Hi! I have written a program which helps decompressing compressed Project Eden level files. Some level files revealed some hidden development messages, because such files were originally meant to be opened in Room Editor II, the official but never released Project Eden level editor. Take a look at the pics.

Are you making any progress. I am pretty excited about what you're doing.

Thank you!

Once I was able to decompress the EDN files, I immediately began decompiling the file format.
I think I have done somewhere like 60% of the work: for now I am able to read the level geometry, the NPCs and the entities.
The next step would be to read the textures, which looks like a complicated step...

This could take time but I am sure that making a 3D level viewer should be fairly simple since I already have decompiled the level geometry.

Hi there!
Here's some recent progress.
My EDN reading script is not done yet, but it does enough for now (everything except the textures).
Also, there is the Room Viewer program I have written, for now it can load a part of the titlebackdrop.EDN file (the main menu city background) in wireframe.

I am keeping an eye on this thread.

How is this coming along? I'd be interested in taking a look if you're willing to share.

Hello
Well that is weird, I posted a very long reply that took me 40 minutes to write but it seems like GOG deleted it... Duh!

OK, I was able to briefly reconstruct my reply. Here it is:

Sure, I can provide you the decompressor, I will send you a link via PM (I sent you a friend request).
I have been studying the game in-and-out's for a few years now, mainly graphics and file formats. What surprised me the most is that it is not just a game, but a full game engine. Guess what, it even has support for loading very early level files of Project Eden! This feature is disabled but still present in the game code.
To discover the decompression algorithm Core Design programmers used, I had to debug the game step-by-step, checking memory etc. until I finally found the decompression function. Next thing is... I had trouble reading the level files because they seem to contain A LOT of extra information not needed by the game, such as Core Design's developer/designers comments, geometry names and so on. This probably means it was intended from the beginning to be editable in a public level editor.

BTW, are you familiar with programming/3D graphics? I managed to read the geometry vertices and normals but not the texture UV's. I found the geometry indices but they are stored in a very weird way. That is why my Room Viewer looks so "primitive".

Just accepted your friend request!

I'm really interested in seeing the inner workings of this game, and if there's comments etc then that could be really cool to read too.

My programming is extremely rusty, but my partner is a game programmer so I might ask him if he has any ideas in regards to looking at the texture UVs, although graphics programming takes him back to his university module that he really didn't enjoy haha, but I will see what he says

After days of work, I finally managed to read all the levels, including the cut-scene and multiplayer ones!
I attached some pictures for you to see :)
Hopefully you can (pretty easily) spot some familiar places from the game.
It is still not perfect, I am unable to find each room's position information, so I am placing them in the centre of their minimum and maximum extent, which is only a temporary solution. But it works!

Quick update for the Level Viewer:
Room positions have been now fixed, you can see the level layout a lot better, especially the Hospital level which is the biggest in the game.

A BIG step forward: polygon rendering!
Finally :)

Hey good job :)

Still here lurking in the shadows. Keep up the good work!

It is nice to know that some people are still interested :)
Reading textures in the correct order is a tough nut to crack, the programmers at Core Design decided to store every texture mip (wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap) as a separate texture and I have trouble combining them and reading the next ones because they are each of variable sizes.
Everything works as expected: vertex positions, texture UVs, the only problem remains with the selection of the adequate texture to draw on a surface.
Here is something funny that happened recently.