The ReBUILD Project

What is ReBUILD?

ReBUILD is a project founded in August 2000 by Timothy Hale and Mathieu Olivier, with the valuable help of Greg Enright of BloodSource. Those 3 fans of Monolith Productions' 3D-shooter Blood wanted to revitalize/modernize the editing tools for BUILD, the engine on which Blood is based, and to gather technical informations about Blood, so people would have a set of good tools to work with when the Blood source code would finally be released.

At this time, Ken Silverman had just released the source code of his BUILD engine, and so many people thought the Blood source code release was a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, this release didn't happen. Timothy, Mathieu and Greg then decided to move on and founded qBlood (now known as the Transfusion Project) in March 2001. As a consequence, there isn't much activity on ReBUILD nowadays, although the project isn't officially dead. If you want to get support or information about the ReBUILD Project, contact Timothy Hale or Mathieu Olivier via the Transfusion website.

What is Blood?

Blood^TM is a 3D-shooter, much like Duke Nukem3D or DooM. It does differ greatly from more modern games like Quake III Arena or Unreal, because like Duke, Blood is not truly a 3D game. It simply appears that way (only somewhat convincingly) because it uses an optical illusion some refer to as 2.5D. The characters in the game are simply animated from a few different perspectives, and depending on what direction they are facing, they can be shown from all sides.

Another difference is that Blood is, as far as I know, the only horror 3D-shooter out there (except, of course Blood2).

Downloads

The utilities marked with an empty dot are now maintained in the Transfusion project's CVS tree. Their source codes and binaries can be found here. Below is the complete list of the utilities the ReBUILD Project has created or modified:

Tools released under the GNU GPL license

The ART tools - Let you fiddle with ART files. You will need the "palette.dat" file (see below)
RFF - It allows you to read RFF files and to extract their contents. Supports Version 2.0 and 3.1 RFF files
SFX2WAV - Convert a SFX / RAW pair into a WAV file
Blud2b - This will take an encrypted blood map, and convert it to a plain BUILD map
Blood Loader - Very basic win32 map loading utility
Blood loader source
Windows art to tga converter - You will need to have the palette.dat file in the directory of your art files for it to work
Windows art to targa source
WinBarf - Win32 GUI based on Mathieu's RFF code
WinBarf source code
Xtract - Art and map extraction utility
xtract.c - The source for the art and map extraction utility

Tools released under the BUILD License

KTools - Kextract and Kgroup Win32 binaries. Handle group files (*.GRP)
Kextract.c - Kextract source code
Kgroup.c - Kgroup source code
The BUILD Map converters - converts between map version 5, 6 and 7
Source for BUILD map converters

Other goodies

palette.dat (zipped) - Blood's palette file. Now you can tinker with targa!
Windows tga to art converter - You need the animdata.ini file if you intend to use animations. Create your own art files!
Windows SFX2WAV utility - You need to have all your raw/sfx files in the same directory. Single file selection only with this release