About that easter egg in Homefront and some other ramblings about the future of Timesplitters

Hey Reddit, so, I got a bit interested in the Timesplitters 2 easter egg Crytek UK (now Deep Silver: Dambuster) put in Homefront: The Revolution (you can play the TS2 Demo on an arcade machine in the game) so I thought i'd do a little bit of digging around in the game's files and executable to see how they did it. (This is probably very very out of scope for the Timesplitters sub-reddit but eh.)

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Allergens: Product may contain sheer technobabble

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Seriously though, I don't know if many of the people here are as into how games like this work as me but there's a TL;DR at the bottom if you don't fancy reading all of this.

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Digging around Homefront's game data

Knowing how much space TS2 took up on a PS2 disk made it fairly trivial to guess where the data might be stored, so, after a few minutes of guessing I found a mysterious .pak file called "lsao_cached.pak", this hefty 1.7GB archive seemed mighty suspicious and lo and behold it contained (what I believe) to be all the data from the commerical release of TS2, in a modern day and (mostly) standard format.

They put a huge treasure trove, (1.7GB mind you!) of TS2 data such as the music and sound effects, all of which are in the OGG file format, so you can load it straight into VLC and listen to various sounds of monkey chatter, Tipper's voice and bullet ricochets to your heart's desire, they even put all the textures (and so on) into this archive.

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So, what could that mean for us Timesplitters fans?

Since Dambuster (or whoever made that part of the game), from what I can see, put the whole game's data (mostly in the original format before it was converted for each platform for release) in Homefront, it's possible that, in theory, with many sleepless nights of hackery involved, a very dedicated fan could (again, in theory) get the engine to load whichever level from TS2 they want, no goofing around with emulators or controller settings required.

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The amazing lengths whoever made this easter egg went to shows that someone (or a team) in either the late Crytek UK or Deep Silver Dambuster definitely have something planned for Timesplitters as a series. (Edit: Apparently ts2redux was a project Free Radical was working on back in 2008 and it got canned after they went bankrupt, still nice to see they reworked it for modern systems though.)

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Side notes (mainly for any reverse engineers or techy fans)

• They seem to have modified / repacked a large chunk of Timesplitters 2's game data (character models mainly, maybe to use higher quality or CryEngine compatible variants?)

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• All the story levels appear to have either been modified or repacked aswell, if they were only including the TS2 demo in the game, the demo should only have (and officially, only does have) two playable levels in it, so why on earth did they go to such lengths to rebuild / repack every level? Edit: This "ts2redux" (as they call it in the executable) got shelved according to Steve Ellis and Crytek UK / Dambuster must've thought "Hey, we may as well dust this off and put this to some use.", still could indicate that they plan to make use of the IP since THQ Nordic have acquired it.

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• Additionally, for some weird reason, they built a new archive file format based off previous iterations (from the previous 3 games, of course) that uses "P8CK" as the "magic number" and always includes "ho ho and an" in the header (the ho ho thing just gives me mad FRD vibes), they only seem to use this file format for .pak files that they themselves have modified.

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tl;dr They put the entire TS2 game data in Homefront: The Revolution and went very over-the-top with what should have been just 2 levels from the canned TS2 HD remaster from 2008, THQ Nordic probably are planning something for Timesplitters and Second Sight, quite high chance of it being a full HD remaster or a re-release for modern platforms, seems very weird and unusually out of place to me that Crytek UK (now Dambuster) would spend time working on dusting off FRD's canned TS2: Redux project and bringing it to other platforms for just for ONE easter egg in a game that had nothing to do with Timesplitters.

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EDIT: For anyone who's looking the file listing from that archive, you can find it here. https://gist.github.com/RyanJGray/fd9b9084744ac7459bbe385564798a88

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^(Sorry for the huge essay folks, I might have gotten a bit carried away with myself.)