Amberworld / News: Recent posts

After joining the Ambermoon research project ( https://gitlab.com/ambermoon ), I found some motivation to create more code for Amberworld. We reverse-engineered the LOB compression, so we are now able to recompress AMB archives. I recreated the exact compression based on LZSS example source code while Nico even managed to produce a slightly better compression ratio based on another implementation. A new refactored version of AMBlib will soon be released. It is now possible to create an Ambermoon editor if someone wanted to.... read more

15 years after releasing the tools and sources to extract and/or convert data files of Amberstar, Ambermoon and Albion, I decided to get back to work on this project. There have been several attempts by other people to recreate Ambermoon, many utilizing my previous work done for the Amberworld project. Unfortunately, not much has evolved from most of these efforts, so it's up to me again to dig through megabytes of disassembled code, this time focussing on the actual game code rather than reverse engineering file formats.... read more

Ambermoon 2D maps in all their glory! Finally.

AMBexplorer allows to browse AMB archives (all formats supported by AMBlib) using a simple WinZip-like interface.
It can easily be extended with plugins (example included).

This is a Win32-only version. The makefiles are for lcc-win32, but should be easily adaptable.

Why has there been a nine-month release delay?
Some people got a binary version in April 2004, and I wanted to make some more changes before releasing the source. Well, I haven't touched the code since then and there seems to be nothing to change. This program isn't really important, we have already seen all of its functionality in AMBtool. It's just a nice addition for Windows users. The plugin system may prove useful some day.

Looks like there are CRC errors in some of the tar.gz files here, at least that's what WinRAR 3.20 says.
However I had no errors in the depacked files, so you can probably just ignore the warnings, too.
If someone notes byte trashing or something, I may ZIP and reupload those files.
The fact that noone complained in the forums makes me wonder if only WinRAR has this problem...

I'm proud to announce the first public release of AmberMap -- the Ambermoon 2D Map Viewer. This is a beta version and under heavy development. Have fun!

Some Ambermoon file format specifications were uploaded today. Have fun!

Flo uploaded his new Ambermoon itemlist. The Amberworld project hits the Sourceforge Top 1000 most active (rank 988). Cool!

Ambermoon Itemliste 0.1 by Flo was added today.

Just a little update of AMgfx. I have added a custom palette (#49) that was created by Iceblizz and is used by the portraits and items in Ambermoon.

I have uploaded the Ambermoon world map today. It was scaled by a factor of 0.25 to cut down the size (the original needs >150MB).

Thanks to Flo for his time and bandwidth to upload the Albion maps.

I've created the AMBlib today to make handling of AMB files easier for developers. AMBtool 0.5 uses this new library to cut down code size and complexity. Source only release. Please use the stable V0.4 if there are problems with this new version, and post your bugreports to the forum!

160 downloads and still no feedback. I'm not going to upload new versions as long as people ignore the forums. Please post your reports, what you're using these programs for, what's good, what sucks, whatever. I need some motivation to go on...

The Ambermoon tools were downloaded quite often during the last weeks, but there's still nobody posting about his achievements. If someone was able to find out more about the file formats, please post it in the forum. I really need some feedback! Every info you can give may be useful to others.

The Ambermoon graphics converter was completely rewritten to support more than just five bitplanes.

Update of the Ambermoon file decoder. Now with auto LOB decompression from AMNC/AMNP archives.

This is the beta release of the Ambermoon graphics to TGA converter.

AMtool 0.2 had a bug in LOB decompression.

This is the first beta release of the Ambermoon file decoder. Of course you will need the full game for this tool to be of any use. Tested with Ambermoon 1.05 German.

Forums opened. Website coming soon. Developers please email me to become member of the Amberworld project!