Solving mystery of LEGO Indiana Jones 2 green platform - part 1
Hello everyone!
This post will be very different than what I posted in this blog so far.
I hope to uncover an old LEGO Game mystery which hasn't been solved for more than a decade. I will also write some stuff on how LEGO Indiana Jones 2 works internally.
I have talked about the topic with a friend who likes such stuff around half a year ago, but I didn't do anything more about that topic back then. Now I am going to look into the topic seriously with detail. A video by channel EyeGuy inspired me to return to the topic. Thank you!
I sadly have to split this into 2 parts, since I didn't manage to make any progress for too long but I want to publish something regardless.
So, the thing I am going to look into is a mysterous green pad, which appears in last hub of LEGO Indiana Jones 2. The Kindom of the Crystal Skull part 3 one.
The green pad in question
The pad (I personally assume it is some sort of a landing pad) itself does not do anything in the game, people including me tried all the possibilities of interacting with it in-game, which resulted in nothing. It also does not really match the setting, and part of it merges into the ground. The object also has an animation, emiting red light. All of that made it a mystery.
So, let's start!
To find the answer, we must look into the game's code. The game stores all the data in .DAT archives. I extracted these with QuickBMS . After extracting, I got access to all files of the game. Surprisingly, the game still works with the data being outside the .DAT archives, allowing me to modify the game on the go as well.
Everything inside is honestly amazing - all sounds, icons, 3D models, scripts, even developer comments and changelogs. Everything is in these files. The engine appears to work with an interpreter, so most of the code is readable with just notepad.
I could browse and analyze these all day, but I am here to discover what that green object is.
First, I decided to try to affect the object, this will be helpful in finding it.
I went to LEVELS\SKULL3\AKATORHUB\AKATORHUB_A and opened file AKATORHUB_A_LIGHTING.LED in a hex editor. This file is apparently responsible for rendering lights in the level, which as we know that object has many (looking at the animation at least 4 coded red light sources).
I opened it in hex editor to try to find red light. Its color would be most likely defined with RGB 255 0 0. Such pattern could not be found, so the engine apparently uses floats between 0 and 1 for colors.
I replaced every 1 0 0 with 1 1 0 to see if any colors change. That surprisingly changed nothing so I reverted the file to original and decided to try to target green color and replaced 0 1 0s with 0 1 1s. As a result, characters, vehicles and interactive objects, including the platform became darker. This way I proven that the whole pad is an separate object and not part of map's own geometry.
I reverted the file back to original again and decided to try something else - move camera underground. I found camera's setup in level's text file and changed its height to -5. This put the camera underground. I discovered interesting stuff this way.
First, I discovered how deep the pad is, and that it has an image texture of LEGO piece bottom inside. This is an useful clue, since we can target objects with image textures to find it.
Another unrealted thing I discovered on the map were blue quickly rotating cubes
I noticed that they were related to water, and I wasn't wrong. I found then underwater on another map too (which I also modded to look underground):
From fact that our characters float on height of the cube and that there is one for each water depth, I concluded that these cubes are used as swimming depth markers.
Another thing I found when walking around maps with camera underground is that unused placeholder objects (usually non-LEGO variants of objects) were usually hidden by being moved vertically underground:
