na_game_tool: more FLICy formats

I’ve added another bunch of formats to na_game_tool, including both old video formats and game archive support to extract some of those (and other) formats from.

For example, I’ve finally added an extractor for Conquest Earth WAD with its 16-bit FLH (a variant of FLI with RNC compression; it has been supported since version 0.2.0) but there are other variants that justify this post title:

• Alien Virus animation—almost standard FLI with changed tag and some jitter in subchunk sizes (i.e. they may be a byte too short or a byte too long compared to the chunk size);
• Bureau 13—here it is a super-format with chunks comprising FLI headers, FLI chunks or PCM audio—and it may be several FLIs with different resolution too. And it is put into its own archive format (which I also added an extractor for);
• C13 for Hammer of the Gods—at first I thought it’s just yet another hack of the format but after looking closer at the data I realised it’s merely LZSS-compressed. Essentially I just hacked my FLI decoder to decompress data first and operate on decoded data instead of file in this case;
• Stargunner FLC—like other files in the game archive it was compressed using byte-pair encoding (and it may be the only case of such method being used for compression in the wild). In this case file is split into small chunks and unused byte values are used to code pairs (of used byte values or other pairs). Adding support for it was as trivial as in the previous case, but the fun thing here is that after I figured out the decompression algorithm I found out that it’s been known and supported by various extraction tools, it’s just discmaster picked up the laziest one.

Beside that I’ve REd HUF format from Johnny Bazookatone which employs RLE compression and then further compresses video frame data with global Huffman codes. And I’ve also added support for Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland archive among other things. The curious thing about it is that such archives contain .gvd files which are essentially remuxed AVIs, so my plug-in reconstructs AVI from them by default (but this can be disabled if you prefer the original files instead). Almost all of the files use Indeo 3 but a couple of them seem to use their own codec with no decoder available so here’s that.

In general I still have at least four original formats to add (plus HNM6 and some extractors) but there seems to be enough candidate games to RE for it to be feasible.

P.S. I also looked at SMV format from AGON: The Lost Sword of Toledo but after looking at the binary specification and discovering MPEG-4 ASP decoder there (also if you remove the SMV header it can be played as an elementary MPEG-4 ASP stream) I lost any interest. Maybe Paul will have some interest supporting it in librempeg, maybe not—and I definitely don’t want to mess with such format (the same applies to KSV as well).

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2025 at 7:19 am and is filed under Game Video, NihAV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.