So these models are stored in animation sequences in FF8? That would make sense. I can look for them in the PSX disks by seeing if there textures are on the disk. I've noticed Ultimecia's textures are on Disk1 in the PSX version. Weird huh?
My Guess is they are stored in a proprietary animation format however.
The other problems include other scene objects in the animation sequence. (IE Siren's rock and the ocean she's in) Hmmm lots of .. things to filter through in this case.
Qhimm how do the battle models differ from the 'in game' models? And they must have a way of importing battle models into scenes in the basic engine. For example the scenes when you return to guardan. Hmmm more to think about.
From the top:
Yes, all magic and GF summoning sequences (along with all normal attacks as well, I imagine) are stored somewhere as animation sequences. Since a lot of these sequences are interactive (direction of the attack, pressing a button to abort the GF sequences etc.), it is safe to assume that the actual sequences, or the "script" of these sequences, are hard-coded into FF8.exe, with additional resources like textures, models, etc. are spread out in the datafiles a bit at random. The layout of the battle and magic archives support this theory, since there's an obvious lack of structure; the files that are stored look more like a resource pool with random files containing textures, models and sound (and no index or naming convention to determine what each file contains). As I said, most likely these files are referenced from the
actual definitions of the sequences, which are probably hard-coded to a good extent (it would make my life easier if I was the developer, so it makes sense).
Pretty much all formats used in FF8 are proprietary (except the TIM textures). The easiest way I found to decode them (and the data of most Square games from that period) is to think from the perspective of the PSX hardware. Things are bound to be stored in a way that is efficient for a PlayStation to process. As an example of this, all the 3D models I've seen so far that use blending effects uses exclusively the additive and subtractive modes of the PSX (actually, I've only seen unmultiplied additive -- halkun knows which mode I've talking about). Why? Because when rendering polygons with additive blending only, sort order does not matter.
I haven't examined the PSX version of FF8, but in the PC version formats for the same type of data varies greatly depending which module uses them (battle, field, etc.). It's possible this was also the case originally in the PSX version, but in the porting some formats were "converted" into a bastard PC version format, probably to compensate for some useful feature of the PSX system that isn't on a PC. As a result, lots of files consist of parts of structured PSX-like data wrapped into some kind of container format that looks like a hack-job. The archives (.fi/.fl/.fs) are one example, the .mch files another (at least, I doubt they looked like that on PSX).
As a result, once you've decoded one format of FF8PC, you still don't have many clues to the other formats. Battle models, field models and common field models each have their own formats and/or container formats. Battle models are stored directly as self-contained files, field models are stored in archives (chara.one) containing both local model definitions and animations used in the scene, and common field models resemble ripped-out model data from one of the field model archives. The last kind also don't contain any animation from what I've seen, rather any animations used by common field models are stored together with the local field models as special animations-for-geometry-defined-elsewhere data.
As for mixing-between-modules: it is very limited. The only mixing I know of is the main characters themselves, which could use the same model data in battle and in the field -- it's equally likely they're duplicated in different formats and I haven't found them yet though. This is also why Ifrit and Odin are stored as enemy models, even though they're also stored elsewhere as magic models. The data just isn't reused that often, if at all.
