Has somebody ripped RA2 sprites?

[jimmyjey_x86_64]

Yeah, has anyone ripped the RA2 sprites for my use?

Wow, I found an active forum about Red Alert 2. You are still modding & playing it?

[Nighthawk]

They're simple enough to extract from the game yourself. Grab a program called XCC Mixer (downloadable as part of XCC Utilities from here).
1. Use it to browse to your Red Alert 2 folder. (C:\Westwood\RA2 or whatever)
2. Go into ra2.mix.
3. Then conquer.mix.
4. The RA2 "sprites" are in here as SHP animations. They can be converted to single frame PNG or PCX images using XCC Mixer.
5. Alternatively, go find OS SHP Builder from here, extract the SHPs themselves and open them with this.
6. If you're looking for stuff from Yuri's Revenge, if you have it installed, then it's ra2md.mix > conquermd.mix.

[~Guest~]

So I got RA2+YR on CD, I played them a lot when I still had win98 on a PC.

Now I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 and it's impossible to install RA2 trough wine, so I can't get the sprites myself (nor play RA2 )


And I just read RA2 uses voxels for graphics, not pixels. Wow, I always thought RA2 would use sprites like other isometric RTS games.

Are you kind enough to extract the sprites for me? I don't want all the RA2 graphics, just grizzly tank, rhino tank, and allied & soviet walls.


BTW I got win98+xp install cd's, and RA2 doesn't use hardware acceleration. Maybe I could still play/install RA2 under VM?

[jimmyjey_x86_64]

Damn, I forgot to log in. I thought I was already logged in because I could post the above post.

[Aristurtle]

The vehicles aren't sprites, they're voxels. (Unless you mean the sidebar icons?)

If you're on Linux and want to extract the resources, go to the install disc and in the Install folder you should find a number of Game?.cab files. You can extract the ra2.mix file (the file with all the game assets) from this, and you can use XCC Mixer (in Wine) to extract sprites and voxels from the .mix file.

Or using a VM would also work. QEMU has given me good results.

[Lt Albrecht]

In short:
If it comes from the war factory it's a volumetric pixel (except the terror drone)
If it comes from the barracks it's an .shp animation.
If it comes from the naval yard unless it's a dolphin or a squid it's a volumetric pixel.

[Aristurtle]

And the buildings are all sprites, of course, except for turrets on defensive structures.

[Renegade]

I'm pretty sure I got RA2/YR to run on linux in the past, though I haven't tried recently.
Have you set any compatibility modes in WINE, and are you using the Canonical-provided one or the latest one?

If you did not consciously make it install the latest WINE, follow this tutorial to add the WINE repository directly to apt, to pull the latest version. Then try again.

[Aristurtle]

I've had RA2 working under Wine before, but it was a good deal slower than working under Windows, and it needed a crack in order to not run into the "blow up all your buildings after 30 seconds" copy-protection "feature".

[jimmyjey_x86_64]

I got the latest wine version, 1.1.19. I tried installing RA2, I tried everything but it doesn't work.
RA2 has SafeDisk copy protection which will just quietly exit the installer, before the installer does anything.
No solution in wine app db. But if I had windows, I could install RA2 under it and copy the installation directory to wine.

But if I can extract all the game files from the CD, maybe I could build an RA2 install directory by hand on my hard disk?
Like installing it manually without the installer. Could somebody post me the directory tree of RA2 so I know where to put each file?

Whoops, this topic isn't about playing RA2 under wine. It's about extracting the voxels and converting to 2D sprite sheets.

I'll see what I find from the CD now.


Edit:
I made backups of RA2 & YR CDs onto my hard drive, googled some tools and found everything I need.

But the colors of most graphics are messed up: http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/1645/...roblem.png
If I extract the sprite as a PNG the colors might be correct or like in most cases, they are still totally messed up.
XCC Mixer version is 1.2.1, if it's a bug in that program.

Also, how can I render those voxel vehicles into a sprite sheet from many angles with animation?


Wow, while looking at those pictures I hear the voices of units, music and sounds from RA2 in my head.

[Aristurtle]

The sprites and voxels in Red Alert 2 use a 256-color palettes, and different resources will use different palettes. Units and buildings use unittem.pal (or unitsno.pal for the arctic environment ones), sidebar images use cameo.pal, etc. You need to have XCC Mixer get the appropriate palette before you extract. Pressing Ctrl+Q autoloads whatever palette XCC thinks is correct and this will work most of the time. The rest of the time you need to go into the menus for it. (edit: it's under the View menu).

[Tempest]

If I remember correctly, XCC needs to get the proper registry entries to get the Auto-pallet feature working correctly. In fact, it wouldn't even let you choose a pallet manually if it can't find the 'ra2 installation' directory.. I'm saying this 'cause I encountered this problem once, a long time ago.. But, I'm not sure if it still persists.

[jimmyjey_x86_64]

Now I know how to get animated GIF's with colorkey from .shp sprites.

But is there any software to render the voxel vehicles into sprites?




By the way I used wrong palette for water splatter animation:

It looks actually quite good. Like there was artillery shooting.

[Nighthawk]

Download OS Voxel Viewer from here. Open your voxel in it, then go to Tools > Make 360 Degree Animation. You can set the amount of frames down at the bottom, and the program will divide up the angles itself. I.e., you pick 4 frames, and it will do 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees as the frames.

I'm not entirely sure if it always puts it into a GIF file or not though. Even if it does, you should be able to Google for a program to get at the individual frames.

[jimmyjey_x86_64]

Download OS Voxel Viewer from here. Open your voxel in it, then go to Tools > Make 360 Degree Animation. You can set the amount of frames down at the bottom, and the program will divide up the angles itself. I.e., you pick 4 frames, and it will do 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees as the frames.

I'm not entirely sure if it always puts it into a GIF file or not though. Even if it does, you should be able to Google for a program to get at the individual frames.

Thanks.

Got RA2 working in wine as well.

Whoops, too big signature. Fixed