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I wanted to hold off posting an update until this was finished, but it's been over a week now and I just wanted to show that I have still been working on it. Behold... The almost-complete Small Transport Truck! Updates: Added 3D grilles Finished the back turquoise plate-with-bar Added parts on the back, including hinge brick Redesigned the wheels (now retextured with modified LRR textures) All that I have left to add are: Back tipper bucket, including LRR logo tile inside Seat back Steering wheel EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention - the developers made Redbeard's wheels as octagons, using 208 Vertices, 112 Indices and 19 Indices Meta entries to do so. I made mine as octagons also, but only used 48 Vertices, 40 Indices and 22 Indices Meta entries!

"The tasty experiment of Portals for Imbeciles" by Ben24x7: A "scary" story by Ben24x7 (Later turns into some kind of Homepride Fred banishing that goes wrong and then something about magic scrolls and a dance off...):

That is an amazingly accurate description of Vista UAC. I guess we know where Microsoft got their concept from.

Greets all, So it's been a while since my initial research on the "mysterious bitmaps" from LEGO LOCO, and after a small splurge of research and coding I finally figured out this mysterious format. First and foremost, the format used by the bitmaps is not bitmap specific at all, it's a compression format used by any and all files which appear to be 'unreadable'. The loading order of the game appears to be as such to detect the difference between the two types of files, compressed and uncompressed: Find requested file If it doesn't exist, return 0 If it does exist, request a file handle and copy it to RAM Check the value at 0x5. If it's 0x1, it's compressed. Otherwise, return RAM offset of already copied file Load 32 bit word at offset 0x0, malloc that amount of space Pass compressed file and malloc location to decompression function Now for the good stuff: The compression format and the entire file format demystified. The file is stored with an 8 byte large header and as large of an actual file space as allowed (limited to highest 32 bit value in this case). While the file is being decompressed, the file is considered to actually start at byte 0x8. The file is divided into two parts: The table and the data. The table is technically only 0x400 bytes large starting at offset 0x400 (0x408 with the initial header), but it can extend larger if needed. The data goes as large as needed. The data and table itself use a Huffman compression method, with the table being the Huffman tree and the data being the binary array. The word value at 0x4 in the header determines the seed position in the huffman tree. The seed position is multiplied by 4 to get the actual offset of the seed. This offset does not include the header. Once the seed is loaded, each 32 bit word is loaded from the data and is divided by 2. If the far-most right bit was a 1 before division by 2, the next tree offset is shifted by 0x2. The next offset is determined as such: (((seed * 2) + flag) * 2). A 16 bit value is then loaded from that offset and used as the next seed. If this seed value is less than 0x100, it is interpreted as a byte and the byte is written and the seed reset to the bottom of the tree. This processes is done continually until all bytes have been written. If that was a bit difficult to grasp, you might be able to tell it a little better by viewing the source code of the decompression tool. With that said and done, the compression tool. It's written in Java and is executed from the command line using java -jar locodecomp.jar <infile> <outfile>. You can download the precompiled version here or view the source code on my GitHub here. The source code is fairly straightforward so if anyone wants to port it to any other languages feel free to do so. As a note, I included a small bitmap fixer which can patch in a header for certain bitmaps. How it works is it takes a blank bitmap header and stitches certain pieces of the raw bitmap together to form a readable bitmap. Since the bitmaps are a bit inconsistent in terms of defining width and height in the raw file, it calculates it using the .dat file associated with it. The width and height can be adjusted in a hex editor. Since it uses .dat files to get width and height, it usually only works with buildings due to the buildings being the only bitmaps that define it's size inside the .dat file. For sounds I'm not sure what header information is missing, but I do know that most of the sounds can be played in Audacity by importing it as a raw file and changing the format to use unsigned 8bit PCM and a frequency of 22050. Questions, comments, concerns? Feel free to let me know. I'm pretty excited for this myself since if we can convert all the bitmaps to a normal format we could potentially open up more expansive modding between the bitmaps and the .dat files.

UPDATE: The final model can be found here! I've started work on a Small Transport Truck model for LEGO Racers, and thought I'd share my progress as it goes along. I aim to finish this and use it as an example of GDB modding, but given the complexity of the model and the fact that we are currently restricted to text editing, don't hold me to it. So far I've spent a while working out accurate stud dimensions so I can use them universally, which I've noted >here, and I've since begun planning out the model.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiX7Q5_TTjo So we're getting: What do you think of the results? Happy with them? Saddened? Excited?

You just blew my mind. How did you get it to work!?! Thats amazing! That thing was a broken hunk of junk and you fixed it?!

[7:50 PM] Triangle717: If I bought a Mac, would that be called getting a new PC too? [7:53 PM] Alcom Isst: No, that would be called "why are you getting a Mac?".

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Aw, come on, until now it wasn't known how the GDB files could be used to make/modify models. I'd call that a discovery, even if it was Will who worked out the file format in the first place. I agree though, it would be much better if someone could make a tool, but there are few people on RRU with the ability, time and dedication to do it. Until such a time as one exists, I'm quite happy putting a little extra effort in to build custom models that I can share with the community. EDIT: Update! It doesn't look like much, but these are the first few plates completed. I might add shadows later, but textures aren't required as they aren't seen (parts will be built on top). Ignore the wheels for now, too. The 2x2 plate that Redbeard sits on was modelled first, and took... Quite a while. The 2x10 plate was a lot easier though, and I was able to make the turquoise 2x4 plate in about 20 minutes (most of which was spent drawing it in Photoshop). So it's not actually as bad as I thought it'd be. I'm just dreading the difficult parts like the tipper, main dark grey base and the bucket seat.