49 replies to this topic

[RobertZenz]

No, I haven't looked at that so far (my knowledge about 3D objects and their file formats is nearly non-existing). After a quick look, I'm assuming they are either in the Anims, INK, or Rand directory.

 

The Anims directory at least contains files (*.nat) that smell like skeletal animation bone definitions. The *.cnb files right besides them seem to be a custom archive format similar to MCZ. It starts with a 32-bit integer as the number of entries, and then entry lengths with names seem to follow. Each entry itself seems to start with the bytes "NAB" ("4E 41 42 03"), whatever that means.

Edited by RobertZenz, 22 August 2024 - 11:03 PM.

[leahnkain]

Many thanks for the information. I have been hunting for the standing stone animation and animations for the maps. Hard to believe how long this topic has continued. Your work with the maps is appreciated and amazing work.

[RobertZenz]

Thank you.

 

From what I can see, these might be the relevant files in the "data" directory:

 

./Anims/Objects/spnspire.nat
./Anims/Objects/spnspire.cnb
./INK/spnspire.cnk
./Sound/spnspire.wav
./WSM/spnspire.wsm

"WSM/spnspire.wsm" looks promising, as it contains the strings "spnston1.tga" and " pnston1.tga" (yes, there's a space instead of an "s", not sure why) which sound like texture names. That one resurfaces also in "Anims/Objects/spnspire.nat", I wonder if the "nat" files *are* the object files, just in a format I don't recognize (which would be easy, me no doing 3D). There seem to be vertices definitions, texture coordinates and faces, I think that would be your best bet.

 

I'll only have time to look at this further after the weekend, I'm afraid.

Edited by RobertZenz, 23 August 2024 - 12:26 AM.

[leahnkain]

Thank you so much, maybe Sam has some knowledge as well. It's crazy this topic has been going for 14 years and nobody has figured out how to extract the area animations.

[Sam.]

There's some old info on creature animations over here.

[leahnkain]

Sam, you are amazing. Has anyone figured out how to extract the standing stone form the game. One darn floating rock is all I need from the game.

[RobertZenz]

I can confirm now that the *.nat files are the objects themselves. To be exact, they contain vertices (points), faces (polygons) and texture (UV) coordinates split into segments. I'm already able to reconstruct objects which consist of a single segment.

 

 

Completely and correctly parsing the file will take more effort and some time to come.

 

Another problem are the textures. I'm very convinced that the *.wsm files are related to them, or even are them, but currently they still elude me. WSM files start with the value "5" in four bytes, followed by 48 bytes as name, and towards the end they contain some form of index with filenames, like "========spnspire.tga", the end looks fishy, too. But I can't tell how to process these files yet. They might contain RLE compressed TGA files, but so far I could not identify the length of each part, nor file header, nor footer of the TGAs.

[leahnkain]

Amazing, this is the only key animation for the maps. Please keep me posted on the progress. Sam, are you able to help with this?

[RobertZenz]

I'm very pleased to tell you that the textures are stored in the INK files. I've said before that they are dBASE files, but that was a false positive (and looking at the file header I can see why the file util got confused), they are actually images with a prepended header.

 

 

As you can see from the last image, for some the color channels are still distorted. I'm assuming there is a field in the header which tells me about how treat the image and its channels.

 

The INK files themselves are images with a prepended 68-byte header. The width and height are in the bytes at 0x34 and 0x38 and the length of the image that follows is in byte 0x40. The image itself is padded with zeros at the end to fill a 512 byte block (so an image with the length if 900 is padded to 1024). It's 2-byte-per-pixel, which was a pain to brute force, to be honest, with 5/6/5 bits per red/green/blue channel respectively. The last part most likely changes depending on some flag in the header.

 

I've updated the README of the por-romd-map-extractor with the file description and also added the first version of the reader to the source tree. Currently there is no functionality to convert images, that comes later on, this is just to let you know that the textures are there and available.

 

There's still a lot to do, fixing the color channels, improving the NAT reader for the models, combining them with textures and at the end writing an exporter for them. The viewer I've written (screenshot from before) also needs to become a lot better as it is currently broken. Animations are out of scope for the time being, while I can already read CNB files, they contain NAB files which seem to the animation data, I cannot parse those. As I've never worked before with skeletal animations, that might get difficult. I'll try to push new state to the repository and README to make sure that knowledge is there as soon as I gain it. Eventually I'll write another article, but only after I'm done with this.

Edited by RobertZenz, 29 August 2024 - 11:41 AM.

[leahnkain]

Thank you for your hard work! I have been trying to get the floating stone for ages, I can probably edit the colors. This is really really amazing work!