How EXACTLY do LEGO Island's assets work? (LEGO Island Decompilation - Part 2)
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- čas přidán 13. 09. 2023
- SI? more like SIGH
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▶LEGO Island Decompilation on GitHub: github.com/isledecomp/isle
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INFOMAIN HD render by: @Ramen2X - Hry
Nothing like a Lego island video for keeping me awake at 4AM
Same here lol
5am here
literally going on 5 am now
same, but almost an hour later
ON GOD
"How EXACTLY do LEGO Island's assets work?"
I imagine they all neatly snap together
on a tight grid
@@DarkIzowith some sort of interlocking mechanism
@@Tethrarxitet made up of nibs on the top of bricks and pins on the bottom to hold assets together
@@fourthwallbreak7727 a sort of "clutch power" if you will
@@No_Life_Alex Ayyyyyyyy, I like that one
"Building a Unity game without a copy of Unity". Yet many developers are doing exactly that as of this week 😢
Foreshadowing
I hope he's not using unity. I'd have to unsub at that point.
EDIT: ok good It was just an off handed comment.
EDIT 2: This thankfully no longer applies and as long as people use an older version of unity they're fine, so I no longer have to boycott any new games made in older versions of unity. really crazy that people are mad at me for not buying a game that directly supported unity though, I bet you are all the same people who get mad that I don't buy from chic-fi-a because I'm bisexual and don't want to give money to a company that literally wants me dead.
@@polocatfan You’re not petty at all...
@@gymnasiast90how is not wanting to support someone if they side with unity being petty?
@polocatfan a game engine unity isnt actually that bad, thats why so many devs use it. the issue is that unity is capitalizing visciously on this sucess
dont hate on devs using unity, encourage them to switch to better alternatives and send your hatred to unity themselves instead
woo, it's that lego island guy back at it again with more lego island
His channel in a nutshell
@@HarmlessBongo0lmao
legoo
How I it 1 day ago
@@Thisgamer69it released early for channel members
I didn't even grow up with Lego Island but seeing you try to figure out the intricacies and programming tricks of this game has been incredibly entertaining.
Same, we had the disk but couldn't get it to work for some reason. I was too young to understand what it was though
Same I grew in when windows vista was the latest os (early 2007)
I played so much Lego Island, but Rock Raiders was my favorite.
I made a few mods for a game on the Nintendo DS a while back before all the fancy tools that existed now did. Many hot nights spent cross referencing a hex editor with an excel spreadsheet to just allocate the files. (Of course this would have been much easier if I had wrote a program to do it for me, but this was long before I knew how.) I never played Lego Island, but this series reminds me of that archaeological feeling, like you're poking around in the dark trying to find the mother of all lightswitches.
It's the same thing with every game for the first person to dig it to understand how to mod it
This is the reason why rom corruptor programs were made
People just poked at different parts of the file to see where stuff was lol
I have similar experiences with Ocarina of Time modding back in the day. If you wanted to replace Link's model, you had to individually convert each limb of your new model, and individually inject each one somewhere within Link's object file using a hex editor, making sure to keep the offsets for your custom meshes written down so you could overwrite the original mesh pointers to load the custom meshes. It was incredibly tedious. Nowadays, you can just rig your model to a skeleton in Blender, and the conversion tool will just handle everything from there.
Do you take adderall by any chance?
@@DogsRNicecute sona
LEGO Island has been one of the first videogames I've ever played and I am so utterly grateful that you dedicate so much time and effort into it!
trueeeeee
@@deeznuttes9340 Well, here's something that might surprise you: I am best friends with the real Nick and Donovan. Jealous?
irrelevant
@@aidandecavitte4758
@@aidandecavitte4758Who? What? Why?
@@JulianR2JG where? When? and How?
Oh new Lego Island guy video!
Loosing interest in smashing keyboard buttons, Seed decided it best to stop. On his right was a can of worms. On his left was a box of seeds. What was he going to do with these objects? We couldn't have known, but we do know he chose to open the can of worms and mix it with the seeds. He thought to himself, "if I mix worms and seeds, will I make worm seeds?" He wanted to find out. As he kept stirring, he found himself unable to move the spoon with which he mixed. The substance had turned into a goo-like sludge. Such a fool little Seed was. How did he think he was going to make worm seeds out of worms and seeds? Worm seeds don't even exist. This surely meant Seed had become crazy after his years of smashing keyboard buttons in his basement. How dumb he was!
@@polygontowerwhat
@@couldntsetpass2901 lol me question exactly
good
Hey seed! I've seen you on another MattKC video!
I see huge potential for randomizers...not only teleport randomization but also random values for buildings or events
Lego Island chaos mod 😅
@@Zircuitz Lego Island Crowd Control
Lego island hot coffee
@@happyjohn1656 the only correct answer.
Lego Island Kaizo when
always interesting to see how older applications get around the limitations of systems, like its wild that your audio could have been TOO POWERFUL that it literally lags people's computers
I actually just checked a similar solution yesterday. Ffmpeg, as it turns out, does support GPU decoding. It's just that most things don't bother because audio is relatively easy to decode on even a slow modern CPU.
Thanks Lego Island Guy! Doing the important work, 25-year-old games for children won't decompile themselves.
I'm just 15 seconds in and your new lighting setup is fantastic.
how is this posted 9 hours ago the vid is only 24 mins old
@@lagged0utprobably Patreon subscribers
@Eeeeeex2 no it's time travel
@@Eeeeeex2no it's time travel
wow i can make the username the color i want!
I love these ridiculously deep dives into Lego Island. I don't know why it's so fascinating, aside from good memories playing it back in the day.
14:14 if you're ok with an optional dependency on GIMP, you can write an image preparation script that uses GIMP to prepare images for this fairly easily (I've done it before, for generating animal crossing patterns)
ImageMagick can probably do the same thing. Just a more lightweight dependency
PAINT NET BETTER!!!!!!
@@SwimSwimHungry it can't do scripting get outta here lmao
@@voxelfusion9894 Ever heard of plugins?
@@SwimSwimHungry And I don't know how to use either! And I don't feel like paying for a paint program that has free alternatives.
Sad how many games lose their source code over time. You figure there would be a copy somewhere stored away safely in a database or whatever but nope. Had the same issue with some old 2D RTS games where even after the old studios had been bought up and employees contacted nobody could find any source code. It was just gone, lost to time. Damn 90's. I bet hard disks dying and CD's decaying was one of the main issues.
Even big game companies such as Rockstar can't be trusted to keep their source code. They have been selling cracked/pirated copies of their own games on Steam.
and it doesn't help when a developer goes under
Important to remember that source control wasn't a universally solved problem back then like it is now.
I remember working on VB6 enterprise software around Y2K and we were fighting Visual Source Safe so much that just copying to a shared network drive at the end of the day was better. Soon after we introduced CVS and thought it was the bees knees. SVN was like honey after that. Funny to think of now that I have used GIT for so long... but it really was crazy back then.
@@ErebuBat Also a lot of weirdness with companies being super protective of property, where there are just few/no backups of anything lying around and everything is so locked up, it's far more likely to just become lost/inaccessible to prevent things being leaked. It would be neat if everything was produced more communally and out in the open like a lot of open source software, and of course, people having far more extra time to pursue interests in such developments.
@@ErebuBat I HATE GIT!!!! uggggg
I mean this is a decomp, I don't expect really rapid progress anyway. It's a meticulous and repetitious process that involves constantly checking for execution accuracy every time you make some progress. So I wasn't really chomping at the bit to hear more since I figured it'd be a good while before you had enough to put into a video.
Also I commend your ability to explain computer science and software development concepts in a digestible video. I work in IT and have an innate curiosity about technology so I'm not completely unknowledgeable on these subjects but not enough to fully visualize concepts when they're explained in deep depth so this video keeps things at a good level and impart actual understanding in the viewer.
Always love a new MattKC video.
Maybe the next one should be on Lego Island
One of the very few channels I click on instantly, no matter what the video. Keep up the good work, Lego Island Guy.
I love this format of videos no matter the subject, whether it's someone trying to find a McDonald's training video game, recovering someone's corrupted Pokemon or reverse engineering a game. If anyone knows of channels with more of this kind of content, please let me know! :3
Dear MattKC, we need more video’s pls!
hes got one in the works. its about backporting modern windows apps to windows 95.
In lego island's debug mode, by entering a bunch of keys on the bottom row, you can make the game play all the animations in the currently loaded .si file. that's how I discovered an unused cutscene that's meant to play after your give the brickster his pizza, it shows him throwing it out the window behind him and walking out of his jail cell (Normally you just get a loading screen instead).
as someone whose childhood gaming experience pretty much involved LEGO island, an obscure Jumpstart education racing game, and an original leapfrog leap pad, this is super cool and educational. Even if you don't figure out everything, the amount of opportunity you've unlocked with the bits you uncovered thus far are going to hugley change this gaming scene.
Thanks LEGO Island guy!
huh that reminds me of a few leappad games that were... just good games really.
...hm. i dont think i could port them though.
@link_team3855 It would be cool if you could figure it out! I don't know how to tackle that either, lol. They would make good browser style games.
@@CaptainChristmasYT i mean the main problem (before copyright anyway) is the fact that i dont have the game carts anymore (i think?), dont have a player (... i think?) and i KNOW i dont have a way to get the data from the cart to a computer. Although.
making something with same gameplay might be pretty easy actually... *comparatively
@link_team3855 Most likely, making a remake of the games would be more straightforward, to be sure. It depends if you're looking to strictly recreate the game play or investigate the challenge of emulating on other hardware. Would make an interesting video, lol!
Gotta love some good old fashioned MattKC Lego Island videos!
Gotta love open sourcing, even if it is retroactive :)
Smackers has gotta be my favorite name for a program.
A lot of early disc based games interleave assets and have hardcoded logic. Super Mario Sunshine for example hardcodes Poluted Piranha being present in Bianco 1 and levels are in a format in which a single file contains every asset used in the level. This means that Pianta models appear as many times in the files as levels they appear in.
Facinating. I completely lack the skill, patience and time to ever get this far down the rabbit hole. Appreciate you taking us along for the ride, even if I don't fully (or even partly in some cases) understand what you're talking about. You're a wizard MattKC.
THE LEGO ISLAND ALPHA BUILD JUST DROPPED. If you haven't seen this already, a video made by the LEGO youtuber R.R. Slugger goes over the details.
Note, if you're dithering images to put in these you *need* to be mindful of gamma correction. Dithering uses physical blurring of light in the real world to achieve the appearance of more colors, which is inherently linear.
So dithering needs to be done in linear color space, using a palette that's also in linear color space.
Its pretty straight forward to convert an image to a linear format before dithering and after, but pretty much nothing off the shelf does this. Every non-custom software ditherer that I know will only dither in sRGB color space.
I've never even played Lego Island in my life, and this is still one of the coolest channels I'm subbed to. Love preservation work like this.
Interesting! A game I'm trying to mod called Phantom Dust has very similar RIFF-style formats (no ASCII chunk IDs though, they're just numerical). I hadn't considered interweaved data, this may be a game changer for my RE efforts. Thank you!
YES! LEGO ISLAND DECOMP, BY THE LEGO ISLAND GUY!
One thing about Lego Island I’ve wanted to know about is why it displays graphical glitches on hardware mode if you’re using an old NVIDIA graphics card (early-mid 2000s). I’ve had this problem happen to me on my XP Computer long ago the same way it happened in your Fastest Windows 98 PC video. Hopefully this decomp figures out why
for the 256 color limit, I would make an rgb to yuv converter with dithering, and have a YUV 3.8074 2 2 format. having been experimenting with custom color encoding mtself for some time, I find that this yields rather good results.
Probably best to just select an optimal palette.
@@Aeduo picking an optimised palette *would* be ideal however that's a very difficult task to automate with code. and dithering is near on impossible with such a method as you would need to calculate a metric by which you can compare a pixel's color to the two closest matches in the palette and then score it a value from 0 to 1 between the two palette colors to then perform a dither on as just using the closest match would lead to blocky color artefacts, especially if there's many different colors all in the same image.
however for texture/images that already have < 236 colors, no gradients, just regions of flat color, then certainly it makes sense to even hand pick colors for the palette. however somthing like the pre-rendered rooms, that wouldn't really work.
@@AB-Prince I'm sure it's challenging but it's certainly been adequately solved. Plenty of software out there to do it and all kinds of libraries that could be used. He doesn't need to reinvent the wheel here. He's already using ffmpeg for some things and that might already have some functions for processing still images on this way.
Would it be useful to have a Weaver replacement and/or SI decompiler? I love writing obscure little (de)compilers like that 👀
I remember my old 486 could barely play MP3s. As in, the only player that ever worked for me was one called "Audioactive Player", and it was the only thing that could play a MP3 without issues so long as you basically had nothing else running and didn't try to do anything else with the computer at the time (almost in the same way as you couldn't burn CDs without causing buffer underruns). Winamp was a total no-go. I'm sure you're 100% correct in your assertion the choice to use WAV and not compressed audio is because the computers of the day just would not have been able to cope whatsoever, yet alone cost and other things. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true for other games at the time too.
Yeah, that and/or memory use. The game I've been working on cleaning up/reverse engineering the missing bits of (Enemy Nations, an RTS from around the same time) had 2 options for music: mono wav at 22.05 khz or midi. It selects midi if you don't have enough memory.
Lovely vid even if I will never play Lego Island or it's decompiled version. I just love watching people be passionate about something
WHERE HAS MY FAVOURITE CZcamsR GONE MAN!! I NEED MY CRAPPY/NERDY JOKES I WILL LITERALLY PAY FOR YOUR CONTENT
maybe SI just means... "Yes"...
that's my game theory
Finally, a video worth watching. Been waiting a few days for someone to post something interesting on CZcams. Glad I stayed up late!
HE'S FINALLY EMBRACED HIS TRUE IDENTITY.
It's interesting to learn the amount of jank and duct tape that went into making my childhood games XD
Lego Island and Lego Loco were some of the first games I ever played (Alongside Freddi Fish lol) super cool we are getting closer to enjoying the true vision of the creators. Thank you for putting so much effort into accomplishing this monumental task.
Recently I became an IT student, and this has deepened my fascination for all this all the more! So incredibly fun to see this progress!
You're like a digital archaeologist. Keep up the good work, your videos are always very well done and super interesting :)
This is definitely digital Archaeology
Source: me a digital public archaeologist
Another great video from Lego Island Guy. I don't know what those other videos are doing on the channel but glad that he's back to his roots!
Incredible work, Mr. Lego Island
Amazing work decompiling! 15% implementation is incredible. looking forward to more vids!
That cursed rendition of Bliss with a Lego man is art 14:10
"he tried to recreate it by scratch because he didn't know it already existed" HAHAHAHA 😂 i actually have a feeling that stuff like that is going to become a lot more common as software continues to advance and morph into new standards for this new day and age
The Brickster has been de-bricked, sir.
@@luisgamercoolgaming Now it's just a ster
This is such so much for real, looking forward to whatever happens following
Amazing. I'm 33 years old. This game was my childhood favourite game and I love your videos about this all.
.si could possibly be connected to softimage, an old discontinued 3d animator that used .si files, it also has a revamped version for the discontinued part
But the Lego Island .SI files interleave data. I mean they split parts of the data and mix them into each other in a specific order. It would probably not be the same as the SoftImage .SI
I now have a sudden urge to download even more Qt development dependencies and compile a program just so I can try something just once
maybe someone could make an appimage.
Do it!
I literally love this
Lego Island... that's a blast from the past.
...was there a way to open that door in the cave?
You know its gonna be a really good day when MattKC posts a new vid
Ghidra go brrr
I have watched every single video on your main and second channels. PLEASE UPLOAD
FINALLY A PART TWO
I'm really tempted to try to do a port of the SI viewer for the web.
HOW THIS POSTED 11 HOURS AGO!?!?!?!!?!?!?!??! VIDEO POSTED ONLY TWO HOURs AGO!!!!!!!!!!!!
@@SoBloxRetroCrYA-UAPatreon supporter
Another classic video by lego island guy. Keep up the good work!
So happy to see a new vid Matt. Found your channel recently and immediately binged most of your videos lol. Love the channel
Worth the wait for part 2! So glad I saw the video pop up!
I have no idea why, but computer corruptions are the freakiest thing to me. Throughout this video, seeing things go corrupt and change colors spiked the hell out of my anxiety lol. I guess I have always been freaked out like that, especially with that one Super Mario World creepypasta where one of the developers corrupted a file and got a freaky blood face thing. Still haunts me today.
The face of the jail lego dude being screwed up was not something I wanted to see today lmao, but keep up the work Matt. You may be playing this game with a lot of cool mods. Maybe even exploring more than just the island, and maybe some additional things like having to survive on the island. Controlling hunger and thrist. Considering most peope are not playing on an old 95 PC anymore.
Good video, can't wait for the next
You're not alone in this TvT
Cathode Ray Dude did say during one of his OS/2 streams (he was showcasing screensavers) that he has a phobia of corrupt computer graphics and computers freaking out in glitchy-graphics way.
I can see why.. When I was a kid, I remember being afraid of BSOD jumping at me from the unlit starway or when I was asleep. (or moreso the Windows XP's "Windows did not start successfully" pre-boot menu, as we kids fucked up our PC in gloriously unbootable ways wayy too many times) I can exactly pinpoint why. xD
(And I do still celebrate Windows 8's BSODs and onwards having a lighter colour and a smiley, makes it less painfully spooky, lol)
Also holy moly, yeah, that creepypasta image.. remembering getting freaked out when the ROM inside ZSNES literally generated the file on my real PC, iirc. That was the stairway spook after that xD
Though I did manage to copy with my phobia better once I found out it's wayyy to easy to make ANY picture into a spooky one. (Vargskelethor streams... or IrfanView's outdated colour correction tools can make glorious creepypastas by cranking Contrast and Saturation to the max and playing with the Brightness.. so much spookiness everywhere)
?
Oh boy, would you get a kick out of Vinesauce's corruption stockpiles 😅
That Unity reference won't age well.
For any future viewers, Unity used to be a game engine back in these days.
Unity still is a game engine, I’ll update this later
wdym
@@denpapa he thinks that unitys gonna go bankrupt because of their stupid decision. They are fine so, no
@@denpapa It was a joke about how the Unity company trashed their reputation even further recently.
I know they won't probably *actually* go under, but part of me does wish they would.
So glad you are posting more again.
You’re a legend and I really appreciate your passion and the work you have done for a random game
Also don't listen to the naysayers (not that I've seen many, still) this is very interesting to follow even if you don't have the LEGO Island nostalgia factor fueling you. It's always interesting to see how something like this is done, and there's so much cool history behind it all. Seeing what file formats they used, ancient programs that nobody knows about anymore. Like the Windows .ini thing, Smacker, even things like forced limited color palettes which I last saw in some 2001 2D games. It's like video game archeology, looking at the bones and trying to figure out what happened when it was still fresh and alive. There was a similar effort to mod old LEGO games like Rock Raiders many years ago, they got a lot of stuff working. I remember one of the original devs even came to the forums and posted a photo of the office back when the game was being developed.
Could SI mean Sound Image? Considering how it's used for both audible and visual data, I think it could be possible.
I was thinking "Simple Interlace", but that's plausible too.
@@TlalocTemporal Maybe Streamed (or Streaming) Interleaf?
Finally, been waiting 3 months for this, thank you!!
I love your videos, but especially your LEGO Island deep-dives. This game is my childhood (I have my copy of it somewhere around here) and I love seeing under the hood, so much love put into the game
Someone should make a Silent Hill mod for Lego Island, where the island is covered in fog and Lego abominations
I guess it wouldn't be possible. But the whole Lego island just struck me as this limbo, this purgatory of Lego figures.
"that's like building a unity game without unity".. yea that's probably a good idea considering recent developments
What happened with unity?
Mad respect!
You are such a brilliant and relaxing guy.
"It's basically IFF, the MS Little-Endian version. Chunks have formats like BMP and FLC."
Okay, great, makes sense, sounds easy to parse. I've done that for a bunch of formats.
"Then all of the top level IFF chunks are put in a blender and interleaved on chunk sizes that are specific to the type of content, and the file format controls the reading application buffer size using non obvious rules and you need padding in the streams to not make it explode, so when you try to reverse engineer the format you get dribs and drabs of bytes from random file types adjacent to each other. It also contains some sort of probably turing complete scripting language."
Burn it with fire. Kill it. Run away. Never admit you saw any of this.
So it's mixing parts of the files into each other so they can load all of them at the same time. Interesting
It's like trying to build a house without the physics that keeps wood together
been waiting for this one, tysm
Very cool work, thanks for sharing
Thanks for the interesting Update! And thank for using KDE
I am interested in seeing mods made for this game. Also, are you ever going to decompile Lego Loco and other Lego games?
I personally looked at LEGO loco in ghidra, and I couldn’t find much. It was a long time ago though so I could look again and see if anything was there
major props to you for your efforts here. not only is this a huge nostalgia shot, it's great to see a deep dive that doesn't shy away from the details. it's so cool learning what went into solving the challenges of reverse engineering this, and what the original developers faced at the time.
so so cool. thanks so much for sharing your progress and enthusiasm! wish i could afford to support this project beyond moral support, but here's hoping someone with a little extra financial means can make up for my lacking donation to your efforts.
It's always a good day when MKC uploads new Lego Island content
RR Slugger released something interesting yesterday, namely being a Lego Island ALPHA BUILD! You might just want to check it out.
Okay but thanks for making the announcement so I saw this lol
Thank you for this video! It's super interesting. I love watching these even tho I never played Lego island lol
Amazing work
i understand your pain, i wanted to mod the ps2 levels of king kong to the psp version, because the psp port had co-op multiplayer and reduced/removed content. 2 years got me perfectly nowhere
Given the speed that AI technology is advancing at nowadays, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a tool to upscale audio in the near future like we have for video.
Heck, there’s already some AI tools that can isolate individual instruments from final album mixes. Of course it’s not as crisp and clean as having the original master tracks, but it’s a lot better than the “isolation” filters we’ve been using for years.
voice upscalers apparently already exist (adobe audition)
was looking forward to another one of these
IVE BEEN WAITING SO INTENTLY IM SO HAPPY THIS IS OUT NOW YAY
2:44 that's an unfortunate comparison in light of recent events
You probably shouldn't have admitted to seeing the leak. Clean room techniques, which are pretty much the legal criteria for a decomp being illegal or legal, require you and all contributors to have never seen any leaked code. (True clean room decomp is impossible with only 1 person but even then seeing leaked code is a sure-fire way to get considered a dirty decomp). If you don't really care and don't think the IP owners will come after you then it's all well and good, but this does compromise the legitimacy of this decomp as an open source project. (but IANAL of course)
I’m assuming LEGO isn’t as litigious as Nintendo or Rockstar, but this is a fair point
I always love another MattKC video
Best series on CZcams right now. Great work, this is epic!!
18:16 if no one else has, i will make a mod turning everyone into the infoman. You cannot stop me.
Lego Island guy AKA British Asian Keanu Reeves is back at it again showing us more Lego Island, and I absolutely can't be any happier at this turn of events.
"British" - Said about a man who clearly has a strong Australian accent.
@@C.I... I'm literally an Aussie so I know and Aussie when I hear one, the original comment called him "Asian Keanu Reeves with a British accent", I'm only relaying what was said.
@@JomasterTheSecond So both wrong and unoriginal, cool. He's Australian.
@@C.I... Cry about it.
@@JomasterTheSecond Said like a true Brit.
I just came out of school, great video 👍
Really cool. This was the first really fun game I had on my computer.