Hacking Stunt Island

Stunt Island is a truly remarkable program, and it had mind-boggling complexity for its day. There was great promise for updates and sequels to the game, but unfortunately its life was cut short in 1993 as Disney decided to go in a different direction with their software offerings.

It's no surprise that people through the years have been interested in reverse-engineering and extracting parts of the software and its resources. This page highlights some of those efforts, and provides tools, clues, and code to help you get started. Scroll to the bottom for a download link to all available resources.

Many people have worked on these projects independently, so I encourage you to find others to share with if you tackle any Stunt Island-related development. One potential gathering place is the Stunt Island Fans and Filmmakers group on Facebook.

SI Free Flight

Created in 2000 by an unknown developer, this is a neat little utility that lets you fly around the island in a fixed 800x600 window. Written in OpenGL, it still works on modern Windows systems (it's a bit fast though!). This program shows the promise of reading the Stunt Island object/scenery format, but also the challenges as you see different glitches around the island.

While Freeflight is nice by itself, of particular interest are bits of code in the /src directory. The full code to Freeflight was never released that I know of, but there are snippets here to assist in reading scenery files, objects, and film files.

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SODParse

Chris Phillips made this set of working command line utilities also around 2000. RIPRES takes a Stunt Island RES file, with objects or scenery, and outputs the objects. In many cases it includes the object names. DECODE can then be used to translate these files to OBJ format. Colors appear to be handled as well through the SI.MTL file.

Output objects can be brought into Blender or even online sites like 3dviewer.net. DECODE does not output discs or spheres that are part of objects. It does not handle any aircraft well either, possibly because they use subobjects. So you will see that parts of many objects will be incomplete.

In addition to the SODParse source code, there is a Fragment directory with advanced code to help convert objects, planes, and scenery.

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MIDI Music

Rich Nagel extracted Stunt Island's synthesized music from Music1.xmm and Music2.xmm. He saved it into MIDI format and converted from the Roland MT-32 type MIDI files to General MIDI. You can find a ZIP of all these files on the Files Page.

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SET File Format (Notes Only)

Neil Halelamien was working on understanding the Stunt Island .SET file format in 2004. I am not sure if he ever produced usable code with it, but he took some good notes on the file format.

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ObjectStudio (Files lost)

A word of warning, I do not have any executables or code for this program. I am mentioning it to show other development work that has been attempted with Stunt Island. Kieran Morrissey created ObjectStudio in 1998 or so to help make custom objects for his Truck Wars series of films. It had a CAD-like interface that made precision design much easier. I used it to make a couple of objects for my film PittJet, including the script on the Llama Entertainment logo.

In the 1997 SIFA chat with developer Adrian Stephens, Kieran mentioned that he wanted to tackle a project to make a high-res film player for Stunt Island. Adrian said it would be a major project, but offered some tips and help if Kieran got stuck. Unfortunately, I don't think this project ever got completed.

Download Tools

Get the ZIP file with all tools and code here: Download Developer Tools

I collected the files from various sources through the years. Any additional information or files you have are welcome, and will be included in future archives.