Blood Pill - a set of tools to manipulate with .BIG files. It can be used to view the data stored in pill.big - resources file of Blood Omen.

Features

Blood Pill is able to decode all filetypes used in the game into readable/listenable form: speech sound, tile, sprite, tim graphich and more.

Feature list includes:

• Packing/Unpacking of .BIG files for PC and PSX versions of BO
• TIM<->TGA autoconversion during packing and unpacking
• RAW ADPCMWAV/OGG autoconversion during packing and unpacking
• Unpacking sprites (enemies and objects) to separate Targa pictures
• Unpacking tiles (level textures) to Targa pictures
• Unpacking the multiobject files ('merged' files that is used on some entries in BO)
• Decoding of .JAM video to Targa frames
• Decoding VAG files to WAV PCM/OGG sounds
• Decoding levels to Targa images (with optional developer info shown)
• Decoding levels into text-based format used by Blood Omnicide legacy loader (early version, still in development)
• Patching .big files
• Support for Blood Omnicide scripted installation

Thanks to

• Mean Person for figuring out Blood Omen's VAG internals
• Forest [LordHavoc] Hale for cmdlib and memlib
• Balder and Zench from XentaX community (www.xentax.com) for pill.big specs, advices
• Klarth (stevemonaco@hotmail.com) and Raul Sobon (Cheekyboy@2-hot.com) for TIM specs
• Andrey [Rackot] Grachev for bigfile specs
• Ben Lincoln for tile compression decoder
• MisterGrim for Jam Decoder

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Usage

Run a program without parms to get help info

Known bugs

There are no known bugs as of yet since the active tool development is over. If you found any, let me know.

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Version History + Changelog

1.1 (Public release)

• New -bigfile -version command estimates pill.big version and sets return code: 1 is error occured, 0 is PlayStation bigfile, -1 is PC version bigfile, -2 is PC Sneak Peek Preview version.
• Klist.txt is built-in now (so it is removed from distrib).
• Font.tim is built-in now (so it is removed from distrib).
• Blood Omen maps: fully investigated the lighting format, added new -l/-maplighting switch which renders lighting on the map. Normally day is rendered. -a/-maptoggled switch (objects toggled state) renders night.
• Blood Omen maps: investigated the field storing music played for particular map.
• Updated mapfile.h (blood omen map format description). Added description for lights, effect flags, song names and map environment flag (indoor/outdoor).
• Berror.txt is now exported for warnings (for omnicide installer).
• Install script: added "bigfile" command to switch current bigfile.
• New icon.

1.09 (bugfix release)

• Fixed tinkering sound (actually a decoder error) in the end of unpacked PSX VAG files.

1.05-1.08 (Blood Omnicide internal release)

• Tighter check for bogus numentries in pill.big header. Increased PK3 pack buffer (100mb -> 150mb) as recent version of jPsxDec has slightly better quality at extracting FMV's.
• Can now attach external spr32 files to generated sprites in build script.
• Introduces blood omen .txt maps exporter (to play them in Blood Omnicide), plus tilemaps scaler.
• Added "pk3compression" option for script launcher to control per-entry compression ratio. It will be used for psx vids and ogg files extraction as compressing them is really just a waste of CPU time.
• Add SoX custom effect (-effect) switch to sound entry extraction.
• Rewritten help page.
• Removed spr32 command stage.
• Rawblock crop now saves frame offsets (which allows to generate correct Quake/Darkplaces sprite file from it)/
• New option "packsprite" for omnicide installer, which will generate a new packed sprites that uses atlas textures.
• Omnicide-related code are moved to separate omnilib/ folder.
• Cleaned up memory allocation utils.
• OmniLib are used to load and save .spr32 files (so dpspr32file.cpp will be removed in future).
• Fresh SoX build.

1.04 (Blood Omnicide internal release)

• Added early version of text-based map format exporter. Used by Blood Omnicde legacy loader.
• New key -f tga8_32 for -extract action enables exporting images with 32-bit palette (palette with alpha-channel), used by tiles.
• Fixed a crash in -extract action.
• Tile and TIM images extraction now supports -colorscale and -colorsub keys which scales rgb color, then subtracts a given 0-255 value from it.
• Renamed -colormapscale/-colormapsub into -colorscale/-colorsub for sprites extraction.
• Tile extraction now supports -scale2x and -scale4x magnification filter

1.02 (Blood Omnicide internal release)

• New key -mapsaveid for -unpack/-mapconvert stages, -s key for -extract action Shows entity/object save numbers when extracting map to Targa image.

1.01 (bugfix release)

• Fixed a crash when unpacking PS1 pill.big
• VAG speech are sorted to dirs defined in klist.txt just as RAW ADPCM

1.0 (final release)

• Map files can be extracted to Targa images (shows base map layout, enemies items, speech marks, objects, doors, optionally solid zones, triggers, switchable tiles at state on/off etc.
• Cleaned up sprite extraction code

0.9

• New -sp prefix shich prints solid pacifier (used by installer)
• New action -bigfile -patch -outfile <new_bigfile.big> Patch file are text file with each line definina a single action : RAW/DEL/WAV2ADPCM <pill_big_file_hash_or_name> <path_to_a_new_file_contents> or (RAW replace, where filename should match some of original blood omen filenames or #hash)
• JAM->TGA converter (-jam action), thanks MisterGrim
• Fixed wrong name unhashing for some file which was producing override of 640x480 .htm fiels by 320x240 .tim.
• Fixed a rare bug with wrong extension for raw output files

0.8f

• New prefix -c: (compact) dont print program caption
• New prefix -f: (function) dont print anything except for errors
• New prefix -cd: change to selected dir before start
• New prefix -ew: (errorwait) wait for key press on error
• Fixed crash when launched with wrong parms
• Fix mkdir when launched with full paths as parms
• Fix program return codes

0.8e

• use static MSVC runtimes

0.8c

• Fixed export of multi-chunk files (vortout.all and so on)
• Fixed all names of ADPCM speech files to be in right dirs
• New -script action for install script (used by Blood Omnicide installation)

0.8b

• Code cleanups
• Optimized -pack action for speed
• file hashes are automatically converted to real file names (thanks Ben Lincoln and Andrey [Rackot] Crachev). By default internal hash/filename table are used, can be overriden by BO1.csv.
• Tiles unpacking (thanks Ben Lincoln for LZW unpacking)
• Support for PS1 pill.big unpacking (but not packing since there are no WAV->VAG/FAG converter)
• Extract action can handle real filenames, old hash filenames should be prefixed by # (example: #AD07E8F1)
• When unpacking, original files are stored in original/ folder.
• Null files (with empty contents) are not unpacked anymore
• Unpack action not unpacks fiels with real filenames (use -hashasnames to revenr to old behavior)
• Sample scripts improved
• Added filetypes.txt which brings together knowledge about all Blood Omen game file types.
• Better support fo PS1 pill.big extraction

0.6a

• New -extract action which extracts a given file from pill.big
• Fix a frequent "cannot open file for writing" error
• Removed -vagconvert,-pcm,-ogg,-rawconvert,-noalign keys from -unpack action.
• New -adpcm2wav, -adpcm2pcm, -adpcm2ogg, -raw2tga, -rawnoalign as a replacement.
• Removed -dstdir option from -unpack action. Now destination dir are optional -unpack parms (example: -unpack newdstdir).
• Removed -srcdir option from -pack. Same as for -unpack.
• Removed -to key from -list action. Same as for -unpack.
• Removed -lowmem from -unpack, now always using low memory usage path.

0.5

• Now can unpack sprite frames (SHD, SDR, SHA files) into Targa pictures. Note that sprite unpacking creates VERY big amount of files (about 35000).
• Auto-align sprite frame size for easy creation of GIF.
• Documented -raw action (sprite unpacking)
• Fixed some memory leaks

0.4

• New -rawconvert key for -unpack action. Unpacks some sprites into Targa files.
• Default folder for each file type (.tim gues to tim/, .dat to unknown and so on)
• Better support for different pill.big versions
• Fixed broken pill.big -pack action ("wrong file type" error)

0.3

• Added -vagconvert key for -unpack action. Automatically converts .VAG/.FAG files into WAV or Ogg Vorbis (-ogg key) by SoX lib. Quality degrades during conversion.
• Backwards WAV/OGG -> ADPCM (.VAG/.FAG) conversion for -pack action.
• Simplify syntax for klist.txt. New "path" option to set additional output path.
• New -soxpath "path" key to set a different path to SoX program.
• Fixed null files sometimes being identified as TIM.
• Fixed wrong TIM layers unpacking for German version of BO
• Fixed segfail during -pack

0.2

• New -tim2tga for TIM->TGA conversion during -unpack. Optional -16to24 enables additional 16->24 bit conversion.
• New action -tga2tim [-bpp x] [-ofs XY] [-mask X for converting single TGA images to TIM images.
• New key -tim2tga for -unpack action. Converts all TIM images into TGA with support of backward converting during -pack.
• New -nc prefix that disables caption prints.
• New -lowmem key for -pack action. Uses low memory usage path.
• Added detection of RIFF WAVE sounds.
• Known files list not includes all speech files.

0.1

• Initial release
• bpill -bigfile "pill.big" -list [-to filename] list pill.big contents to external file.
• bpill -bigfile "pill.big" -unpack [-dstdir dir] unpacks pill.big contents to external folder (defailt is bigfile)
• bpill -bigfile "pill.big" -pack [-srcdir dir] pack unpacked contents back to a new bigfile.
• Known-files-list support to detect RAW ADPCM files