uncam: Combat Mission campaign extractor

[AlexUK]

On 2/8/2023 at 9:45 AM, Paper Tiger said:

I just burned out after CMBN Market Garden, I guess. Even before starting the maps, the RESEARCH that was required to make a campaign like the three I made for CMBN was a massive undertaking. I'm going to take it VERY slowly but yes, I plan to make some new content. I doubt very much I'll ever make anything like 'The Road to Nijmegen' again because some of the missions in that featured an entire reinforced battalion and that exceeds my pain threshold for RTS. I can DO it but I miss so much of the action in RT because I'm too focused on what platoon X is doing and that's a lot of the fun in CM for me. I like to get the camera down to ground level and see the action from my pixel troops' POV rather than the God view.

I expect you'll see campaigns with reinforced company sized actions and a few smaller reinforced platoon missions to change the pace from me. But there's quite a lot changed with regards to AI scripting - more groups is always going to result in better AI plans but the triggers were relatively new when I last played and I didn't see much need for them. I'd like to see what some of the other guys have doe with the new scripting and see if it's better.

Oh that’s fantastic news. I have played though so many of your campaign missions. They are definitely my favourite. I finished Road to Montebourg twice and regularly replay. Scottish corridor and Market Garden I have started several times and really loved too (waiting for a computer upgrade/Engine 5 to revisit). 
 

i haven’t tried any of your CMSF campaigns. Before I do, are you planning on revisiting?

 

Thank you so much for the literally countless hours of entertainment you have given me. 

[Paper Tiger]

I'm a bit hesitant to make definite statements about what I'm going to do at this point but I'm getting re-inspired. I'd like to look at CMSF2 soon but first, I want to get some issues with my CMBN campaigns sorted out.

I'm concerned about the difficulty of The Scottish Corridor mission, especially the finale, Fair and Square. I'd be happy to hear some feedback on that before making any real plans. 

I think Nijmegen is in a good place and would prefer not to have to do a lot of work on that apart from fixing an issue witha bunker in the Mook Bridge mission. The Irish Guards missions were extremely hard work to build and test because I wanted them to be really special, especially 'Breakout from the Neerpelt Bridgehead', my favourute mission from that campaign.

[Vacillator]

On 2/8/2023 at 8:45 AM, Paper Tiger said:

but yes, I plan to make some new content

As others have said that's great news.  And it's great to see you back even though I wasn't here the first time .

I have however seen your name on a lot of excellent work, so thankyou for that and any future stuff.

[37mm]

On 2/7/2023 at 9:10 AM, Paper Tiger said:

You are my favourite person from now on. Thank you for making such a simple tool available.

It's a great tool & i've used it to rework a number of CMA & CMSF campaign (RommL's 'Battle of Grozny', Fredrocks 'Major Nosovs Command' & some tweaks to Dragonwynns 'Heart of Darkness') as well as explore the older campaigns.

One tip, when you update a campaign you have to create a new core file & replace ALL the core forces for all the scenarios otherwise, when you start playing the campaign, your units will have disappeared. This is a laborious & time consuming job but is still a lot quicker than making a campaign from scratch!

However, there's a few campaigns uncam doesn't seem to like including 'Hasrabit' which IIRC is one of yours (your first?). I could never get that one to uncompile (a shame as I wanted to do an SF2 playthrough & add a real stream to that first scenario).

Edited February 9, 2023 by 37mm

[Ithikial_AU]

8 hours ago, 37mm said:

However, there's a few campaigns uncam doesn't seem to like including 'Hasrabit' which IIRC is one of yours (your first?). I could never get that one to uncompile (a shame as I wanted to do an SF2 playthrough & add a real stream to that first scenario).

Yeah, in my opinion it should common practice among the community to upload not only the .cam file but also the script and .btt files in a folder as well. That way if you leave the community your work can be updated down the line as needed. Pretty sure I put that into the Campaign Design doc.  

These community tools to break up a .cam file are great, if you want to play individual scenarios, but the lack of all the individual pieces at the other end still makes it a time slog to recreate the missing pieces and then put it all back together again.

[Rokko]

On 2/7/2023 at 10:10 AM, Paper Tiger said:

You are my favourite person from now on. Thank you for making such a simple tool available.

 

I'm afraid I had a horrible computer crash a few years back and lost everything CM-related and now I can access all the campaign files and perhaps rework them.

 

Thanks

 

PT

Wow, stop making me blush! Your campaigns are works of art, by the way

21 hours ago, 37mm said:

However, there's a few campaigns uncam doesn't seem to like including 'Hasrabit' which IIRC is one of yours (your first?). I could never get that one to uncompile (a shame as I wanted to do an SF2 playthrough & add a real stream to that first scenario).

Can you retry with the most recent version? I just checked with a file I found on this forum by googling and it got unpacked with no issue.

Or alternatively, send me the file causing issues, it may be a different version of the campaign than the one I found.

Edited February 10, 2023 by Rokko

[Paper Tiger]

I missed the latest version and downloaded the version in the OP. The 'new' version did the trick nicely with Hasrabit. I guess I'll be able to rework it as well.

Thanks again.

[Aragorn2002]

On 2/20/2023 at 3:27 AM, Paper Tiger said:

I missed the latest version and downloaded the version in the OP. The 'new' version did the trick nicely with Hasrabit. I guess I'll be able to rework it as well.

Thanks again.

Can you please post a link? I try to uncam Mission Boston - Objective La Fiere, but it ain't working.

[Paper Tiger]

On 3/30/2022 at 1:11 AM, Rokko said:

Hello,

I haven't touched CM in ages, having mostly lost interest in it, but today I had an itch and looked at the code I had written for the uncam tool and somehow ended up rewriting the entire thing in one setting. I fixed some issues and it should be possible to unpack CMCW campaigns as well as potentially campaigns of yet unreleased games, as long as BF does not muck with the file format. Anyways, I don't have CMCW so I can't test and there are no campaign files in the scenario depot. If it doesn't work, send me the campaign file (or a download link) and I can take a look at it. I don't even have a Windows PC anymore, so I couldn't test the Windows version either, so please report any issues.

Best regards

PS: If anyone wants the source code, feel free to ask but I didn't include it this time in the archive.

uncam-0.10.zip 800.99 kB · 39 downloads

The latest version is attached to that post quoted above on page 2 of this thread. You'll find v09 at the top of the thread but it doesn't unpack all the campaigns but this one did.

[PEB14]

Hi,

@Rokko, uncam works very good but for the first time I was unable to extract two campaign files, namely CMFI and CMBN training campaigns.

Here are the message I got with the CMBN training campaign Task Force Raff:

 

[2023-07-03T20:15:34Z ERROR uncam::parse] encountered parse error at offset 16
[2023-07-03T20:15:34Z ERROR uncam] failed to parse file "(...)/Task Force Raff - Combat Training/Task Force Raff.cam": failed to parse campaign in "(...)"
    
    Caused by:
        0: failed to parse campaign header
        1: invalid campaign file header, expected 0x4af6e5b261708d9bc8c4f9a5d0132e37, got 0x6b72616d000000006b6f6f62
logout

 

Any clue?

[Rokko]

15 minutes ago, PEB14 said:

Hi,

@Rokko, uncam works very good but for the first time I was unable to extract two campaign files, namely CMFI and CMBN training campaigns.

Here are the message I got with the CMBN training campaign Task Force Raff:

 

[2023-07-03T20:15:34Z ERROR uncam::parse] encountered parse error at offset 16
[2023-07-03T20:15:34Z ERROR uncam] failed to parse file "(...)/Task Force Raff - Combat Training/Task Force Raff.cam": failed to parse campaign in "(...)"
    
    Caused by:
        0: failed to parse campaign header
        1: invalid campaign file header, expected 0x4af6e5b261708d9bc8c4f9a5d0132e37, got 0x6b72616d000000006b6f6f62
logout

 

Any clue?

This looks like the 16-byte campaign file header. Basically, every CM .cam campaign file begins with the same 16-byte sequence identifiying it. It looks like the files you are trying start with a different pattern. Are you 100% certain they are actually .cam files and not some kind of compressed archive? I mean it's unlikely, since these files come with their respective base games, so there is no reason for them to be archived, but it's a guess. Otherwise, you could send me DL link for these (private & temporary Dropbox or Google Drive should work) and I'll take a look if they unpack alright if the campaign header check is simply relaxed.

[WimO]

On 4/9/2023 at 4:28 AM, Aragorn2002 said:

Can you please post a link? I try to uncam Mission Boston - Objective La Fiere, but it ain't working.

@Aragorn2002 If the only reason to unpack my Mission Boston is to get to the individual scenarios, then these and more are posted at the scenario depot as a single update package.  If there is anything else you want to see, just PM me.

 

[Rokko]

On 4/9/2023 at 10:28 AM, Aragorn2002 said:

Can you please post a link? I try to uncam Mission Boston - Objective La Fiere, but it ain't working.

That one I just downloaded and it worked for me. But maybe my local dev version contains some fixes I forgot about, I guess I should release a new version soonish.

[Aragorn2002]

Thank you, guys!

[luigim]

On 2/20/2023 at 3:27 AM, Paper Tiger said:

I missed the latest version and downloaded the version in the OP. The 'new' version did the trick nicely with Hasrabit. I guess I'll be able to rework it as well.

Thanks again.

I don't find the link for last version

[Murauder]

How do I put them back into campaign file?