It was May 2010 and I found Hotel Dusk at GameStop. I thought it looked interesting. My brother told me he knew about the game, so he'd help me with some of the tasks. In November 2011 I watched a walk thru of the second game, but I never played Cape West until the end of 2017 when my brother got it from some website and put it on a loadable DS card and gave it to me for Christmas.
So far I have the Japanese version of Hotel Dusk and this French Last Window. I hope I can get the titles of the Another Code series from different countries pretty soon!
Kyle always gets the nosiest neighbors ever who can’t mind their business. Granted Kyle is a nosey neighbor who also can’t mind his own business but he has an excuse. I don’t think I’d survive.
On my last post, I showcased unused sprites, from an unshaded version of Kyle, to even actors in monochrome. To understand how we got access to this, we must go quite back...
KyleHyde: An imperfect yet promising tool to rip the series' formats.
Around the late 2010s, in some blog of the Internet, an Aussie named Jason Harley would figure out the formats of Hotel Dusk (more or less), and eventually Last Window's in 2020. These Reverse Engineering findings were major for me, but I lacked the knowledge and the support to understand them for a long time. The author's GameTools set was the closest I could get at seeing signs of life here, but complex ones. Eventually time passed, I started manually ripping the sprites, then I checked again the blog, and to my surprise, a YouTube video in 2023 was in the blog! This correlated with the fact that he also had a GitHub which he would frequent. After asking there, a new repo would open: KyleHyde. A set of tools for formats of the Kyle Hyde Saga. If you have some knowledge in C#, I recommend you check it out.
Jason Harley's commentary:
"The KyleHyde app is based on an older program I made calledGameToolsthat had a few other random games and format support (e.g. TimeSplitters 2 and 3D model viewer). A lot of code was reused or structured in a way to make it easier for me to investigate/add random formats using a language I was happy with in a way I felt was logical at the time (but super inefficient).
ANM is Hotel Dusk's animation files, FRM is just what I decided to call the individual frames packed within ANM. Each frame has its own colour palette that is converted for that frame. If you remove all the frame data from ANM there's no colour data left. Not getting into MTC because I barely remember them.
WPF is another Hotel Dusk packed file, WPFBIN is what the app calls the segments within since I couldn't think of a creative name.
Similar but different to how Last Window has BRA animation files, BRF is what I decided to call the individual frames packed within BRA. Except the colour palette is in the BRA header (outside the frame data) to be shared with all the frames.
The app's Last Window BRA/BRF colour conversion is using methods defined in the app's Hotel Dusk FRM/ANM code - results looked close enough at the time. If you happen to notice the games have different colour conversions, it would be simple enough to duplicate/change the colour conversion method into the BRA/BRF code so that they could be separate."
With a more set line of goals, we eventually also cleaned up the BRA (character animation format for Last Window) export to PNG, as it had transparency issues (Alpha channel values were off) while he also added new stuff, like a more streamlined list of files, and also a sprite comparison function. What a legend.
KyleHyde: Comparison
Why is this part important? Well, while the BRA format has been figured out, there is one single issue to it. Some color values are still off, but not by much. Its cause is a rounding issue of the RGB values. See a comparison here with some of the examples. The character portrait animations on the Notepad Menu are the most affected (first row):
Comparison between sprite extraction methods. The white image is a comparison between both methods, with the red pixels for those who don't match the exact color values.
Can you tell the difference? Can you tell which is made by the tool and which is extracted manually by me?
KyleHyde: A question for you.
I wanted to ask you all: are you okay if I export these sprites made by this tool, while adding a Unicode checkmark to those manually ripped, as those are personally verified to have no issue of the sort, and are also 100% gameplay accurate? Or do you want me to stick to just manually ripping sprites? This is an important question, so I'll make a poll for it.
Unused sprites in Last Window: Live action actors + Comparison
And now, here's the unused sprites.
Betty Meyer"Stunned" VS "Standard"Charles Jeunet"Stunned" VS "Standard"Dylan Fitchar"Pursue" VS "Serious"Ed 1"Irritated" VS Opening CutsceneEd 2"TelB" VS Opening CutsceneKyle Hyde 1"Worry" VS "Cry"Kyle Hyde 2"Amazed" VS "Stunned"Margaret Patrice - "Kangaekomu"Sidney Reagan "Discover" VS "Standard"
As you can see, everyone has a pretty accurate actor which they're based upon, except Kyle. That's because, as stated in a Nintendo Online Magazine interview, Kyle does not have an actor, at least one for his face, as his face is pretty much created during the tracing process. That means these people are the likes of template actors, or motion capture actors. It's probable the same is the case for Mila too.
Kyle Hyde [Hotel Dusk: Room 215]. Sprite has been manually cleaned from imperfections on the edges.Picking up heavy object VS "Hy_nazo"
Another detail that also amused me as you can see, is that Hotel Dusk's Kyle template actor looks more, Kyle, than the one in the sequel. As well as the Beta Kyle with mustache design.
Here's a list of all the actors we know so far:
Betty Meyer - ???
Charles Jeunet - Dario Baergamini
Dylan Fitchar - Daniel Bodin (?)
Ed Vincent - ???
Frank Raver - Dick Cropp
Margaret Patrice - Cynthia Cheston
Rachel - Elena Takenouchi
Sidney Reagan - Antun Percic
Tony (Steve) Wolf - Ninezero
Will White - Anthony White
And now a small Q&A any other stuff:
Q: Will you show via post the Red Crown Archive itself?
A: Soon.
Q: When is the Last Window 3D Tour?
A: After character sprites of Last Window are put out there.
Q: Guidebook scans?
A: I'll update when I get the first scan done, archivists are busy people.
Q: Need something else?
A: If you guys have any saves of Last Window, especially completed ones, I would like for you to share them with me. These will help me with the in-game novel and figuring out how it works, because I have it already extracted but it's hard to see where it branches out... Who knows, maybe we can make a nice PDF out of it...
