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Map viewer and asset exporter for Attack of the Saucerman

I'm working on reverse engineering the file formats of the 1999 game Attack of the Saucerman (Windows version). This repository contains the results of this work so far:

All of this is work in progress and not complete yet.

Map viewer

The map viewer is written in C++, and uses SDL+OpenGL. It's currently relatively basic: It can open and display all of the game's level files, but it can't display all elements of a map yet, and only offers very basic camera movement.

Use the up/down arrow keys to move forwards/backwards, and left/right to turn. Holding shift + arrow up/down allows moving up and down vertically.

What works

  • Displaying terrain, level geometry, billboard sprites, and 3D models
  • Basic tank-control style camera movement
  • Toggling display of different elements

What's missing

  • Texture animations
  • Handling translucent surfaces
  • Lighting (texture brightness adjustments)
  • Displaying entities and other map elements
  • More flexible camera movement (looking up/down, mouse look?)

How to run it

Building the map viewer requires CMake, SDL2, and a C++-17 capable compiler. On Windows, the SDL dependency can be installed using vcpkg, on Linux/Mac it's available via the usual package managers. The build process is standard CMake fare. For example (using the Ninja build tool):

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -GNinja
ninja

The resulting binary, bin/SaucerMapViewer, accepts the path to a map file as command line argument. On Windows, you can also drag a map file onto the executable to launch it.

Asset exporter

The asset exporter is a Python script. It reads files in the game's wad format (unrelated to Doom WADs), and currently unpacks the following assets:

  • Textures and other images (converted to PNG files)
  • 3D models (converted to glTF files)
  • Sound effects (exported as WAVE files)

The exported 3D models currently don't support translucent surfaces, and aren't the most efficient representation.

The script requires Python 3 and the Pillow library, which can be installed using PIP (pip install Pillow).

To use the script, first unpack the game's main data container Saucerdata.pak. This is basically just a ZIP file, and most standard tools should be able to extract it (I had trouble using 7zip, but Linux unzip and Windows Explorer's built-in ZIP support worked fine). After that, invoke the script on the desired WAD file by passing its path as a command-line argument. The dumped files are placed into a new directory called <wad_file_name>_exported.

For example, to unpack the first level's assets:

unzip Saucerdata.pak
python3 dump_wad_file.py LEVELS/ar51_1.wad