Introduction
Harbinger by Silverback Entertainment runs on a custom engine. This engine was only used for 1 title, as the game financially underperformed and the studio closed down shortly afterwards. As a result it uses a lot of proprietary formats.
However Harbinger's archive formats at the very least have been cracked and can be opened via DragonUnpacker. I'll go over how to do it here. This tutorial is made in hopes that it might interest people in reverse engineering Harbinger's graphics formats so we can extract its textures and sprites one day.
What you will need
- A copy of the game. You can acquire Harbinger legally from GamersGate.com currently.
- DragonUnpacker
Opening Harbinger's files
First, install both the game and DragonUnpacker. Then set the files of type to Harbinger .SQH and go to the game's directory.
res0.sqh is where the majority of the files are. So let's open that.
From here we can extract all of the game's formats. Unfortunately as of writing this tutorial it's not possible to open or convert the graphics files. The graphics files are a proprietary format called .gim. Which isn't the same as the PSP .gim graphics format. However we can view dialogue, script and audio files pretty easily.
If you want to extract the ost in particular it's located in res0.sqh/res/common/music
Conclusion
Hopefully we'll be able to play around with Harbinger's file formats more in the future. But for right now we can at least extract the archives. I'll update this tutorial in the future if the situation changes.
Is there a program for packaging and editing? Simple unpacking is not very useful.
Unfortunately no. I would love it if someone could repackage Harbinger's package format or create some kind of modding framework for it. It's a game I could see a lot of potential with custom levels.
And if you come from the other end. Rewrite the executable so that it takes game resources not from the archive, but from the unpacked folder?
I'm not sure if that could work. I'd love to see if it's possible. However afaik nobody's been able to replace any of Harbinger's assets thus far. I haven't figured out how to read the graphics format for example.
It may not be necessary to unpack all resources. I can't say anything about how the Harbinger works. But in the Stalker series of games, the executable took data from both packed archives and unpacked folders. Moreover, unpacked folders had priority.
If anyone could get it working it'd be much appreciated.
Harbinger is such an immersive and atmospheric game, I loved it back then and it still looks great and detailed.
There is only one thing that needs to be changed (maybe a mod could do it?):
A lot of the atmosphere comes from the excellent lighting creating a dark mood and atmosphere around the player as he barely sees the enemies ahead.
_But_ for an unknown reason the developers decided to completely destroy this dark atmosphere and added the feature that whenever you target an enemy or hover with the mouse over them they glow brightly. Why all that complex lighting when it gets completely destroyed anyway?
I mean this:
The in-game light sources create such a moody and atmospheric lighting, but it is constantly destroyed by the interface by illuminating whenever the mouse cursor "touches" some "creature in the dark".
Maybe there is a way to mod the game and disable this bad feature?
p.s. My current workaround is to use the mouse cursor with "shift" trying to not directly touch the enemies (and move it behind them). This way the great lighting of the game is not destroyed:
The main thing I'd like to see is a mod that allows for custom levels, or at least playing the other race's levels as each race.