[Dissidia] Models - Viewer and Extractor Tool by MrAdults (2009-04-08)

[Ukurere]

Re: stride: Oops, I think I mixed up idxStride and numIdx there. So in that case idxStride isn't 1, it's 206.
By the way, what is the point of swapping idxStride and numIdx for different primTypes? I ask this because in the following picture, I changed primType without changing idxStride or numIdx, and it seems to handle it okay:


(idxStride=206, numIdx=1, verts are unindexed)

From left to right, this matches PRIM (primitive kick) in Yet Another PSP Documentation:

0 - 000 Points
1 - 001 Lines
2 - 010 Line Strips
3 - 011 Triangles
4 - 100 Triangle Strips
5 - 101 Triangle Fans
6 - 110 Sprites (2D Rectangles)

It looks like each Sprite is made of 2 verts, which I guess makes sense. (Also, 7 = triangles, 8 = points, 9 = lines, ...)

P.S. Are anyone else's SMD textures looking all mucked up (even with -flipuv enabled)? Dissidia textures show just fine, but stuff from Castlevania and Gitaroo Man looks not quite right (and the UV layouts look a bit different). It doesn't affect OBJ models, so I'd assume my SMD import plugin is to blame, but I'd like to check here first.

[MrAdults]

Swapping them was necessary with my interpretation of the data. But as we've noted, the data can be interpreted in a number of ways with the same results. I'm not sure exactly what you're changing based on that picture, as I have no idea what Gitaroo Man looks like normally and have never played it. But if your changes work, congratulations.

Dracula models exported to smd work fine for me, at least all of the ones I've tested (including Dracula himself). I also use Max 9, however. If you'd like to give me a specific model, I can test it for you.

[sorayahya]

How do you do the bones so easy?

[Ukurere]

Eh, haven't been on for a while. I had (and still have) some real life stuff to attend to, so wiki article has been on hold... but don't worry, I don't like to leave stuff unfinished.

But as we've noted, the data can be interpreted in a number of ways with the same results.

I'll probably go with your way, then.

My SMD texture troubles... were the plugin's fault. I loaded the models into gmax and now they look fine. Well great, now I've got to learn to use gmax

How do you do the bones so easy?

You mean how did we find them? Um... what makes you think it was easy? Well maybe it was easy for MrAdults, seeing how he's a game programmer and all

[MrAdults]

Eh, haven't been on for a while. I had (and still have) some real life stuff to attend to, so wiki article has been on hold... but don't worry, I don't like to leave stuff unfinished.

I've been pretty tied up by various projects and things too. I still haven't gotten around to making a revised format spec. I may not need to, as between the two of us, we may already have all of the specs fleshed out enough for wikification. But it would probably be useful to you or koral in writing the wiki document anyway. So, I guess, let me know if it's important to you, and I'll put it higher up on my personal priority list.

My SMD texture troubles... were the plugin's fault. I loaded the models into gmax and now they look fine. Well great, now I've got to learn to use gmax

Ah, well, I guess that's "good". You could always report the issue to the plugin's author, and/or re-export from gmax to a blender-importable format. There's a nice and functional md5mesh exporter for gmax that might do the trick.

You mean how did we find them? Um... what makes you think it was easy? Well maybe it was easy for MrAdults, seeing how he's a game programmer and all

Well, it was certainly easy relative to other formats. We got very lucky with GMO, in that the data is all nicely organized into obvious chunk sections, and the bone data is plain as the eye can see, in a combination of raw matrices, quaternions, and translations. It could have easily been worse if the bones were delta compressed against their parent matrices, stored in range-compressed bit signal formats, or a variety of other data compression techniques that are typically employed for skeleton storage.

I do suspect SE won't be going with GMO for their main blockbuster titles, as a lack native range/delta compression in skeletal data seems like a big downside. Considering that skeletal data is huge in memory and the overhead for doing a matrix decompression at runtime is trivial (compared to the full skeletal transform cost), I'm guessing bigger-budget titles will want to employ proprietary techniques for that purpose. It's actually possible that such a technique is already employed in Crisis Core, as we never did get around to finding the bone data. I just managed to find the original skeleton hierarchy, and generated bones for the models based on hierarchy and vertex weights.

[koral]

I will add GMO support into my RINOA viewer too, but I am happy with the information you and Ukurere have provided us with so far. 
Unless there were some really huge mistake in your blog-spec, or vital stuff which Ukurere hasn't (or wont) cover, then you really do not need to go out of your way to re-document it all again.

Are you sure that you haven't seen animation (matrices or deltas) within the CrisesCore model files?
I haven't looked for them yet, but I would expect that if the animations are not within the !-model files themselves, then they may be within those ATEL-event files (for NPCs) or some other data files altogether (for monsters and bosses).

[MrAdults]

I will add GMO support into my RINOA viewer too, but I am happy with the information you and Ukurere have provided us with so far. 
Unless there were some really huge mistake in your blog-spec, or vital stuff which Ukurere hasn't (or wont) cover, then you really do not need to go out of your way to re-document it all again.

Alright, cool. The indexing formats are the main thing that could really use some clarification. Other than that, I think everything has been covered enough for you to not run into any trouble when implementing support in RINOA. My post earlier outlining the tris/quads thing is workable, although looking back, I do think it's more likely that those quads should just always be interpreted as tri strips. All of the Dissidia models seem to use pure 4-index segments for those, which is another thing that led me to thinking they were quads. But other games, as we've discussed a little bit, do all kinds of different tri-strip-looking things with them.

Are you sure that you haven't seen animation (matrices or deltas) within the CrisesCore model files?
I haven't looked for them yet, but I would expect that if the animations are not within the !-model files themselves, then they may be within those ATEL-event files (for NPCs) or some other data files altogether (for monsters and bosses).

Not 100% sure if there's real bone pose data in those files, but from the looking I did, I definitely didn't see anything that looked like plain bone orientations. I think all of the pose data is probably in separate animation files - the model files are too small to have all of the animations for each of the characters, so I do know that at the very least, most of the frames must be in different flies. As to where they could be, ATEL files are as good as guess as anything.

[Aurenasek116]

Hello there. Sorry to revive the topic again but something came to my mind.
Is it in any way possible to replace the textures in models and then insert them back to the game files? Would be great since then I could reskin some things in Dissidia and still have it work with modified textures.

[koral]

um, this topic hasn't been "dead", so technically you haven't revived it, so have nothing to apologise for 

It shouldn't be difficult to swap the texture-data with custom data (thanks to the chunked-data system), but there is no way we can "re-pack" it back into the original (PSP) data files, because we only worked with the GMO files you provided so we dont know anything about how they were extracted in the first place.

You should be asking Vash, no us! 

[Aurenasek116]

Yeah I know, problem is Vash doesn't seem to be replying to PM's ever since he started working on Dissidia translation patch. I know that Rich coded GitMo which extracts GMO's so I was wondering if it's actually possible to write a tool which would work other way around - inserting the GMO's back in their places. Also since I have no coding knowledge at all, I don't know how to replace textures in the GMO itself...
Help will be very appreciated, thanks in advance.

[MrAdults]

Well, like koral said, that would be more Vash's area. You could probably manage to inject replacement GMO's over the original ones without any knowledge of the containing filesystem, if you kept the GMO the same size or smaller than the original one, which would just be a matter of a hex-edit copy-paste job. But even that wouldn't be for sure, since the filesystem retrieval may expect a fixed size and mess up somehow on the GMO parsing if there is garbage data at the end of the real GMO. But since texture data is not compressed and pretty fixed-size, you could at least directly overwrite those files in the main ISO if you kept the same bit depth and resolution, since that would maintain the exact data size. But you'd still have to have something to generate the GIM files (I know there are tools, including an official Sony one meant for themes, but I know nothing about any of them).

All of this is moot where I'm involved, though, as I don't even have an original Dissidia ISO to work with. And I don't have a lot of interest in re-finding what Vash has probably already found, unless he just wrote a bruteforce GMO extractor. But given the filenames, it looks like he went to the trouble of actually determining the filesystem specs.

[duoblade]

Can someone please repost the models and tools Aurenasek116 listed on pages 1 and 2?  The links are both dead...  Thank you.

[MrAdults]

I've just made a new discovery - apparently Vash's tools were in fact missing quite a few GMO's in Dissida - around 100 or so. I'm still going through them, but I've found at least one interesting model that was not present in the Vash tool dataset:



GitMO can be used to extract all of them. I guess we may need to re-catalogue the model list on the wiki.

Edit: I think this is new too, unless I missed it in the original batch:

I recognize the area, but the throne and such is new. There are lots of other new models, but they're mostly tiny little bits of things that are hard to recognize out of context.

[Satoh]

I don't remember seeing Chaos' model in there either... though it only just occurred to me...

I forget if Cosmos has an in-game appearance or not, but she definitely wasn't in the models.

[Aurenasek116]

The throne one was in the batch provided by me. It had all levels, including this one. Chaos Throne is one of 12 levels in the game
As for Cosmos, completly forgot about her. I also don't remember seeing her model in the files, seeing as she does make ingame appearance.

[MrAdults]

Alright, wasn't sure about the throne one. The former model definitely was not in your batch, though, Aurenasek. Having finally played Dissidia, it looks to be the model used when a fighter goes into a special ex attack/limit break. I thought Cosmos was in your batch, though, as I seem to recall stumbling upon her model. She's definitely in this new rip as well.

On a mostly unrelated note, Aurenasek, you said Vash was working on a translation mod, right? How's that coming along? I don't want to wait until a US release now that I've finally played it, but my Japanese is very poor, and stumbling through the menus is kind of tedious. Not to mention, I'm missing a lot in the story dialog (though, so far, there really hasn't been much).

[Aurenasek116]

Yep, the first model is EX-Burst background.

As for Vash and translation, like I said earlier - Vash pretty much disappeared, nobody knows if he's still working on translation or anything, that's why I asked here ;P
I could translate stuff for you if you want though. (To be honest, would be even better if you could write a program or something to translate Dissidia, I could take care of translations themselves.).
Storyline cutscenes can be found subbed on YouTube.

[Aurenasek116]

I already gave an example on Rich's website, koral quoted it on the 1st page of this topic, just head there.

[koral]

hmm
I have also made the text a teenie bit larger and slightly more clearer on the first page: http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=8290.msg99960#msg99960

My RINOA tool will also be able to support them in the future, but you have to use mesh2rdm for now. Sorry

[MrAdults]

He also posted on my web site, and I answered him there. He had a command line that was a mashup of random parameters that didn't really make sense, and was trying to drag gmo files onto batch files and doing other crazy things. Hopefully I set him straight.

I just generally assume if you are importing models and doing things with them and know enough to figure out a modeling suite, you probably know how a batch file works. But I guess that isn't true these days. Maybe they're making the modeling suites too easy to use.

[Aurenasek116]

Yeah Adults told me how to fix it. It's working now, and those instructions in the first post aren't detailed enough for most people. You know some haven't even touched the cmd before. Anyway, I managed to import the object into blender. With the textures, but the UV layout seems to be messed up. Guess there is some command I gotta put into the bat file to fix it...hmmm

The UV is simply upside down, you can either manually flip it verticaly in blender or use flipuv parameter in mesh2rdm

[koral]

those instructions in the first post aren't detailed enough for most people.

Um, I dont mean to be rude, but there is something called "google" and there are literally millions of sites devoted to cmd and dos-prompt, the thing is stupendously antique (it was around during Windows 3.1 I think, perhaps earlier?)
I will not write a nice little tutorial using cmd on the first post because it is completely irrelevant, the pointers there (posted primarily by Aurenasek116) should be sufficient.

If you dont like cmd, just wait for me to add GMO (Dissidia model) support in RINOA. 

Other than that, good luck with trying to extract them 

[ssjkiego]

*sneaks in*

you guys haven't posted for a while,

<_<

>_>

you guys better have not given up yet!, I got plans to create some new stuff for dissidia...
and your my only hope! Must....replace...cloud for...tifa...,must....replace...yuna for...tidus!

its in your hands you guys *sniff* All my hopes and dreams are up to you!

*fades away*

[koral]

MrAdults will not be posting anything more here due to his departure from the forums, so I have ammended the first post to clarify what is to become of this topic and updates here (simply, there wont be anymore updates).

I know nothing about Dissidia anyway, so this topic can be considered dead (unless anyone wishes to share anything new about Dissidia file specs or GMO).

[Yuffie_Lover]

Mr. Adults Final Farewell (this message is not written by me, but by our very own Mr. Adults... who sadly has left this forum.)

"My reasons for leaving are pretty simple. There can be no joy in contributing anything productive to a forum where the moderators allow, and perhaps encourage, blatantly antisocial behavior.

In citing the specific example - Allowing a thread to exist, which singles out and harasses/humiliates a single member, is not acceptable. There is no excuse, most especially not "he started it!". I do not at all mind the existence of members which incite this garbage, nor do I mind anything they have to say to or about me. As some may notice, I'm well enough in gently dumping their poop right back on top of them. I do, however, wholly object to the moderation's support of the attack thread on fundamental grounds, and the acceptance of the threads and posts (some being even in otherwise productive forum areas) that led up to said thread.

So comes the sad realization that these forums are not a deserving place, at present time, for the product of any true efforts or laboring, if those in charge of the forums themselves cannot be trusted to uphold civil policy. I also feel that to contribute to the forums, now, passively encourages these poor ideals. I hold higher standards for myself, as well as any community I am a part of.

Should an administrator become aware of this and feel that the moderator(s) in charge have merely been incompetent and/or inappropriately influenced by social contacts, they are free to contact me on the matter. I'll otherwise be hanging my hat up on these forums and migrating to, well, more civil ones."
- Mr. Adults