So now there’s just one letter left, hopefully it won’t take that long to find a suitable format.
Meanwhile two formats for letter ‘o’ have been added, both formats are formally from Origin.
One is FLIC-in-IFF used to store intro and ending for Ultima VII (both parts). Actually there are also fonts and speech stored there but since you need external data (plus game engine) to combine them properly I ended up simply decoding animations from those archives.
Another one is equally flimsy—System Shock movies (which are predominantly just audio tracks used probably for audio logs; also the game reminds me of Paul for some reason). What’s remarkable is that it essentially combines two different coding methods for two sizes: VGA movies are RLE-coded, SVGA movies use 4×4 tile coding with additional Huffman coding of tokens. Essentially tiles are coded using tokens representing opcodes, which may refer to 4-16 colours from the global colour table or some other operation (e.g. “skip N blocks” or “repeat previous operation” or even “fill block with these two colours”); tokens are Huffman-coded, both colours and Huffman table may be transmitted at any time. Luckily I did not have to RE it from scratch as the engine code has been open-sourced some time ago.
Just a couple more formats and I’ll be able to make 0.3.0 release at last.
And I’ve thought for another fun goal for 0.4.0: get a number of supported formats to a hundred (it would be better to hit some round number like 128 but that’s more of a milestone for the improbable 0.5.0 release). Currently I have 70-something formats listed and that will number will increase to 80 for the upcoming release for sure. Finding about eight extra formats to support is easier than finding twelve formats to RE. And to put things into perspective, librempeg lists about 270 video decoders (excluding raw formats and hardware accelerated decoding), some of them being equally incomplete, simple, or being a small variation of another decoder. So having a third of that number for game-only video formats (most of those being unique too) is a respectable feat IMO.