http://wiki.enleth.com/ 2010-09-04T21:40:56-07:00 http://wiki.enleth.com/ http://wiki.enleth.com/lib/images/favicon.ico text/html 2008-09-11T10:05:18-07:00 http://wiki.enleth.com/doku.php?id=homm:file-formats&rev=1221152718&do=diff General remarks It is worth noting that HoMM I, II and III share quite a lot of general characteristics regarding data files - both their layout and internal structure. While they are different in detail, the idea remains essentially the same and knowing one set of formats makes learning the rest very easy. All the formats are quite simple and logical, except maybe saved games, that, especially in HoMM III, look like some form of automated object serialization rather than a proper file format -… text/html 2008-09-05T14:34:52-07:00 http://wiki.enleth.com/doku.php?id=homm:homm3-def-animations&rev=1220650492&do=diff DEF files contain animations, terrain images, map objects and some parts of the game interface, mostly multi-state buttons (that is, the buttons that change their appearance when pressed). The DEF file format is relatively simple, but a bit counter-intuitive in some aspects, due to a specific way of cropping the individual images to the minimal size possible and an even more specific way of encoding the scanlines using a range of weird <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding RLE>-deriv… text/html 2008-03-23T10:43:40-07:00 http://wiki.enleth.com/doku.php?id=homm:homm3-lod-archives&rev=1206294220&do=diff LOD archives are used by HoMM III to store most of its data files conviniently in one place. A single archive can store up to a hard limit of 10000 files, either compressed using zlib or included as-is, with a size limit for a single file of 2^32 bytes and identical offset limit - thus making it theoretically possible to cram almost 8GB of data into one archive, however pointless would that be. text/html 2008-03-23T10:44:03-07:00 http://wiki.enleth.com/doku.php?id=homm:homm3-pcx-graphics&rev=1206294243&do=diff PCX files contain static raster graphics, mostly backgrounds, focus masks and interface elements. They are completely unrelated to ZSoft's PCX format, in both origin and structure. The image can be stored as a raw 24bit BGR bitmap or an indexed bitmap with a palette of up to 256 arbitrary 24bit RGB colors (note the order of color channels), both contiguous, without any word-boundary alignment of scanlines or other such optimizations found in other raster formats. The structure of a PCX file is v…