Restunts

Restunts is the name given to a project originally started in the community with the purpose of disassembling Stunts and then translating it to C and thus obtain a source code we can handle and modify. This was desired because attempts to get to the original source code failed and it appears to not exist anymore. Nowadays, the term sometimes extends to other related efforts, which include modification and recompilation of the assembly source code as well as recreation of parts of the code.

Many extensive forum threads make up vital parts of the history and progress of the project. At its current stage, the dissassembly was completed and recompilation was achieved successfully. Some mods have been created based on this source code and a huge amount of information was learned from reading and analysing it. The knowledge of the Stunts internals has increased significantly thanks to this project and variables and structures have been named and tagged, while the source is already very well commented in many sections. On the other hand, translation into C is minimal as of November 2023.

The source code in its current status has been mirrored and can be found at https://bitbucket.org/dreadnaut/restunts/

History

During the decade of 2000, there had been several moments when wishes of getting the original game source code were expressed. At some point, the community managed to get in touch the Stunts' main programmer Kevin Pickell, who said he didn't have the source and that it was almost certainly lost. With time, there were fewer talks about finding that source code and more about reverse engineering the game one day.

In July 2004, a forum thread was started by user Cyberman in which he tells about his observations on file compression in Stunts. He noticed that the "P" in file extensions stands for "packed". He later continues to notice that the main executable appears to be combined with DIF files for the different graphics cards. While this thread does not progress much at that point, it would later become a spark that starts a fire.

In March 2008, dstien posts his analysis on RES files in the same thread and later, he mentions that he has reversed the first decompession pass. Soon, many community members become interested in start participating. This marks the beginning of the complete understanding of Stunts data files and opens the door to carmaking, among many other things.

In early 2009 a forum thread was started by llm, which might be the first thread in the reverse-engineering section of the forum, in which he described his first efforts in decompressing LOAD.EXE. dstien mentioned that the Resource file format wiki article already existed

Temporary

The following is temporary information I'm using to build this article:

https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=1137.0 https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=2303.0 https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=2454.0 https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=2482.0 > Trackdata > Stunts Cartography > Resource file format