Messages

1

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / How are polygons sorted before rendering ?

« on: 2013-08-24 12:21:10 »

Hi,

I'm working on a BattleScene exporter for FFIX (I'm aware that one of them already exists, but it was fun nevertheless). I've currently got the exact same output than Zidane's one, but I'm struggling on one issue.



You can see that some elements which should be transparent are actually too much transparent - they ignore the objects behind them and are filled with the screen background color (here, grey). Zidane's viewer does not have this issue because it does not follow the PSX object description : it basically says that each polygon should be drawn appart from the others, so they can be easily sorted. The problem is that it can't be a general solution, since it is very heavy : instead of 7 draw calls, you have 7000. In a webgl context, the FPS drops from 60 to 20, and I assume that on PSX, it would be worse.

So I'm wondering : how does the PSX (or maybe the game engine of FF7 / FF9) handle the polygon sorting ?

Thanks,

2

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / FF9 "Type 3" directory

« on: 2012-11-10 19:05:50 »

Hi,

I've seen this topic, however I don't fully understand what are type 3 directories.

Could someone provide more details about this ?

Thanks !

3

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Multiple questions about FF9 file.img

« on: 2012-04-24 09:52:13 »

Hi : )

I'm currently trying to understand FF9, and I've read multiple Qhimm topics about this, but I've got some questions :

Type 03 entries are a bit different. I've got only one. Its elements are like this:
(2 bytes) - Number of sectors to add to base sector or 0xffff for empty entries, with "base sector" being the sector pointer that appears in the Type 03 entry.

Ok, I don't understand
Do you means that "file sector" = "sub directory first file sector" + "file pointer" ? If so, how can we know what is the end sector of the file ?
[edit] I've understood !

- The easy way to find the end of the last file in a directory. (But I'd say you already figured that out.)

I'm currently crawling the file from the end. Is there an other way ?

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the way to get the size for the last file is quite similar to the previous files, as the last element in the structure has 0xFFFFFFFF in the "Flags" field and the "First Sector" field points to the first sector after the current sub-dir (which is the same as the first sector of the next sub-dir.) I forgot to mention that in my previous posts.

I don't understand. In my current tests, the first file sector of the subdirectory entry seems to be the first file sector of the first file of the subdirectory files informations sector. It does not seems related to the next subdirectory.
Am I wrong ?

[edit] I've managed to make a correct extracting tool (c+), and put it on Github. I've also writed some wiki pages (on the repository) about the game structure.

Now I'm trying to find out how to extract monster data (life, skills, animations id, etc). Didn't find any documentation yet.

Thanks !