{"id":608,"date":"2008-09-18T23:01:57","date_gmt":"2008-09-19T06:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/psychotron-story-arc\/"},"modified":"2020-07-25T22:12:37","modified_gmt":"2020-07-26T05:12:37","slug":"psychotron-story-arc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/psychotron-story-arc\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychotron Story Arc"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m still on this game hacking kick<\/a>. Today’s target is The Psychotron<\/a>, perhaps the most painful interactive movie game I have ever seen. Thing is, I have to admit that I have never actually played<\/em> this game; I am judging the game purely on the plain Cinepak\/PCM AVI files that comprise the key feature of the game. I don’t even own the full game, only a demo. Granted, I have tried to play the Psychotron demo<\/a> but could never make it work. These 1994 multimedia-heavy games… <\/p>\n


\n\"Psychotron<\/a>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

Whereas the conversations in Flash Traffic: City of Angels<\/a> were packed in a quasi-compressed binary format, the conversation tree in Psychotron is stored in a series of .SEG files that look like the file S5H1PD1.SEG here:<\/p>\n

\\scene5\\s5h1Pd1.avi*from 23 to 283*3*Fold.*10*S5h1r1.seg*Bet a large amount.*1000*s5h1r2.seg*Bet a small amount.*500*s5h1r3.seg*<\/p>\n

Pretty straightforward to figure out. It also helps me understand a technical matter about the game that irritated me so much when I viewed the FMV files standalone– when you view the game’s files in a standalone player, you will see that they invariably start paused with tracking lines (apparently digitized from a VCR). I am guessing that the game uses the field “from 23 to 283” to describe which frames of the file are meant for human consumption.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I wrote a Python script to print out a Graphviz-compatible<\/a> spec to map out the game demo’s dialog tree. Warning! There might be spoilers in the tree!<\/p>\n


\n\"Pyschotron
\nClick for full image<\/em><\/a>
\nClick for Graphviz source<\/a><\/em>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

Ah, who am I kidding? No one cares about spoilers in this alleged story. It is interesting to note that 2 of those trees don’t correlate to any of the scenes on the disc.<\/p>\n

The Python source code for generating the graph is below. I finally ordered the full game from an eBay seller the other day so I am wondering if the graphing utility will be applicable to the full game.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Usage: graph-psychotron-segments.py <\/directory\/to\/.SEG\/files><\/p>\n