Eventual support for modded Cave Story games?

[jmfergeau]

Notice i'm a complete noob at programming... But I was trying to make work some modded versions of Cave Story (like WTF Story or Jenka's Nightmare) but they don't seem to work on this core.

After inspecting the logs, I noticed it doesn't work because the core is expecting a file named Arms.pbm. And this file is not a pbm on these mods but a jnb

Again, i'm a complete noob, but are those file formats really different? Is it possible to make these modded games compatible with the NX engine? Or would they need a completely different core to work, or a fork of it?

---

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[hizzlekizzle]

I don't know anything about those files, but the first thing to do, I think, would be to open them each in a hex editor and see if they're actually similar/identical.

[jmfergeau]

I just did. And, surprisingly, the files seems to be very identical.

But, even more surprisingly, when I tried to rename the files extensions and launching the game with the engine, it still didn't work because "Failed to load the file".
https://pastebin.com/F8QARyhm

So I guess the type of file is similar but not quite the same. :/

[hizzlekizzle]

If you can upload a pair of the files, I'll take a peek and try to see what's different about them.

[jmfergeau]

Here's the file Arms.jnb of the modded game "Jenka's Nightmare".
It normally serves the same purposes as Arms.pbm in the regular game.
Arms.zip

[hizzlekizzle]

@maxlefou
Something else must be going on. that file is 100% identical and even has the same md5sum.

[isage]

Sadly, it's almost impossible. Many mods hack original exe to add custom logic (and, in this case, change data files extension). There's nothing different between jnb and pbm. It's still just a BMP file.
Moreover, nxengine doesn't fully support npc.tbl, and uses custom format for sprite mappings (sprites.sif)

[ghost]

@maxlefou
You would likely have to fork this project and mod it to support that specific Cave Story mod.