Quote:
Originally Posted by azxten
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There is no source code that has anything to do with these effects.
Yes, this is black box reverse engineering. Good luck trying to figure out where these files are being referenced.
The .dds image files in SpellEffects folder are DirectDraw surfaces which implies they are being passed as an argument to a DirectX particle emitter function. However, the .edd file has no reference I can find.
In my opinion this means the file is a custom format that is read in by a custom function which passes data to the DirectX particle emitter functions.
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Why would it be difficult to determine where these are being referenced? What method is passing in the data to the DirectX particle emitter function. Is the DirectX particle emitter function well-defined? Are there references? How did the original EQ devs know how to create the DD surfaces? We should be able to locate calls into directx. We then should be able to see how these files are deserialized, or find the entry point into the DirectX method call and see what gets passed in as a parameter. If it's just the DDS surface, then we should be able to look up the member definition of that DX interface and understand the serialization format. If it's passing actual parameters, then our custom function is defined in source and we should be able to tell what we're pulling from the files.
In either case we own the code that deserializes or we know which method is decoding the files - and that method, if DirectX, is public domain.