Elbereth Zone

I have been working quietly and intermittently on Dragon UnPACKer. Mainly bug fixes and a new conversion plugin to use external programs for convertions.

I recently fixed a big bug on HyperRipper (broken Ogg and TGA support) so I am planning on releasing v5.6.2 this weekend.

If I finally motivate myself to finish the configuration interface of that new conversion plugin it will be included with the upcoming v5.6.2. If not it will be delayed for a further version. For those wanting to test it, it is available in the nightly builds.

I could not fix everything for last weekend so this new 5.6.1 version was delayed, but I think I finally nailed the last bug (still waiting for confirmation from Paul of http://www.spookcentral.tk)  so hopefully current build 262 (SVN 601) will be released as final today or tomorrow. I just need to change the doc (install scripts are ready).

Just noticed some important things do not work in Dragon UnPACKer v5.6.0 (they did work in 5.5.1 Beta), like the sorting in the lstContent... I will release 5.6.1 with fixes asap (end of the week if possible).

I started coding for v6.x branch. I started from scratch (as stated 2 articles ago) using Lazarus/FPC as a base and this time opening everything as much as possible (at start the 5.x branch was closed-source, some decisions do not make sense, like the obscure "compiled" look file containing icons).

As a proof of concept I also tried to go object-oriented plugins, it seems to work fine so I will stick with that for the moment.

The source of this new Dragon UnPACKer can be downloaded from SVN using DragonUnPACKerLazarus module name instead of DragonUnPACKer. Please note it is nowhere near usability point, I just have the basic interface and themes working, plus the ultra basic PoC of object-oriented plugins.

On the 5.x branch, nothing really new, but following a bug report I noticed some flaws in Dragon Update Server and Duppi. Because of how Sourceforge download files, it wasn't working anymore (downloaded files were "corrupted", actually HTML files redirecting to the download). I decided to drop SourceForge as main download site as a workaround. But I also decided to introduce some modifications to both DUS and Duppi.

For some time now DUS have a list of available servers to download from, but this is not used by Duppi which only uses the first available one. I am modifying Duppi so that it uses the servers in order until the download is completed successfully. For this I added a SHA-1 hash for each D5P file in DUS and the file size (in bytes). In SVN Revision 505 Duppi already does this for Duppi updates, so not very useful for you at the moment. I will be changing all downloads to work like that. DUS v3.2.0 with the modifications is live for more than a week now and Duppi v3.3.0 should be available next week (time permitting).

In short: I was finally able to add nightly builds to Dragon UnPACKer.

Long version: I always wanted to add automatic nightly builds to Dragon UnPACKer, this way everytime I commit code to CVS the binary version would be automatically available to users (if they ever wanted to test).

The problem was that I wanted to do that from my Debian (Linux) dedicated server and Dragon UnPACKer uses Borland Delphi which is a native Windows IDE & compiler.

I knew the solution was to use the command line compiler (DCC32.EXE) from Borland Delphi 7 along with Wine (allows running Windows applications under Linux). But using the clc is more complicated than using the IDE directly to compile. Anyway yesterday I spent a couple of hours to configure everything and voila!

Using cron, every night at 00:30 (GMT+1) a CVS checkout is executed from the HEAD branch (latest one). A small program I made in php checks if any file was modified since last compilation. If there was a modification, the build is executed (the core executable, the plugins, duppi and dlngc are built & compiled, the languages files are generated). The resulting files are compressed by using p7zip (the Linux version of 7zip) and uploaded (along with the build log file) to the download server (which is mirrored every 30min to 2 others servers).

Feel free to try the last nightly build which comes with many speed-ups and bug fixes for the HyperRipper. The nightly of yesterday (20100421) should also be pretty stable (even better than the last unstable...). I would be glad to hear from tests done with this version as it is the first time I use the clc for Dragon UnPACKer.

Download from Dragon UnPACKer Development > Downloads > Nightly Builds.

In the past months, I have been busy with many stuff not Dragon UnPACKer related (1 month holidays in Peru, finishing Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2).

But I also played a bit with Freepascal & Lazarus. I must say, the more I get into it, the more I am disappointed. I was starting to make progress but now the compilation just fails with error message on my Error.pas class (maybe that's the problem, I used a reserved name...).

To be honest I only tried with a snapshot of FPC/Lazarus (0.9.29 with 2.4.1 FPC) both beta products. I will have a look with 0.9.28 and 2.4.0, but I don't hope much...

On the bright side, Virtual TreeView (latest version), which is the main component used by Dragon UnPACKer is now fully adapted to FPC/Lazarus.

I am thinking that I should stick with Delphi 7 for 5.x branch and maybe re-start under Lazarus for v6.x. The good thing is the plugin will not need rewriting (I know it compile & works already with FPC/Lazarus). I will try to fix the broken HyperRipper in 5.5.2. Honestly I think starting from scratch for the UI will just be easier and faster...

Some overdue news regarding Dragon UnPACKer...

Sorry for my lack of communication but I am very busy with the configuration of the new intranet server of my company. The go live is this weekend, so I might have more time afterwards.

Still I worked a little bit on Dragon UnPACKer, mainly trying to migrate the core program to Lazarus. It proved to be more complicated than I anticipated. Many features just don't exist in Lazarus (or are just quite different). I think some Windows 7 features I introduced will be lacking in the next version.  

I think I will also switch Dragon UnPACKer from registry use to file based configuration (per user).

In the last couple of days I worked again on Dragon UnPACKer, fixed some cosmetic bugs, added Windows Vista/7 progress indicator in taskbar support and most importantly fixed the HyperRipper. I will release a v5.5.1 Beta soon with the fixes & features. In the meanwhile if you plan on using the HyperRipper don't use 5.5.0 Beta (BMFind is wrong therefore most file formats are not found).

I am in the process of re-installing my computer on my new Intel Postville X25-M 160GB (34nm SSD). Delphi is installed and running, but I haven't installed any third party library yet. I want to take this occasion to check if I cannot replace some obsolete libraries (cxCPU for example, it just don't retrieve correct information now).

I am currently progressing in merging old plugins (drv_giants and drv_mix) into the Main Driver Plugin (drv_default). While it was very easy for the Giants: Citizen Kabuto .GZP support (because I had the source code), it was a little bit more complicated for the Command & Conquer .MIX support.

The goal of this merging is to be able to had source code of all parts of Dragon UnPACKer and to produce a native x64 version when possible thanks to Lazarus/FPC.

The MIX file format is not complicated but there are no filenames stored in the file. The filenames are generated by the game then hashed to retrieve an ID. By using a filename database (all credit goes to XCC-Utilites) the current version on CVS can display most filenames in .MIX files. I am currently trying to retrieve filenames from Blade Runner .MIX and .TLK files.

For the support to be on par with old drv_mix plugin from Felix Riemann, I still need to add a fileformat identificator. This shouldn't be very difficult.

On a sidenote, I tried to adapt the MIX encrypted (C&C:Red Alert and Tiberian Sun) format C/C++ code given on the following page (specification by Olaf van der Spek): http://xhp.xwis.net/documents/MIX_Format.html but after spending my whole sunday on it, I was unable to make it work. I even tried to use the compiled C in Delphi directly which gives a decryption key, but never the same... Something is obviously wrong. I will try to work on this when possible. I would have preferred an explanation than the C code provided.

To finish, I adapted the D5P version 4 format to allow a Deletion/Obsolete flag in file entries. This will allow to delete the old drv_giants.d5d and drv_mix.d5d files while upgrading to the new drv_default.d5d version (when available). This new flag is supported by Duppi v3.2.0 for the users (which is available for a few days already) and by DUP5 Package Maker (DPackC) v3.6.0 for the developpers.