Hard Light, I come before you humbly asking for help.
Those of you who have been intp space sims for a while should remember an older Digital Anvil title by the name of Starlancer. Judge the game as you will- I'm not here to talk about the gameplay. I am asking for help with some of the game's assests, in particular the in-flight communication animations.
Allow me to back up a bit. (Optional reading below)
A while ago I decided to poke around in Starlancer's archives for anything that might be of use to the community- my experience with Freelancer's Crossfire mod showed me that somebody out there can make heads or tails of Starlancer's bizzare .hog archive format. Eventually I found a program that could extract from the archives, and another puzzle presented itself. Most of the data was unrecognizable, filenames gave no clues, .tga textures seemed unreadable by any software, and only a few .bik movies made any sense.
One of the archives I popped open finally made some sense- pilots.hog. Could it be? Un-archiving the files, I realized that I had found the repository of all the in-game communication animations! Dozens of them! But, there was a problem. the files existed in this weird format, .fm8 to be exact. Some intarwebs searching revealed about zero useful information, only that .fm8 was used in some music software. Huh. Today, I spent about an hour on the phone with various Microsoft tech people, and even they were able to tell me little that was new. And Digital Anvil came apart several years ago, so there are no longer official channels (through MS, at least) to contact Starlancer's developers. Frustration!
I would suspect that the only way to really get answers about what's been uncovered is to speak with some of the old development staff; perhaps they still have the tools to make sense of these files, or at least the knowledge. Also, before somebody starts worrying about getting entangled with Microsoft's potent legal machine, be aware that during my inquires, I did try to check on the legality angle. Nobody I spoke to explicitly gave permission to use these assets, but I sincerely doubt that anybody at MS will care about an obscure 10-year old game that has been struck from their official support register. Further, if what I am about to propose smells funny to anybody, just know that officially, all I'm asking here is for help decoding the .fm8 filetype.
(End optional reading)
So, to sum up, I respectfully ask for some assistance from the community to decipher the .fm8 file format. I can offer nothing in return except my gratitude, and hopefully a big stack of .anis. An example .fm8 is attached, as a .7z.
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