution pixels from the footage

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.

6-9, 0 crashes on load in a nontutorial. You want a tutorial level without tutorial messages.

Ok, so I make a tutorial level that has numbers in it but no lines starting with ? and when I touch a number I'll crash it?

Welcome to the Interguild, where we discuss the minute details of how to crash a 16-year-old shockwave game in the right way.

Cool!

So I take it that went swimmingly?