Messages

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Newcomer's Board / Re: Vagrant Story [PSX] SHP Model Format

« on: May 03, 2013, 02:02:19 pm »

The playstation lacked a floating point unit so all psx games use fixed point in place of floating point. The values are stored as normal signed integers. The Q format used can vary widely but Q16.16 or Q8.8 are the most logical choices. I Just do a straight cast to float so the floats are integers in the range -65535.0 to +65535.0.

Another thing to watch out for is that the polygons index the vertices by a sort of compromise shifted offset. Its one shift left to make it a true offset and two shift rights are reqjired to make it an array index.

There are duplicate polygons no idea why but they are there and if you figure out why some polygons need to be duplicated please let me know.

Some models still don't parse correctly, perhaps these models we works in progress that got cut from the final production.

Any ways I will share my shp / wep model viewer and its source code via PM. It is not animated but you can learn from it.

Please keep in touch with me.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Replacement for CD Mage in the works

« on: March 04, 2012, 11:51:19 pm »

For most PS1 games there are no such tools. I'm thinking of the future reverser that wants to break new ground and explore games that haven't been touched before. This is a situation where generic tools are the only option. You wouldn't need to resort to such a low level approach if there were tools already available that did the job.

I do understand you're point about keeping all the files on disk and keeping the image "clean". But you still have to keep a virgin image somewhere and make copies of it that you can mangle to your hearts content. I do this myself. But what I'm worried about is the time that is wasted to extract the file from the image to disk only to open the file in a hex editor make a few edits and reinsert back into the image. This could be so much more productive and user friendly. Just stick a plugin architecture onto the image tool. There could be a hex editor plugin, or a disassembler plugin, or a TIM plugin. Who knows what a determined user would like to add to it.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Replacement for CD Mage in the works

« on: March 04, 2012, 12:04:27 pm »

@Gemini: It's true that the game may ignore the TOC entirely, but that doesn't mean that it isn't important to maintain the TOC. How would you go about extracting/importing files using standard CD image tools if the TOC is invalid? Does it not make sense to keep the files readily accessible. The modder would need to maintain the internal LBAs and filesizes. Which is something you would have to do anyways. But the files would still be visible to general purpose tools. Not just dumped somewhere in the image and out of reach.

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Personal Projects / Re: Code Naturalizer

« on: October 24, 2010, 10:10:50 pm »

So is this gonna be a tool that generates the type of comments an amatuer asm coder would write or will it actually be more of a decompiler?

If its gonna be a decompiler I'd suggest you forget about the natural language interface and just focus on decompilation. The ideal user of such a tool would be someone well versed in coding asm and some form of HLL. Cater to this persons needs, let the person who's only learning asm pick things up in their own good time.

The difference is a tool that looks at a push opcode and says "a value is being pushed on top of the stack" rather than a tool that analyzes further and finds that this is a local variable that is kept on the stack and it appears to be an unsigned int, or a pointer to a structure which is made up of 5 int's and 2 char's. It's this kind of feedback that is needed IMO.

http://www.backerstreet.com/decompiler/introduction.htm