Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️uDraw Studio: Instant Artist, 2009, Wii:
"Pipeworks bundle v1.30 (big endian)"
Godzilla: Save the Earth (2004), for PS2, uses "Pipeworks Bundle File version 1.3".
1.3! This is the earliest game I've seen using Pipeworks, and it's got a surprisingly late version number. Weird!
"Pipeworks bundle v1.20 (big endian)"
I don't think that's the same engine as what I've been calling "Pipeworks".
The closest I've seen is Terry Fernham, who says they were "[r]esponsible for tools and technology included in the core custom game engine on multiple platforms."
Ian Sabine's linked-in said he "Maintained and updated Spigot engine".
He's credited on Charm Girls Club: Pajama Party, Jeopardy, and Wheel of Fortune, all of which use the same engine.
interesting find: the "Colossal Kaiju Combat" games licensed the Spigot engine from Pipeworks. So if they are showing some of the same files, then it's gotta be Spigot.
Time to find out. 5$ to find out
"Pipeworks bundle v1.30 (little endian)"
It's got the .pvd/.pvm files and everything.
This is 100% the same engine.
this giant monster fighting game...
uses MYSQL!?
Started building a wiki page listing all the versions and such.
Plantville, which they made for Siemens, is an edutainment game about factory management from 2011.
here's the really fun part:
they clearly were fine with licensing out their spigot engine, given that they licensed it to that kaiju game.
How many other games did they license it to, and it just never was mentioned anywhere?
So they made a few demos (for the xbox) with Microsoft prior to announcing their "first" Spigot game. I don't think those demos were ever released, they were just shown as promos for the Xbox.
It's possible that's where Spigot came from. Maybe they built the engine for that, then reused it for their Godzilla game.
if I see one more place where this code is like "(if x!=0 && x!=0xFFFFFFFF)"...
LEARN TO USE ONE SENTINEL AND STOP PRETENDING -1 IS A POINTER
as far as I can tell, it's not just one of their games.
it's all of their games (at least the wii ones)
Pierre Bourdon@delroth Will do!
Although, haven't ya'll done a comprehensive survey of Wii/GC games? Seems you could script extracting the .elf and then using readelf to check for debug symbols without too much difficulty.
@foone GC/Wii games don't typically come with ELF files :-) The standard executable format for those consoles (DOL) doesn't have any kind of symbol section. The Wii SDK has some amount of dynamic linking support (REL files) but only imports/exports have symbols there (think DLLs).
So usually when we find symbols it's either weird game engines with their own executable format, or forgotten files on the disc image master (e.g. "framework.map" in Zelda: The Wind Waker).
The games I've been digging into all have elf files. I wonder if they're doing something weird like implementing their own ELF loader in the DOL?
@foone either that, or dead files that were actually converted to DOL but still kept on the disc image for whatever reason (someone forgot to `make clean`). I've seen both, usually more of the latter.
Sometimes you can get lucky and the ELFs are even debug builds!
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Ships_with_Debugging_Symbols has a bit more details for each game.
Or, sometimes the developers forget a Windows version of the game on disc... https://tcrf.net/Pikmin/Windows_Executable
@delroth huh, yep. The elf file is completely superflous, the game runs fine without it. good to know!
Although now I'm wondering if the .elf and .dol files are definitely in sync. I may be reversing an old version of the code!