Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Help/Tips/Tricks My Quest for Modding the 2D Sprites

Hello everyone!


Foreword:

Even though I feel this game's forum is on it's deathbed, I will share my efforts of modding with you, meaning specifically the 2D sprites. There were a decent amount of people in the past interested in this (including me) and I wanted to give it a final effort.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Documentation:

cmp: Divine Divinity Archive
divinity: Divine Divinity sprite archive (use on CPackedi.*c files)

The below is basically what we are dealing with in this case.The archives in "...static\imagelists" contain the sprites, namely the CPackedi.0c - CPackedi.12c. I found a post on another forum where a decompiler + utility (SAU - Sprites and Archive Utility by SNV) to extract files of games from this era with had been uploaded and discussed. I experimented a bit with decompiling but haven't made progress so far. I guess I am not correctly applying the formula. :S
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Don't even try conventional methods like .rar, .zip, .7z or /r cmd unpacking. All tested, all for naught.
Even DragonUnpacker and ResourceHacker don't work one bit. The closest I got was with DragonUnpacker's advanced tool. But it can't be called a success when all I was able to extract were some random creepy-ass midi files (probably broken due to bad extraction).

If you got any questions, hints or info, post it here I'll get right to it. Peace

Update: Seems you have to do some basic C/C++ stuff to use this utility... first you've got to mount up an SAU decompiler which I will hand out along with the utility to anyone asking or eventually just upload it and give you the link.



If anyone has a better idea than me how I should actually apply the formula it would be greatly appreciated. I just haven't gotten the hang of it yet...

Progress: Seems I figured out the right synthax, BUT - I have to take guesses as the output file format seems to be anything but .dds, .png, .gif, .div, .tga etc. etc. so basically I'm poking in the mud until it maybe works


Progress: This utility seems useless or it works differently than advertised. What I found out in the meantine however is that those are fiendishly encrypted .CC (C/C++) arhives which are next to impossible to safely open in visual CC runtime editors because of their size. Great job on being the hugest dicks possible in this regard, former Divinity - The Sword of Lies (as it should have been named) developer team. Your DRM and anti-piracy obsession destroyed countless opportunities to keep your game interesting and expandable.

From here on I am running low on alternatives to finally giving up - which I will not yet:

- Finding a program which can savely open the archives
- Settling with opening just the smaller archives in hopes my desired files will be contained in these
- Finding another tool/utility or hint to work with on http://xeen.wikia.com/wiki/Xeen_Wiki - which is one of the very few games having been encrypted in the same way

It's possible Raze or perhaps Norbyte might have an idea (I'm afraid I don't!) but I think with all the other stuff going on right now they may be slightly preoccupied for the time being...

Wow, another nightowl
Thanks for your prompt reply and goodwill. ^^ I know Raze, he is the best community bridge you guys have. Always has ideas and more often than not solutions to everything.
But on this subject he seems just as or even more clueless than I.
This other guy I do not reckon. I will try contacting him if you think he could help me a bit to tamper with the archives.

An insomniac in my case. It's worrying if even Raze doesn't know something! Norbyte as a possibility is really speculative on my part but I figure since he created the D:OS unpacker he might have an idea of where to look.

Me aswell. And then I fall asleep during late afternoon. A curse, really...

I took your suggestion to heart and PM'd him, hope he drops his 2 cents on the matter. :0

That sounds very familiar. They're still trying to find a name for my curse, with narcolepsy being the odds-on favourite.

Hopefully Norbyte might have some pointers (or even better, might hopefully just know the answer! )