Could the TimeSplitters 2 demo in Homefront: TR be hacked into a full port?
I've been poking around in Homefront: The Revolution's assets using an extraction tool. There's a fair bit of interesting stuff in terms of cut content, but what is very peculiar is the TimeSplitters 2 demo, which is referred in Homefront's exe file as ts2_redux.
Basically, the demo assets are 1.7GB and contains, for example...
- Cutscene .pob files for every mission.
- Music for every mission.
- Voice acting for every mission.
- A full sound effects library. (Including zombie growls and all that stuff, which obviously belongs to the Notre Dame mission not present in the demo.)
- A series of .pak files in separate "Arcade" and "Story" folders, that seem to correspond to individual levels for the Arcade and Story modes based on their corresponding .list files. None of these levels are accessible in the demo.
- The 191MB xbob.pak file appears to contain all the game's text in English, German, French, and so on. Mission descriptions, menus, dialogue, and so on. Some of this text is also present in raw form in Homefront TR's exe file, along with compiler strings and such.
On one hand, perhaps these other files are just placeholders. Maybe only Chicago and Siberia were ever properly source ported. On the other hand, maybe licensing issues with Crytek forced Dambuster to cripple "TimeSplitters 2 Redux" so that only two levels from the Story mode were accessible. It would be very interesting if someone with skills in this area could attempt to bypass the demo's limitations especially now that Denuvo is gone and exe modification is feasible, because on the surface of it, this does look like a full source port of TimeSplitters 2 with a restrictive main menu.
Posted Mar 30, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC