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wow, this is amazing. every once in a while i chip away at a project of mine to reverse engineer the playstation 2 game "007 agent under fire," because i have a lot of nostalgia for that game. maybe im just really bad at RE but i have found it to be incredibly difficult to make any progress.
some of the game data is not compressed. i was able to extract all of that in a single afternoon with a tool i wrote from scratch in C -- trivial stuff. but that was just audio and video files and other things -- the interesting data, maps and models, is compressed.
maybe i should have guessed which compression algorithm they are using and tried to decompress it with that. but i decided to start out by loading the games code into ghidra and finding the algorithms in there. while i have made a lot of progress, the task overwhelms me. its a sea of nonsense.
so then i tried to load the game up in an emulator and then get the uncompressed data from the virtual ps2 memory. that worked and i am able to edit the memory in real time. with that setup i tried just poking around, changing individual bytes, hoping that i would stumble across a vertex of something i was looking at. that worked actually. so as it stands i have vertex data but i still have to figure out the layout and then write something to extract that data and then translate into something i can use.
but this isnt ideal because there are some things that might have never been put into a level but are none the less on the disk. and there are other data that might be lost between the disk and memory.
i love zanarkand from FFX. i think its one of the most aesthetically pleasing settings in any videogame.
https://noclip.website/#ffx/014;ShareData=AMwnv9fi/38AMV_9u4...
Awesome! Might I recommend adding Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight? There's already an open source renderer available (https://github.com/stephanreiter/jkview) and you can see it, here, for example: https://www.massassi.net/levels/files/323.shtml (under the screenshots, see the 3d preview). It's got blurred textures on purpose (afraid of copyright issues), but it can render the original textures as well.