Working on Chinatown Wars

[spicybung]

Hello hello, in the middle of everything - I had an epiphany of parsing Chinatown Wars .MDL types while cross checking between binary data and Chinatown Wars Explorer(see: https://gtaforums.com/topic/781150-relctw-chinatown-wars-mobile-resource-explorer/). This version of .MDL's doesn't follow the .MDL format started by Quake at all(Leeds .MDLs are usually based off the Quake .MDL format). The header holds no signification value, but the resource table after it does. It's almost like CW .MDL's are like mini-LVZ's: files with a resource table pointing to all the parts of the world resource. The pointers in the table lead you to smaller GM sections(Game Mesh? Game Model? GTA Model?), each containing a mesh/part. There's some others things, too, but for now, I'm tired.

[spicybung]

Noticed while working on things tonight that the top of Chinatown Wars .MDL headers appears to be a stride, or maybe bit flags. For example, each .MDL that shares the 10 00 00 00 header use the same format. Will need to do some digging into this

[spicybung]

I haven't reported much back since I started, I promise I'll fix that. Things are going good though. Through using DK22Pac's Chinatown War Mobile Explorer, I was able to examine the bytes in a CW .wbl(basically a dictionary for .mdls, it can hold multiple mesh's), and determine pretty much the full structure of the majority of Chinatown War models. Granted there's thousands, and I'd imagine there's variants for ones that are vehicles - nothing too major though.

Surprisingly, worldblocks for Chinatown Wars don't have a identifier in the global header, or anything really besides a transform for the models(.mdl's) in the worldblock dictionary. So you can think of the "global header" of a chinatown wars .wbl as the transform, followed by sectors A to B, where number of Instances, Shadows, Lights, etc, are defined. The juicy stuff comes from the instances, where we do seem to see an identifier(GM? MG? Game Model? Game Mesh?) , followed by some ID's for the instance/mdl, and an offset to the mesh, where we read the vertex buffer.

Material data in Chinatown Wars mdls seems pretty simple. Materials have a simple structure in CW mdls: the data is attached at the end of vertex data, there is no names for textures in Chinatown Wars, usually a number denoting the texture(i.e 3 or 4 means the game loads texture3 and texture4).

So yeah... getting there. It's pretty much done. Can't forget the padding/alignment at the end -- each .wbl is aligned to 4096, and must be so to prevent breaking the game.pak(until someone possibly breaks the limits?).

It should be noted that this is all based off mobile resources, but the PSP version can't be that bad to figure out as well, could it? DS is a possibly, but as someone on the GTAForums on one Chinatown Wars thread said, the models/textures would be so low quality - is it worth it? Mobile and PSP modding - sure, and I'm not knocking anyone, but is there anyone even interested in CW DS modding?