Monster and town graphics

The following are graphics extracted from the file DAT/PICS. They represent all graphics which fill the main box; i.e. town scenes and monster graphics. Monsters marked with a † symbol are unused; i.e. they appear in the game files but cannot normally be encountered in the game.

Dungeons of Avalon I

“PIC #00” (unused)

Shop

Temple

Kham

The City Ghale

The City H’Khan

Tavern

Rhateph’s Castle

The Wise Three

“PIC #09” (unused)

Thorndragon†

Worm, Hellworm

Troll, Master Troll

Silly Guard, Guard

Elistaire, Green Dragon,† Dragon†

Unused graphic†

Spider, Great Spider†

Silly Walker

Vampire†

Gnom, Master Gnom

Phantom†

Magician, Master Mage†

Silver Ninja, Ninja†

Woodoo Man†

Vulture

Devil†

Alien†

Unused graphic†

Dark Lord

Unused graphic†

Blue Dragon†

Fire Troll

Fire Dragon

Gnom King, Hellgnom

Pure Worm

Unused graphic†

Unused graphic†

Unused graphic†

Gnom Fighter

Dungeons of Avalon II

Unused

Shop

Temple

Quiz giver

Unused

The City Isla

Tavern

Tower of Roa

The Wise Three

Unused

Big Frog

Big Turtle

Pest Baby

Slime Twin, Thiefs Rabun

Eagle†

Werewolf

Invisible

Voodoo Man

Alien

Zombi

Big Spider

Dragon, Elinor

Devil, Giant Argha

Fire Troll

Arc Dragon

Skelleton

Guardian, Prison guard

Magician

Lord Roa, Fake Lord Roa

Dungeons of Avalon (May 1991 alpha)

Mostly unused early development art. There are entries from #00 to #29 but aside from the ones shown here, the others are blank.

01 Shop

02 Temple

03 Riddle

04 City

05 Inn / Adventurer’s Guild

06 Tavern

07 Castle

08 The Three Wises

10 Thorndragon

11 Hell-Worm

12 Troll

Notes

The game credits Klaus Erhardt with “monster grafix” and Frank Matzke for “monster sketches”. Matzke went on to have numerous credits, becoming managing director of Bethesda around the time Skyrim was released.

A large number of unused monster graphics appear in the PICS file for the first Dungeons of Avalon, mostly because of monsters which do not appear anywhere in the dungeon. All of the unused art appeared in Dungeons of Avalon II in some form.

The Thorndragon and Blue Dragon became DoA2’s Dragon and the NPC Elinor. Phantom became Lord Roa. Woodoo Man became Voodoo Man. Devil DoA2’s Devil and the NPC Giant Argha. Alien became Alien. Unused graphics became DoA2’s Big Turtle, Invisible, and Zombi.

DoA2 featured only two pieces of completely original monster art: Big Frog, Pest Baby, Slime Twin, Eagle, and Werewolf. Of those, Eagle never appears in the game. The other art is re-used, sometimes with a different palette or graphic changes.

Technical notes

Each PICS file consists of a set of images concatenated together. Each image is compressed with PowerPacker, but the first four bytes have been changed from PP20 to XX50 in a form of obfuscation. Interestingly, this specific obfuscation is mentioned in the documentation for the Track2File decruncher tool, dated 29 December 1996. This means that even back then, someone was trying to analyze the Dungeons of Avalon games.

Each decompressed image is 7,200 bytes in size. It begins with a 128 x 112 pixel 16-colour image, stored in 4 bitplanes. This accounts for the first 7,168 bytes of the file. The next 32 bytes store the image’s palette as 16 two-byte values. Each half-word stores one hexadecimal digit, where the first digit is 0 and the remaining three are R, G, B.

In DoA1 only, the PICS file has a few zeroes at the end for padding, which need to be trimmed to unpack with xfddecrunch.

In the alpha build, the compressed content uses standard PP20 headers.