It's obvious when asset recovery is necessary. For instance, a disk crashes while you're mid-project, and lack of proper backups has eaten source files for some of your data. What if you've been put in charge of localizing a game from another team (or another company), but they can't (or won't) find all of the necessary data files for you? Perhaps you are porting a project developed on another platform and don't have the necessary hardware or software tools to edit or convert the files in their native format. Alternatively, you have the source data but you don't have the tools or scripts necessary to convert the data to its in-game format. No matter what your situation, you don't have many choices; you can cancel the project, recreate the data from scratch, or recover it from what you have. Usually, recovery is the preferable option.

I spent over four years as the lead programmer at Working Designs, handling many east-west localization projects. In that time, not once was the project source data we got from Japan anywhere close to complete. Asset recovery was a large part of my job. In this article, I'll share with you my secrets for handling missing data.

What are your goals?

The first thing to determine is what your goals are. Does this screen, that you can't find the bitmap for, really need to change, or can you simply reuse the post-processed binary file? Do you actually need to get the original version of this text file, or will all the data change anyway? Do you need to change every sound in the file, or just the one in the middle?

If you can hack the change in with a hex-editor in an hour, why bother writing tools to extract every file back to it's original form, and then put them back together again? Always remember that the goal is to ship your product, not to have a perfect set of data!

What have you got?

The next step in any recovery effort is to determine what you have to work with. Usually you've got some sort of binary file, which might be the commercially available version of a game to be localized; the CD build you gave to test last week, or what was left in the object directory after the disk crash. You have to be creative when thinking of places your data might be hiding. A lot of times you might have intermediate files laying around, which would be easier to decipher than the final binary data. If you are doing localization work, the data files might be hiding in some data format that you are unfamiliar with.

If you were sent incomplete data as part of a porting or localization kit, it's always good to try to contact the original team and see if they can help you. Maybe they have an older version of the file and you can simply redo the revisions. The best asset recovery is to not have to do it after all.

Once you know what kind of data you do have, the next thing is to look at what resources you have for understanding the format of the data.

If you are localizing a game, you may have documentation in a foreign language, which may or may not be applicable. This is a situation where it is good to use machine translation (MT) software. Even though the translations given by MT software are usually terrible, you can often get an idea of whether the document you are looking at will be helpful or not, before you pay real money to a real translator for a real translation. Good examples of machine translation software include Digital River's Sys Tran (the software that powers Altavista's online Babel Fish translations), and Fujitsu's Translingo and Atlas products. These utilities often do strange things to the formatting of their output, so you'll have to write pre and post processing utilities if you wish to use them for source code comments. Still, if these products save you (or your translator) a few hours (or days) of work, they've paid for themselves!

If you are using utilities and data from another group, don't forget to check to see if they sent you any useful utility software. There may already be a utility to return the binary file to a usable format, or you might have source code for the original conversion program that converted it to that format. If you don't have either of those, at least you have the game source code that reads or processes the file data. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to drop extra code into the game, which runs on the target that will echo the decompressed data back to a file on the host.

If you are working on a product that is or has a sequel, you might inquire about utilities, data, or documentation from the other versions. They often use a compatible format, a very similar data format, or are backwards/forwards compatible with other versions. Sometimes the source code for the tools have comments in them about what has changed from the previous versions.

Sometimes, with ports and localizations you may have data, which was simply generated by an unknown tool. When I was working on Princess Maker 2, the art was delivered in files with the ".ZIM" extension. Researching on the Internet, I found that this was a format of "Kid98", an art program that exists only on NEC's PC-98 computer line. Source code for a tool that converts ".ZIM" files into the Maki-chan ".MKI" format was found. Although ".MKI" is similarly obscure, we added capacity for good old ".PCX" files to the tool and were back in business! Sometimes, it may even be more economical to buy, borrow, or emulate the strange computer that the data came from so that you can run the native editing software, rather than rewriting it yourself. Also, always check to see if there is a third-party tool that can do the job.

Finally, remember again to always ask the providers of data if it is at all possible. In addition, make sure you tell them the complete situation, rather than just telling the providers your current plan of pursuit for retrieving the data. Their methods of creating the data maybe completely different from what you thought, and if you focus on something strange, they might not understand what it is you really need, especially if you are operating through a translator. Sometimes, your request may go unanswered for a long period of time before your data suddenly arrives!