Yo er'body. I was chillin at my computer last night and I was messin' around with the data files from FFVIII, specifically the model files (.mch). In my programming classes (I got to Eastern Michigan University BTW) I'm learning how to read from different file type and finding algortihms and that good stuff. So I decided to challenge myself. I wanted to see if I could figure out the structure of an FFVIII model file. After tens of minutes of hex editing and consulting with my friend Mo (who is an excellent 3d and AI Programmer BTW) I notice some patterns that may be vertex data. Looking through the file you'll come across lines that have -D and %D in an obvious pattern. A majority of the time the -D or %D (it's usually %D) will have six characters before it. I think these characters may be the x, y, and z coordinates (but where is w?). Before and after each instance of the 6char+%D there is (in hex) 0000 0100. I think this may be the defining space container for each vertex. There were some other patterns I found but I can't remember them right now (I'm in the computer lab at school so no FFVIII data is accessable). But the thing I'm forgetting is pretty important if I recall. My friend Moe pointed it out to me. I'll post it when I get home tonight. I don't know if I'm even remotely on to something ...shoot I could be looking at the wrong files...If I am, I'm definitely going to start writing a file reader for this file type. But I hope this is useful to y'all. Off topic--You know how you can hexedit a lot of programs and plain english will turn up in a file? Am I not seeing any English in these files (except for the .cnf files and the grp file) because the game was programmed in japanese or is there just no human readable data in any of the files? Anyways, I gots to get back to programmin' my stupid/hard e-commerce recommendation system project for my java programming II class.
