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[7/2/2014 6:56:24 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: For whatever reason, now I'm really interested in learning American history. [7/2/2014 6:56:47 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: But before I do that, let me tell you what I know of American history so far. [7/2/2014 6:57:54 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: So, in like 1600s or 1700s, a bunch of British people said "Let's not go to Australia, too many cunts there", so they packed some ships and sailed to where a bunch of other sailers had once explored. [7/2/2014 6:58:55 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: So, there we groups on the East Coast and then some morons in Viriginia, and the morons in Virigina pretty much all died because they were morons. Meanwhile, the group the East realised they didn't like tea all that much so they threw a lot of boxes in the water. [7/2/2014 6:59:22 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: And thus the Tea Party was born, and now American's will throw their tea boxes on the ground every year at the same time. [7/2/2014 7:00:12 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: So anyways, this lead to a lot of talking and arguments and some fighting and eventually some fat guys signed some Delclaration of Indepndance that meant they give the English the bird. [7/2/2014 7:00:49 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: So the English said "f**** this noise" and ran off and the newly formed Americans then elected their first president, Captain of the Morons George Washington. [7/2/2014 7:01:26 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: So anyways, people did some exploring s*** and they started colonising the rest of America and accidentally kill off all the natives because every had the flu. [7/2/2014 7:01:38 PM] Will Kirkby: AMERICAN HISTORY TLDR: [7/2/2014 7:01:43 PM] Will Kirkby: EVERYTHING WAS AND STILL IS f****ED [7/2/2014 7:01:50 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: At some point down the road this one guy wanted a train track. [7/2/2014 7:02:28 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: So he made some law thingy that created Nebraska and the other one, and then people were doing stupid things regarding slavery, and then a big civil war broke out. [7/2/2014 7:03:16 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: So then all of the Confederates who enjoyed giant monster trucks, shotguns and cheap beer fought the other people who enjoyed long walks on the beach and being right. [7/2/2014 7:03:45 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: The other people won, and there was much celebration involving cheap beer and long walks on the beach. [7/2/2014 7:05:25 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: So then nothing happened for a long time except for the gold rush which made people move around a lot since they couldn't find any jobs, a bunch of presidents dying because public healthcare doesn't exist in America, something about the depression because people who run the stock exchange aren't actually good at math and then 9/11. [7/2/2014 7:05:30 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: The end. [7/2/2014 7:08:35 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: If I wrote this on one of your history tests, how would I score? [7/2/2014 7:21:27 PM] Philip: Cheap beer and long walks on the beach [7/2/2014 7:21:49 PM] Hugh Wotmeigh: [7/2/2014 7:33:26 PM] Jamesster: that was amazing [1:09:48 PM | Edited 1:10:13 PM] Jim Brickkeeper: Brickipedia is the LEGO community equivalent of a bunch of cannibalistic hobos cooking each other around a garbage can fire at a gas refinery.

Last month, I received a comment on one my blog, which is usually not out of the ordinary. However, this comment was special. After researching what was mentioned in it and looking at it myself, I was floored. However, I did not tell anyone about it because I wanted to be sure it was all legit and not some phony. Late last month, I starting hinting around with two people, jokingly saying "I'm so awesome, this stuff comes to me" and sharing some stuff from it. I am now positive this is the most progress (aside from Noneatme's reverse engineering, which hopefully this can benefit from) ever made in extracting the LEGO Island SI archives. So what am I blabbing on about? Only a new tool that can extract way more stuff from the SI archives than LIME can and has the most documentation on the SI archives to date (unless Noneatme knows these details already). It requires Python 2 to run, has some odd command-line parameters, and appears to be mangling the file names a bit, but it works. Few things I noticed: While it definitely pulls out more than LIME, it is not pulling out all the audio LIME does. So for now, you still need LIME. The BMP images are, for once, actual BMPs. :D :D :D :D There is a megaton of unused content in here. Going back to point 1, you will need LIME to pick out some of the unused audio, but there are piles of stuff in here. It seems many of the Island's residents came in radio contact with Pepper as he is flying the helicopter (Nubby triesto tell him a poem) and Nick wants to hug Pepper after this ( ) If this news is regrettable or joyous I'll leave that to you, but we finally know who Enter and Return are. No more guessing. The jukebox was originally going to have volume controls Not all SI archives can be extracted yet, but that's because it's still in development ...And like always, there is plenty of unknown file types A lot of stuff is still not being extracted, though. I scarcely came across any 3D models, and rarely (if any) a character texture. So eventually even more stuff will be extracted through further exploration of the SI archive format. I've put together a small package of the most interesting stuff, unused and known, I've found. You can get it here (Zip version). The two videos are actually separate in the files. I converted the SMK video to uncompressed AVI using the RAD Video Tools, then pulling it and the WAV audio into VirtualDub and saved them as an uncompressed AVI again, so there should not be much (if any) quality loss.

So, Just another comic about Watchdogs that's nothing like any of the other comics about Watchdogs. And yes, I really would do that. Enjoy!

Original Topic - '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>> I feel as though the 2010 version didn't really apply some core RRU factors, so here's a new one. We, the people of Rock Raiders United, do by solemnly swear our lives and walruses to the almighty power of the Chief. We promise never to break the swear filter in the name of the WAD, and to always have a healthy helping of pizzaz and sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and Actions Stations. Our Mission forever more will be to bust a cap in Sony's collective ass. We shall never forget to turn flowers to teapots, and we shall never let the Berg win a race. We will keep our crystals in stock, our green bricks away from our red bricks, and always let the TV finish talking about Headquarters first. In our greatest intentions, we aim to protect our friends by assaulting the LMB Zombies and the TT Game Slaves with hours and hours of endless "Are You Ready To Le" action, supposing that no Landslides are Occurring at the time. Those who write LEGO as "Legos" shall be sentenced to exile, or will be forced to bake Xiron a waffle. Finally, we shall put an end to the miserable lives of those who dared to play LEGO Friends or Galidor in the only way we see fit; by listening to three hours of Joe talk about his pingas.. In order to keep this community thriving, we will ensure we never deny the existence of tornadoes, declare genocide on foreign countries or double-post and post spam whilst the Keeper of the Pants is around. We do this in the good name of Bricky Studburns. All hail the Infoderpiac. Simply say the pledge once, and you'll become an officially certified RRU member. Please do suggest any changes. Keeper of the Pants, out.

Thanks for the compliments That's not just one abomination, but two! Right next to each other! Heeeeelp! Personally I'd say no, not at the back, because it has a nice back and it's also quite thin. I was more thinking directly behind the seat. Wait: is there a yellow 2x1x1 on the bottom? Because if there is, you could swap it our for the same piece that had two holes in, and then you could put 'studs' on the holes. Those TECHNIC parts? These ones? From previous experience, it is possible to jam two crystals next to each other (actually, and fill up an entire baseplate with them); you just need to have them on the right rotation. If I'm blind that yellow 2x1x1 doesn't exist, you could try inserting a grey 2x2x1 with two holes just before the grey sloped piece with a hole in it... if that makes any more sense. I was wrong, I mean the same, Crystal holder behind the seat maybe soon I can rebuild the grey part behind the seat and add the crystal holder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-zdHMNFNM Some of my classmates have sung this one on my a-levels prom... It's about my home region (not the soldiers and tanks... the song itself, well it was actually an old march)

Hey guys I thought I should let you know that I've posted suggestions to have videos made on these games in Nerd³'s June Requests Megathread Here is a link to the Youtube Nerd³ channel https://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialNerdCubed And here is a list to the posts I made on the Subreddit. Give these as many upvotes as possible LEGO Rock Raiders http://www.reddit.com/r/nerdcubed/comments/29js6b/requests_megathread_july/cilo75y LEGO Racers 2 http://www.reddit.com/r/nerdcubed/comments/29js6b/requests_megathread_july/cilo6v5 LegoLand http://www.reddit.com/r/nerdcubed/comments/29js6b/requests_megathread_july/cilo6p2

I just updated the links to direct them to the July requests megathread.

Original text: "Meat holes. Haha." ...35 translations later, Bing gives us: "ChaCha Rod body" Uhm, what? Original text: "Mad Pain Points are the new type of font-punishment." ...35 translations later, Bing gives us: "Pain is the new generation of stupidity" Bad Translator's words of wisdom. Original text: "All hail Cutesy." ...35 translations later, Bing gives us: "James" This is very peculiar. Cutesy was made by jamesster, weird.

Great vehicle. I like your technique.

That sandwich on the phone. 'Occured?' What's that? Oh, you mean 'occurred.' Sorry about that

It's safe to say that landslides occurring aren't just a fad. They're here to stay. Many are calling them the new frontier of the disaster world. With each passing year more and more Chief's are finally convinced that it's time to give landslide prevention a try. But as is always the case when launching a mining plan in a new channel, there are many pitfalls that Chief is unaware of. Because landslide prevention encompasses so many different channels, the number of possible mistakes are huge. No Rock Raider team will ever create the perfect landslide prevention campaign without making a few mistakes. But here is a look at three particularly rubble-creating mistakes and how to avoid them. Failure to enlarge for equipment For several years now mining equipment has been steadily increasing in size up to equipment for building the LMS Explorer. It's projected that within the next year, mining equipment size will surpass LMS Explorer repair equipment. Think about that for a moment. That means that more than half of the Rock Raiders working will be driving some type of enormously large mining equipment. Unfortunately, most Chiefs still haven't come to grip with this fact. Tunnels that aren't optimized for new mining equipment will have landslides occurring on half the Rock Raiders in that tunnel. Of course many of those will drive on through to collect the energy crystal they want by shoveling rubble and driving over lava. But it's impossible to know just how many new Rock Raiders Chief is not recruiting by failing to enlarge for new mining equipment. Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this mistake. GPS is a type of technology that automatically tells the Rock Raider the correct newly built tunnel to enter for the equipment being used to drive around in. Rather than having to operate one single tunnel for all traffic, GPS and new tunnels allows you the convenience of building multiple tunnels for different sized mining equipment that all lead to the same destination. No priorities When you're thinking as Chief, it's easy to just assume that Rock Raiders will know what you want them to do in the event of a landslide as a result of an order. The best orders are those that include priorities. By expressly stating what task you want the Rock Raiders to perform, you give priority and purpose to your order. While priorities are important for all mining operations, they are especially crucial for landslide prevention. A good priority will be very clear and impossible to misunderstand. Your priority should be short, demanding, and as overly detailed as possible. The right priority is often the difference between a safe reinforcement and a Rock Raider teleported safely. Failure to target area workers Most Chiefs, when asked who their intended Rock Raiders for their order was, would say, “all of them.†In an ideal world, all Rock Raiders would hear and be influenced to obey your order. But in the real world, trying to order everybody to reinforce walls through an order will result in reaching almost everybody eating sandwiches. A good landslide prevention order will be tailored for the Rock Raiders in the landslide area. Make sure you spend sufficient time choosing your desired Rock Raiders and coming to understand their incompetence and hunger cycles. With this information you'll be able to create a landslide prevention campaign that is much more likely to prevent that audience from getting covered in rubble. Rock Raider Activity News brought to you by rockraiderSMSer.com Source: priorities4rockraiders.com/landslides/landslide-prevention-mistakes-every-chief-avoid-713001#!LR7EERU

You failed to address the issue of becoming a drone from playing TT games stuff and also failed to address what the crime shall be for playing Galidor and Friends (other than permanent irreversible brain damage). Oh, and I think you should include something in here about banishing those who dare to utter the word, "Legos".

So I finished ripping all the textures in the buildings folder, and I came across an unused building. I think it's rather interesting: So apparently the house that could merge into a double house also was meant to merge into a quadruple house. And since a lot of the .dat files have the easter egg implementations I might be able to make a mod that could restore this since the texture is fully intact, although when it's placed via attaching a .but with the same name part of the texture is cut off, although I'm sure that's fixable. Once I get to ripping the paths folder I might actually find the one beta path that can go over train tracks that everyone seems to be talking about.

Thanks, This is my first time reversing an x86 executable so this is kinda exciting for me. Actually, "real" bitmaps use this raster order too. Rather than use "standard" raster order (that being left-to-right, top-to-bottom, like words on a page), they use vertically inverted raster order. It still goes left-to-right, but the y component is flipped. Didn't know that. In the GameBoy Advance (which is what I usually mess around with) it does it from top to bottom, but in 8x8 squares. Interesting to know that this isn't anything new. OK, so apparently this in-built bitmap format is a lot more complicated than I thought. Turns out it is slightly compressed, but not using a compression algorithm. Instead they have a system to minimize the number of bytes used which makes things a bit more difficult. Basically, each byte can be as little as 2 pixels to as many as 4, which complicates things since that means that somehow it's selecting other colors from the 256 color palette shown in the normal images, which also means that I have to decipher a crapton of other stuff in there. Aside from that, I did figure out a way to dump images without directly decoding it. In the .dat files there is a property called total_number_of_frames that can be adjusted. So if you take a multi-framed object and set it to 1 frame it will turn up like this when you place the object down, exposing the entire image: So I managed to dump some of the images, but unfortunately they don't exactly insert back in very well (hence the really crappy looking factory above), so we still have work do to. But they do load and animate correctly, it's just that they don't load the proper palette. So if we can figure out the proper palette we could most likely fix the issue. Not to mention that the building .but's will also have to be modified or the executable hacked to view them from a normal BMP instead of a .but. I'd personally rather do the latter because the bitmap format caused me much pain trying to figure out and I got absolutely nowhere outside of what I learned in the last post. Just to give you guys an idea of what we're working with here, I'll throw up some of the ripped animations I got: Also, this can work to our advantage in terms of other things since we can rearrange the images to rip other items that aren't buildings. So if we can figure out a way to get the palette to work correctly and to load other buildings we could have a potential modding scene here. I personally plan on using the resources to make a sort of "Open LEGO LOCO" which can recreate the game with proper networking support as well as improved modding ability and maybe a more Sim City like engine which could give purpose to the factories and restraunts while also implementing currencies and other things.

OK, so I've been playing with the bitmaps (AKA flooding them with random bytes and values) and I've come to the following conclusion: These bitmaps are really really really weird. I was pretty much wrong about everything in my initial analysis. However, there are some things I'm glad to be wrong about. First off, I've discovered why some of these are formatted as normal bitmaps and why some of them aren't: animations. Every one of those files has an animation. Just take a look in the buildings folder, only the ones with multiple frames will have an unreadable file. Second, I found some interesting animations for the telephone. It turns out that there is also a blue and red version of it that was never used, as well as some unused easter eggs. If I can I'll try and get a pic up for you guys to see. Third, these graphics are indeed bitmaps, but they are very very very weird ones at that. Instead of being like a normal bitmap they start their image from the end of the file, so the top right pixel corresponds to the last byte in the bitmap file. And to make things even weirder they put each row of animation one after another, which is why they looked so darn weird in GIMP. So just as an example, instead of having it so that you have two separate images like most games do animation, they have the two images weaved together with the corresponding rows right next to each other. Weird. But, I am very happy because this means that these are both readable and editable. It's just a matter of figuring out the rest of the file. Also, I've discovered that the preview (with the magnifying glass) image is separate from the one displayed. And lastly, I found the purpose of the .but files. They are used in the toolbox as previews, because if you look carefully they are not just scaled versions (well, most aren't. The telephone is.), but in fact separate images. I'll keep looking into this. I'm actually very excited now that I know that it's possible to edit these easily (ie without cracking a compression algorithm). All that's left is to find the palette inside the file as well as the other information (the number of frames and the size of the image just as an example). Once we have that we can start converting these to editable bitmaps and then just use those for the purpose of modding. And since it seems like you guys didn't know this before (based on the top post here), those .dat's are just text files. They only look weird if you open them in either a Notepad or a Hex Editor If you open them in wordpad you'll find them to be perfectly editable. I'm a bit curious to see if LOCO dynamically scans for those .dats and if they'll show up in the toolbox if you copied a building or something. EDIT: Number of frames is specified in the .dat file. Also, it doesn't dynamically scan, which means there's a list of files for it to open out of the buildings folder. If I can get another building to be added this could mean a lot in terms of modding. Also, it seems that the .WAVs have the same exact header as the .BMPs, which is interesting. I'm guessing it's just raw PCM data.

Sorry to bring up a dead thread like this but I recently had the inspiration to recreate LEGO LOCO using the original game files (as opposed to manually ripping textures and stuff). So I did some research, got the RFD and RFH sorted out and now I'm stuck on getting these pesky BMPs to open. Luckily I happen to have some experience in reverse engineering (specifically Pokemon games for the GBA) so opening up a hex editor to take a peek at the files is nothing new. So first off, these files are definitely compressed in some sort of form. If you open the files as a raw image using GIMP you'll see something similar to this: Whereas if it were just a bitmap stripped of it's header it would look a bit like this guy from the Yoda Stories data file that I happened to open which comes from around the same time (1990's): I'll keep looking but it seems that we're going to have to keep looking. It does seem to have some sort of a header, I believe it's about 8 bytes long since everything else in the file is shifted by 8 bytes. Some notable offsets after looking through some files: 0x0 - Some sort of header 0x408 - Some sort of data, perhaps a palette? The openable files are indexed bitmaps with a 256 color palette, making the images 8bpp images as opposed to something like 4bpp. 0x808 - Compressed (maybe) data. Still need to find compression format. I'm placing my bets on Huffman, LZ77, or ZIP. If we're not so lucky it could be a home-made compression format which might take time to decipher. Also, I found an interesting file in the buildings folder. It's in reguards to the telephone: Instead of the usual BMP and DAT files, this one has a BMP, DAT, and a BUT file. The BUT file is in the exact same format as the BMP, so this might aid in finding the original format which we already have found to not be BMP. Also, if anyone has anything interesting to contribute I would appreciate it. Hopefully I can figure out this format soon so I can make a data extractor for my game so that I can use the original resources without having to resort to blatantly stealing IG's work. But, if needs be, I will end up ripping the sprites manually and maybe throw in a check for a valid installation of LOCO. EDIT: Also while going through in IDA I found a debug string that says "Error while loading db bitmap" and one that says "LOCOBITMAP Convert - failed to create surface". Perhaps another clue as to what the file format does? It does appear to be converting something so I might be able to identify the compression. EDIT again: Another small breakthrough, but it seems that the developers did in fact implement a function that would open files uncompressed, which will help debugging immesely. Since LOCO was (for the time) quite large I'd imagine that they would have it default to the uncompressed files, and if they couldn't be found it would try and open the compressed files. It's cut off but the full file path is C:Program FilesLEGO MediaConstructiveLEGO LOCOART-restoyboxnewtoyhandle.bmp, which is definately not inside it's compressed file. This code might not fully work though so I'll test it by removing the archives and seeing how it goes. One more EDIT: So apparently it does need the data files due to the fact that it will try and read from them on startup. I'll have to see which it tries to read from first and get the results back to you guys. On another topic, I found one file that has both a weird formatted file and a normal bitmap, so we might be able to use that to figure out how it's compressed. The two files are roads/tjunct-swint.bmp and (here's that extention again...) roads/tjunct-swint.but. I'm pretty sure the .but is the original file extension before they went in and renamed them to all be BMP's, so if we can figure out this file then it blows the doors wide open for modding. Maybe. That and it allows me to view all the images which is why I'm here.