Home > Software > The Eye of RAW

The Eye of RAW

software and article by Ben Lincoln

The Eye of RAW is a utility for viewing the various RAW image formats used in many Crystal Dynamics games, as well as greyscale versions of the texture arrays used in the Playstation versions of Soul Reaver. The Crystal Dynamics RAW format is unrelated to the RAW format used in better digital cameras, and The Eye of RAW cannot read any file of that type.

The Eye of RAW requires at least version 2.0 of the .NET Framework to be installed on your PC. It can be obtained from the Microsoft website or Windows Update.

Some examples of how RAW images are used:

• Menu screens.
• Logos and icons.
• The Dark Chronicle text and cinematic stills in Soul Reaver 2.
• The bonus art in Soul Reaver 2, Defiance, and Legend.

Supported Formats:

• Soul Reaver (PS1) texture arrays (greyscale only)
• Soul Reaver 2 Air Forge Demo (PS2) ARGB (*)
• Soul Reaver 2 Air Forge Demo (PS2) Indexed (*)
• Soul Reaver 2 (PS2) ARGB (*)
• Soul Reaver 2 (PS2) Indexed (*)
• Soul Reaver 2 (PC) ARGB
• LoK: Defiance (PS2) ARGB
• LoK: Defiance (PS2) Indexed
• LoK: Defiance (PC) RLE-Compressed ARGB
• TR:Legend Demo (PS2) ARGB
• TR:Legend Demo (PS2) Indexed
• TR:Legend (PS2) ARGB
• TR:Legend (PS2) Indexed
• TR:Legend (PSP) ARGB
• TR:Legend (PSP) Indexed

The Playstation versions of SR2, Defiance, and TRL in particular have a lot of interesting images, including the "coming soon" and area select screens from the demo version of Defiance that was never publicly released.

Known Issues

The Xbox version of Defiance, the Xbox, Xbox 360, and PC versions of Legend are not supported at this time, because they use a different BigFile format that I haven't taken the time to decode yet. Images from those games may open, or they may crash EoR. I haven't tested them yet. Support for them will be added eventually.

The Soul Reaver texture arrays are displayed as greyscale. This is because they are basically memory dumps of the Playstation's VRAM. I assume the idea was to load in all the textures and palettes you'd need for a "room" of the game, a creature, or an object all at once, into a block that was predefined as "the room block" or "the Raziel block." This is cool in terms of optimizing the game for the Playstation, but it means that there's no way to tell which palette goes with which texture without reading and interpreting the associated 3D model. I haven't gotten around to making that utility, so greyscale it is.

Because The Eye of RAW preserves the alpha (transparency) channel of images that have it, if you save a PNG it may look odd unless you superimpose it over a black background layer in Photoshop or a similar application. This feature can be disabled in the Options menu, and you may or may not need to do this in order for the image to display correctly if it's from Defiance or Legend.

Usage:

• Use Soul Spiral to extract the contents of bigfile.dat.
• Open a RAW or SRTex file using The Eye of RAW.

How to associate The Eye of RAW with *.RAW and *.SRTex images:

This is useful if you want to just go through a folder full of this type of file, double-clicking on the ones you want to view. To set this up in Windows:

• Left-click once on a file with a RAW or SRTex extension.
• Hold the shift key and right-click on the same file.
• Select "Open With" in the menu.
• Select "Chose Program" if you already have a program associated with this file type.
• Make sure there's a checkmark in the "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" box.
• Click the "Browse" button.
• Navigate to wherever you put EyeOfRAW.EXE and open it.

Updates in version 1.1:

• Some minor bugfixes, like preventing the window from automatically resizing to a very small size.
• A bit of additional cleanup for the source-code release (see Source Code Collections).

Updates in version 1.0:

• This is a complete rewrite.
• Added support for a bunch of new formats (see the list, above). Every RAW image from any of the games in the supported list should now be viewable and displayed correctly.
• Various bug fixes.

Updates in version 0.7:

• Added support for the RLE-compressed format used in the PC versions of Defiance.
• Optimized code to provide much faster image load times.
• Various bug fixes.

Updates in version 0.6:

• This is a bugfix to make EoR capable of viewing RAW files from the PC version of Soul Reaver 2 again. I'd accidentally broken that while I was playing around with support for palettized images (which will be added in a future release).

Updates in version 0.5:

• Migrated to .NET 2.0.
• Added support for the swizzled RGB565 and ARGB4444 RAW images used in the PSP version of Legend. This allows all of the concept art from that version of the game to be viewed.
• Improved the colour-depth switching code, so converted textures should look a bit nicer.

Updates in version 0.4:

• Added support for Tomb Raider: Legend, including the "Ignore Alpha" option.

Note: Releases prior to 1.0 are no longer available.

For those with an interest in writing their own software, the source code for this application is available in the Source Code Collections article.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
The Eye of RAW	89 KiB	1.1	2012-02-12	Ben Lincoln

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
The Eye of RAW	92 KiB	1.0	2006-10-15	Ben Lincoln
First non-beta release

Related Articles:
Source Code Collections
Soul Spiral

Last updated: 18 February 2012

You have Javascript disabled in your browser. This website will look nicer if you turn it back on.

The Legacy of Kain series and related material (including images and sound files) is the property of Square Enix (formerly Eidos Interactive Ltd). The Lost Worlds is an independent, not-for-profit fan site. All content created for this site is Copyright 2002-2013 Ben Lincoln except where noted as being provided by another author.

Privacy Policy - Download Policy