The VG Resource

Hey there!

I've been busy the past week or so figuring out the file formats for WayForward's games. Now, it turns out that Shovel Knight was made by a branch-off company from WayForward, and they use similar technology. Namely, similar .anb files, which are where the sprites are located.

I took a brief glance at the file format some time ago, without realizing that it was indeed the same format. In fact, the YCLZ compression headers I found were just renamed WFLZ headers... like are in most modern WayForward titles.

Since the sendspace links in that thread are dead now, and I appear to have misplaced the .anb's that I downloaded and looked at before, anybody mind sending me some .anb's to look at? (Or some .pak files and I can extract them myself). Some .tex files, if there are any, would be swell also, so I can double-check that that format's the same, too. For now, Shovel Knight's sitting in my Steam wishlist, waiting for the Summer Sale like all the other WayForward titles...

If anybody wants to package the sprites up into sheets, that's swell too. If not, I'd need all the .anb files and I can sheet them myself.

Thanks!

Oh man, this is awesome.

Update: Shane C from Yacht Club Games was a complete bro and actually gave me a copy of the game and offered to help with the format, so mad props to this guy. He's been super helpful in the past, as well.

I hope the files I sent you were helpful towards this. I really want to see some content from Shovel Knight!

(05-31-2015, 01:42 PM)Daxar Wrote: [ -> ]Update: Shane C from Yacht Club Games was a complete bro and actually gave me a copy of the game and offered to help with the format, so mad props to this guy. He's been super helpful in the past, as well.

That dude is seriously a great person. Really appreciate the effort he puts in for the ripping community while doing his actual job.

@Carpaccio: Yep, thanks!

It looks like the image format itself is straightforward enough. Everything's just flat WFLZ-compressed without chunks (I'm presuming because there's no real need, as the images are so small). Looks to just be raw pixel data after it's decompressed, in RGBA format. The texture headers are slightly larger, not totally sure what all the new fields are.



It also looks like the piece data is somewhere totally different or in a completely different format, so piecing them together might not be the easiest thing ever.

Woo! Awesome, can't wait to see a sheet of the optional Hat boss.

Getting there! I've got the piece format figured out (Thanks to Shane again), and most files are working. Just have a few that aren't decompressing properly, so I've got to debug those and then I can start making sprite sheets (Unless someone else feels particularly inclined to do so).

Current Source Code

I'd help if I knew the first thing about compiling from source.

No worries; I'm done. Just finished uploading the sheets.

Great work!

Did you find any unused things?

Oddly enough, I don't think so (Though I can't be sure, as I haven't finished the game myself). Most WayForward titles have had some leftover editor stuff at least, but nothing unused so far as I can tell here.

100% sprites? Like, backgrounds? All characters and more? I do animations on my youtube channel and like to create animations with sprites of Shovel Knight.

Good point; backgrounds seem to be stored in the level .ltb files (I should probably rip these and upload them also), which are WFLZ compressed but after decompressing are in the following wonderful format:



I think these are just map tiles that the rest of the .ltb stitches together entirely (This is my guess, since the paths at the bottom don't repeat).

As for characters and everything else, check out the rip page, it should be everything.

EDIT: Added tilesets to the rip sheets. Looks like they're 16x16 tiles with padding around them, with some larger tiles... I'm not sure if it's really worth the hassle reconstructing the levels entirely, as there's probably tile layers and such. That might also venture from "ripping sprites" to "reconstructing the game" at that point. You can probably reconstruct the levels with a program like Mappy with these images anyway.

Oh my god, this work should be too complicated 0.o
I wish you luck in rip these sheets! I'll be looking forward, peace Bro!