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The in-flight palette : I love how colors are arranged: Pick a color from [0-15] then get a gradient of it by adding gradient*256 (gradient is also within [0-15] ). So clever. Notice how the palette has a lot of space for green, blue and brown in order to perform nice gouraud shading....and...

OMG, I reverse engineered the maps !!!!! Only missing the colors and textures :) ! And a slightly photoshopped version with motion blur and desaturation :

I tried to estimate the total effort to reverse engineer a game as massive as Strike Commander. Based on previous experience, a man working with IDA one hour each day and 4 hours/weekend can reverse engineer ASM to C/C++ at a rate of 10KB / month. So for all of Strike Commander that gives us an...

Spent an other day on trying to make sense of the 3D maps to no avail. I wonder if Chris Robert or Jason Templeman could remember the basic idea of how that worked.....

Working on Unix is great but XCode crashes a lot unfortunately. I haven't taken the time to create a VS project and a Makefile for Windows and Linux but I will soon. The important thing is that I am not using anything that is not portable and use SDL so recompiling should take just a few minutes.

@Shades2585 I am not using photoshop. The program I wrote opens the TRE from Strike Commander and then makes sense of the IFF and PAK in order to extract the ressources (object list, distance from object, objects, textures, background). The objects are viewed exactly in the order they were in...

I am still horribly stuck on the maps and animation. So in order to cheer myself up, I rebuilt the Object Viewer, DogFight and MainMenu:

A few more pretty pictures I came across in the PAKS :

I am releasing the source code of the tools I have build for Origin Systems RealSpace engine: LibRealSpace : https://github.com/fabiensanglard/libRealSpace RealSpace was used for many other Origin games : Strike Commander Pacific Strike Wings of Glory Wing Commander III Wing Commander IV I...

I have finished the 3D models exporter and added a Renderer with texture and gouraud shading:' F-22: F-15: A:10 F-16: YF-23 :

Here is the PAK format that contains the map data: Strike Commander TERRAN format : Example MAURITAN,PAK Triangles are probably within MAURITAN.TRI MAURITAN.TRI seems to have indexes at the bottom of the file (0x00 to 0x75) MAURITAN.PAK contains 7 unique entries (0 duplicates): Entry[0]...

@delMar Sweet, so the Origin FX system may have been used for the midgames (intro, cut-scenes) in Strike Commander ? Do you have any source code or idea of how the codec worked ? I am thinking of maybe bytecode that allows to program the animation and compose all the layers into one. I have...

Thanks Mario, your hard work and generous explanation have been incredibly helpful. I can now read the PAK archives....at least partially ! I was hoping the RLE format was used to stored full animation but it looks like it is made of layers.....which means there is more work to be done in order...

@wcnut. Programming for Oculus involves many steps. Among them, rendering twice at half the horizontal resolution (for each eyes) and more importantly perform a barrel distortion to counter the Oculus binocular distortion: I won't even mention that Strike Commander was using 24:8 fixed point...

Well, it took me a week in my spare time but I have managed to extract the palette, 3D models, the texture and all the voices from the intro (.VOC Creative Labs format). It was very helpful that Origin uses IFF file structures: Object Viewer: Textures viewer : Those were the low hanging...

GOLD !!!! This clarifies the story behind "ZAP SC" : On his first day, Prem Krishman deleted a directory from a network drive...wipping out the central source code repository. The team spent the next 72hours merging source code from individual developers. He became Prem "Wipeout" Krishman.

I just did, thanks for the suggestion :) !

Back in the 90s, my dream was to be able to play Strike Commander with a Virtual Reality headset. Now in 2013, I have the Oculus Dev and the C++/OpenGL skills but not the source code of SC. It seems to have been lost...so I cannot add that feature :( ! 1. I wonder if anybody have managed to...

Seriously, even one year later, I would love to read your reply :p !

Hello Bandit LOAF, I would be VERY interested to see the pictures (" I have some photos I can dig up of the original if folks are interested."). I have a thing for 3D engines of the past (I wrote articles about Quake,Doom,Duke3D and Another World on http://fabiensanglard.net )...and I would...