H2O Archive And Other File Formats

[Gamemakergm 0]

Update: I have moved the information to http://battlerealms.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_Realms_Source

Battle Realms was coded with Microsoft Visual C++

Battle_Realms_F.exe

Imported .DLLs

• WINMM.dll - For time functions.
• KERNEL32.dll - Basic WinApi library.
• USER32.dll - Basic WinApi library.
• GDI32.dll - This is a graphics library.
• ADVAPI32.dll - Registry
• SHELL32.dll - To execute shell commands
• IMM32.dll -
• WSOCK32.dll - This is a socket library.

• RPCRT4.dll

• WS2_32.dll - More sockets

• MSACM32.dll - Streams?

Most of these probably were put there by the Visual C++ compiler

Source Functions and Files

-To be written.

Directories

• C:/Projects/Samurai/Code - Contains the .cpp files used by Battle Realms
• C:/Projects/COMMON - Contains directories and files probably shared by other Liquid games.

H2O File Format

http://battlerealms.wikia.com/wiki/H2O_File_Format

Models

• .lsk = Liquid Skeleton
• .lfx = Liquid Effects
• .lms = Liquid Mesh
• .lmd = Liquid Model
• Textures are in Truevision TARGA format = .tga
• .lwt = Liquid Weight

I'm still figuring out how to edit these or how they are formatted. Using a hex viewer you can see that these have a lot of data in them relating to other files.

Dialogue/Interface

• .lte = Liquid Text Effect? - Contains the text that is drawn to the screen when a cutscene happens.
• .lfr = Liquid Font Resource?

UVAs

• .uva = Probably related to UV Mapping. They come in a group accompanied by a .TGA image. They seem to be crops of the specified tileset(.tga) that they come from.

I will update this after I make sense of some of the dissasembled code I have to describe exactly what these file formats contain and how they are edited.

Also the reason H2OTools doesn't create the correct H2O file when using build is because it does not use PKWare's Compression Library Implode method to compress data when it is building, it only uses its explode method when extracting files.

Edited July 24, 2013 by Gamemakergm

[MrFish 5]

I always like hearing new things about the inner workings of Battle Realms. Stuff like this keeps me interested in the game, so thank you for your work.

[Gamemakergm 0]

I always like hearing new things about the inner workings of Battle Realms. Stuff like this keeps me interested in the game, so thank you for your work.

You are welcome. This is only the start. Only analyzing. I want to allow people to be able to modify all or most of the files inside Battle Realms.

Edit: Updated main post with link to my H2O format documentation.

[Gregor8356 275]

thanks for help I appreciate your work

[Gamemakergm 0]

I have moved the information to http://battlerealms.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_Realms_Source. I will try to post all the format documentations there and link them to that page.

[Blankname 14]

if im not wrong, apart from the missing compression, the h2o tool were also adding extra 0Dh characters after every file

i also remember the .ini file supports more stuff than it has

[Grayback 14 9]

That really helps.