Mastodon bot posting quotes from Anachronox. The script to post quotes is quite simple, see anoxbot.py. The actual complexity is in creating the quote database.

This script is repsonsible for the quotes posted at https://botsin.space/@anachronox

The quotes are extracted from decompiled APE (Anachronox Programming Language) files.

To get the decompiled APE files you must first extract the APE files from the gameflow.dat file, follewed by extracting the newer APE files from the anox1.zip in the game data directory, and finally followed by the newer APE files in the game data's subdirectory gameflow.

Extracting the DAT files can be done with the DATExtract tool available on: https://anachrodox.talonbrave.info/

Decompiling the APE files is done with the modding tools on: https://code.google.com/archive/p/anachronox-modding/source/default/source

To create the quote database run the extract-quotes.py with the files you process.

The extract-quotes.py script partially parses the APE source files to construct dialogs as they could appear in the game. Many of the dialogs have variable conditions, the script takes a best effort to take these into account. Luckily the developers did not create too complex and overlapping conditions in the dialog. And various variable substitutions could be fixed with a simple lookup table.

The extract-quotes.py script makes a distinciton between plain quotes, and subtitles. The latter are the subtitles in cinematics and are often fragments of a dialog.

The subtitle quotes are stored in a separate table for further processing.

To process the subtitles into quotes you need the script files (with .s extension). The assemble-subs.py script takes the script files to process as its input arguments and tried to assemble quotes based on the parsed .s files.

You will encouter a lot of errors concerning missing subtitles. These are probably not missing subtitles, the script is actually refering to "switch" sequences which are started.