LBA File Information:About

LBA File Info is meant to be a compendium of technical knowledge about Little Big Adventure games. This is a collaborative project of the Magicball Network community.

History

First bits and thoughts for researching technical aspects of the LBA games came to existence by two people: El Muerte - founder of the Magicball Network, and The Incredible WUK - who is a rather widely unknown person, that haven't shown up for many years. LBADeComp was the first program aimed to LBA games modifications. It allowed for decompressing the games' data files and viewing some of their contents (mainly images and text). Also rough format and content descriptions of some files were included in the program package.

After the MBN community grew bigger, and global Internet access got cheaper and available, there came more people interested in LBA engine research. To name a few: Zink was the first to find out the main game font, vector shape and isometric grid formats, then yaz0r and Alexfont researched the 3D model, animation and scene formats, and OBrasilo (Battler) was the first one to know Japanese version font and encrypted text formats, and was much involved into various LBA version differences research.

Through many years the information about the file formats has been scattered over the internet, and over many MBN threads in various formats, and was generally hard to find. There were some projects trying to gather the information in a nice and easily browsable form, of which the most known are:

• Little Big Adventure File Information site and the accompanying offline chm file]
• New LBA File Information website designed to replace the previous both online and offline version, with easy submission and administration system.

But soon the second system proven to have flaws, which made it stall. One of the biggest problems was the system itself, which has been written especially for the site, and required much work to change or add a feature.

So after some years we have come to the idea of using the MediaWiki system, which proven to be much more flexible, and provide lot of useful features right from the start (like searching). This also allows anyone to create pages with information they discover and edit existing articles (but administrators have tools to control that).

Current status

Currently this wiki site seems to be the most complete knowledge base of the technical aspects of LBA games, and it still grows with new information.

The future

We have some plans for future changes and new features, but it all depends on our free time, so we cannot guarantee that anything of this will ever be implemented. The planned features include:

• Data exporting to various formats (for offline browsing and usage in modification software, like HQR editors)
• Addition of articles relating to fan-made projects (new file formats, modification projects, etc.)