Inky Blackness news: Superseding ss-specs.txt

[6741d164f14aadertseha]

° InkyBlackness

Today I reached a milestone with the ss-specs subproject of Inky Blackness: Superseding ss-specs.txt from TSSHP, the unofficial documentation file!

With various pauses and boosts throughout the last months, this week's run brought me the last commit that imported and refined the last information.

Of course, it wasn't just copying information, it was a process of re-verification as well. There were several instances where ss-specs.txt was wrong (or simply lacking information). In its current state, Inky Blackness still doesn't have the complete documentation of all the data; At least, whatever is in ss-specs.txt (or only in the sources of TSSHP) has now been taken over, corrected and expanded on. (With minor exceptions)
Also a thank-you to Gawain, who through the course of their project gave some input & pull requests.

Especially the chapter on the trigger objects has been greatly expanded. Nearly all of the trigger actions are now documented.

For me it is also great to see "behind the scenes" on how the game actually works; From simple door controls to how the reactor code is loaded into the panel.
I also found some interesting bits, which haven't been utilized; For instance number pads support up to three different number combinations.

Furthermore, THERMOS cans can actually store stuff! Either I had completely forgotten about this or never tried it. (There's even one with an access card in it!)

Another unofficial milestone has also been reached: I could finally crack how video clips (the low-res cutscenes and video mails, not the MOVI ones) are decoded and put into sequence. I was quite relieved when I solved what I couldn't nearly 15 years ago. Probably others did that before me already, at least now it is documented. Either way, all raw resources are now documented. (One of the Inky Blackness tools, chunkie, can export most of them.)

Next up for Inky Blackness will be focus on the level editor. Along with it I'm hoping to document the other remaining unknown fields of various level objects.

[6741d164f1683Gawain]

Excellent work! 

[6741d164f1895icemann]

Awesome work. That truly must have taken a monumental amount of time to put together, even in it's current form.

I'll forever hold some disappointment with TSSHP. It was going the direction of Doom source ports (adding in great new features, whilst still retaining the core experience) and then just died out of nowhere. If it hadn't we'd have had a good SS1 remake, done completely by scratch 10 years ago (at the least). They were so close to having a working game. All it needed was working AI in the enemies and it would have been done for the most part. The rest was already in by that stage, from memory. Drives me bonkers whenever I think about it.