Sprite Table

Sprite Table

Description

Sprite table is employed to define a few metadata of the sprites found in a sprite file of the original Deadlock and its sequel (every known version on every platform). It involves the image dimensions, offset of the raw file and the relative position to be drawn.

Each tuple of the "spritetable" was named "spriteinfo". Technically, "spritetable" is an array of that structure.

Structure (DL1)

The "spriteinfo" structure is 128 bit long defined as follows:

Size (bits)	Signed	Type	Name
16	Yes	Integer	X Position
16	Yes	Integer	Y Position
16	No	Integer	Width
16	No	Integer	Height
32	--	--	Padding
32	No	Integer	Offset

Structure (DL2)

The "spriteinfo" structure is 128 bit long defined as follows:

Size (bits)	Signed	Type	Name
16	No	Integer	Width
16	No	Integer	Height
32	--	--	Padding
32	No	Integer	Offset
16	Yes	Integer	X Position
16	Yes	Integer	Y Position

Notes:

• We have not found a Width, Height or Offset value that goes beyond half of its max value, therefore, they could be signed but it was irrelevant;
• It is unclear whether the padding was manually set or it was set by the compilers;
• The structure seems to be the same for both platforms but the byte ordering is dependent on the underlying hardware;
• It was not tested with the MacOS data, still, it seems to be the same structure in the opposite byte order.

Structure in C

 /** spriteinfo structure,
 * Each line represents 32 bit of data.**/
 typedef
 struct spriteinfo
 {
#ifdef DL_1
   int16_t x; int16_t y; 
#endif
   uint16_t width; uint16_t height;
   uint32_t padding;
   uint32_t offset;
#ifdef DL_2
   int16_t x; int16_t y; 
#endif
 } spriteinfo_t;

Known Instances

Platform	Sequel	Version	Container Offset	Dump Offset	Array Length	Size (bytes)
Windows	DL1	1.20 (pt_br)	0x65CE0	0x481CE4	5615	89840
Windows	DL1	1.31 (en)	0x67C7C	0x481880	5615	89840
MacOS	DL1	1.0 (en)	0xFDC66	unknown	5615 (guessed)	approx. 81802 (RLE compressed)
Windows	DL2	1.0 Demo (en)	0xCCE58	unknown	7509	120144
Windows	DL2	1.00 (en)	0xD7FD8	unknown	7361	117776
Windows	DL2	1.20 (en)	0xDBDB0	0x4DCFAC	7361	117776

The "Huh?" Marker

There is an isolated "Huh?" (0x48 0x75 0x68 0x3F) after the table finishes, always near to the ending of table.
This is common to all Deadlock versions (including MacOS and the sequel).

It has proven effective since the "Cr.", "%d", "SPRITELG.DAT" or "SPRITENW.DAT" that also happen to be close to the table are not unique and as common as the "Huh?" sequence (all case sensitive).