Blade Runner Reverse Engineering Blog [Check it out]

BaliosEX · Post by **BaliosEX** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 2:09 am

I started a blog about reverse engineering Blade Runner here: http://westwoodbladerunner.blogspot.ca. I started decoding BLADE.EXE from WinMain and have put my findings in a psuedo code file named BLADE.CPP. I'm currently near the end of the DirectDraw initialization.

Buckle up, should be a fun ride.

Post by **digitall** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 1:57 pm

Good luck. See also https://github.com/madmoose/replicant which may be of help.

Longcat · Post by **Longcat** » Wed Feb 26, 2014 4:03 pm

I hope you finish this!
One of my favorite games

Ray McCoy without jagged edges would be a dream ...

Good luck!

BaliosEX · Post by **BaliosEX** » Thu Feb 27, 2014 3:25 am

Thanks. I have seen Madmoose's Replicant project. I plan to incorporate my code into his project.

Post by **sev** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 4:27 pm

So, just like many one-man projects with complexity like this, it died at a very early stage...

Eugene

Longcat · Post by **Longcat** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 5:55 pm

Yeah, looked promising, but I was checking regularly for updates and they stopped a long time ago.

Pity. I love Blade Runner.

BaliosEX · Post by **BaliosEX** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 12:55 am

With a one-person operation distractions are costly to progress and I get preoccupied easily. When I have free time I would rather decode Blade Runner than update the blog, but then again, the blog should be updated more frequently just in case I get hit by a bus

A progress report will be posted to the blog in the next couple of days.

Well, I gotta keep it going full-steam so I can finish by year's end

Longcat · Post by **Longcat** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 7:24 am

Glad to hear it

Looking forward to an update, good luck!

Longcat · Post by **Longcat** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 1:06 pm

Cool to see there are some updates, keep it going!

md5 · Post by **md5** » Sun Mar 15, 2015 2:00 pm

Great work!

I don't understand your reasoning for using ResidualVM for Blade Runner... you won't get any better quality in the in-game models with a hardware renderer.

Westwood used voxel graphics with the Blade Runner models. Essentially, these are models projected into a 3D space. Imagine creating a car out of lego blocks, like this:
http://www.bilderzucht.de/blog/wp-conte ... terial.jpg

These are voxels. There are algorithms to make them look a bit better using antialiasing techniques, but IMHO don't expect anything really noticeable.

Check this wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runn ... evelopment

...on voxels (pixels with width, height and depth)...

Instead of just having one voxel, dozens of rotating voxels were used in the shape and depth of the actual polygon model data, making it true real-time 3D without requiring 3D hardware. In layman's terms, it was piecing together flat "picture panels", and then rotating and positioning them in 3D-space, thereby giving the illusion of a 3D object

Here's an explanation on what voxel graphics are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel

And here's a comparison between voxels and vertices:
http://www.gamersnexus.net/gg/762-voxel ... s-in-games

So, IMHO, there won't be much benefit with the usage of the 3D functions of ResidualVM in this game.

zmally · Post by **zmally** » Tue Jul 19, 2016 3:25 pm

Is this project still going ahead?

md5 · Post by **md5** » Tue Jul 19, 2016 9:17 pm

There's a WIP ScummVM game engine here, too:

https://github.com/madmoose/scummvm/commits/bladerunner