This README is a grab-bag of miscellaneous information about file formats at present. This is being migrated to the Formats overview as a precursor to making this file useful!

No game yet, nothing even close. I'm in the very early stages of trying to understand the various file formats. Until then, you can play WH40K: Chaos Gate in a WinXP VM, disconnected from the internet. It doesn't need 3D rendering!

Building from source

I'm writing code in Go at the moment, so you'll need to have a Go runtime installed on your system:

$ go version
go version go1.10 linux/amd64

Clone the source tree to $GOPATH/src/ur.gs/chaos-gate. You can then run make loader or make view-map to get the two binaries that exist at present.

They're not very interesting :D.

Place your WH40K: Chaos Gate installation in ./orig to benefit from automatic path defaults. Otherwise, point to it with -game-path

Dependency management uses govendor. Unless you're contributing code you shouldn't have to worry about it.

dep bug https://github.com/golang/dep/issues/1725 means I can't use it.

Unmigrated text

"Mission Setup" includes information about available squad types

From EquipDef.cpp Dumo: CEquipment we learn the following object types:

DELETED
WEAPON
GRENADE
MEDIPACK
SCANNER
GENESEED
CLIP
DOOR KEY
DOOR KEY
DOOR KEY
DOOR KEY

And we learn they can be "on"....

CHARACTER
VEHICLE
CANISTER

Hypothesis: Idx/WarHammer.idx points objects into bitmap data in Anim/WarHammer.ani

We can use WH40K_TD.exe and investigate reads of .idx followed by reads of .ani to test this.

WH40K_TD.exe opens files in this order:

Data/USEng.dta
WH40K_TD.exe (?)
Cursor/Cursors.cur
pread64(fd, 23, 0) = 23
_llseek(fd, 0, [0], SEEK_CUR) = 0
_llseek(fd, 0, [0], SEEK_CUR) = 0
_llseek(fd, 40666, [40666], SEEK_SET) = 0
_llseek(fd, 0, [0], SEEK_SET) = 0
close(fd) = 0
read(fd, "\x26\x00\x00\x00\x20\x00\x00\x00\x30\x01\x00\x00\x50\x01\x00\x00\x8a\x9d\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00", 32) = 32
(...)
_llseek(15</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Cursor/Cursors.cur>, 39868, [39868], SEEK_SET) = 0
read(15</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Cursor/Cursors.cur>, "...", 798) = 798
(some statting of Idx/WarHammer.idx, no reading that I saw)
Anim/WarHammer.ani
read(15</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Anim/WarHammer.ani>, "...", 32) = 32
(some clones of child procs, I didn't follow them)
Sounds/wh40k.ds
pread64(31</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Sounds/wh40k.ds>, "...", 23, 0) = 23
read(31</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Sounds/wh40k.ds>, "...", 417792) = 417792
read(31</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Sounds/wh40k.ds>, "...", 4096) = 4096
Data/Sounds.dat
pread64(34</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/Sounds.dat>, "#**********************", 23, 0) = 23
...
Pic/wh40k.pcx
read(34</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Pic/wh40k.pcx>, "...", 168509) = 168509
Sets/*
(lots of statting these)
Data/Randchar.dat
pread64(34</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/RandChar.dat>, "#**********************", 23, 0) = 23
read(34</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/RandChar.dat>, "#***************************************************************"..., 4096) = 4096
...
Data/WeapDef.dat
pread64(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/WeapDef.dat>, "#**********************", 23, 0) = 23
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/WeapDef.dat>, "#***************************************************************"..., 4096) = 4096
...
Data/SpellDef.dat
pread64(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/SpellDef.dat>, "#**********************", 23, 0) = 23
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/SpellDef.dat>, "#***************************************************************"..., 4096) = 4096
...
Data/AniObDef.dat
pread64(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/AniObDef.dat>, "# ******** ANIMATED OBJ", 23, 0) = 23
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/AniObDef.dat>, "# ******** ANIMATED OBJECT DEFINITIONS **************\r\n#\t\t0 : **"..., 4096) = 4096
...
Data/VehicDef.dat
pread64(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/VehicDef.dat>, "# ******** VEHICLE DEFI", 23, 0) = 23
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/VehicDef.dat>, "# ******** VEHICLE DEFINITIONS **************\r\n#\t\t0 : *** VEHICL"..., 4096) = 4096
...
Data/StdWeap.dat
pread64(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/StdWeap.dat>, "# ******** SQUAD STANDA", 23, 0) = 23
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Data/StdWeap.dat>, "# ******** SQUAD STANDARD WEAPONS **************\r\n#\t\t0 : *** SQU"..., 4096) = 4096
...
Data/Ultnames.dat
Data/Chanames.dat
Data/keymap.dta
Filters/wh40k.flt
_llseek(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Filters/wh40k.flt>, 0, [0], SEEK_SET) = 0
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Filters/wh40k.flt>, "\x01\x00\x00\x00", 4) = 4
_llseek(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Filters/wh40k.flt>, 4, [4], SEEK_SET) = 0
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Filters/wh40k.flt>, "...", 72) = 72
_llseek(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Filters/wh40k.flt>, 1444, [1444], SEEK_SET) = 0
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Filters/wh40k.flt>, "...", 327680) = 327680
Misc/occlusio.lis
pread64(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Misc/occlusio.lis>, "62 # Number of Absol", 23, 0) = 23
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Misc/occlusio.lis>, "62 # Number of Absolute Deltas.\r\n # These Deltas are off"..., 4096) = 982
read(35</home/lupine/.wine/drive_c/GOG Games/ChaosGate/Misc/occlusio.lis>, "", 3114) = 0
Data/GDestroy.dat
(stat Obj/destroy.obj)
Data/minimap.dat
Misc/occlusio.list
Obj/specials.obj
Obj/Man_Shadow.obj
Sets/map01.set
Data/Defs.dat
Assign/jungtil.asn
Obj/jungtil.obj
(more assign + obj pairs)
Data/Cycle.cyc