After having success with the texture format I thought I’d try my luck with the model files. I’m not good with 3d models so will struggle with these files.
As the game contains all of the data except the model files for the removed cars I should only need to create the models for the cars and place them in the data folder. I could maybe grab the models from TXR2 or TXR0.
I know that all model files will of course have XYZ positions of points declared in float values. So in the past I’ve just parsed files to draw a point on a 2D picture box to give me an idea of what the file/offset in the file is. Ideally I’d like to be able to convert the file into a format I can work with or create an addin for something like blender so that I can edit the file directly.
I read about a utility that could grab the data and render it in 3D and that would export the result to OBJ. This sounds like what I need. The utility is “Model Researcher“. So I loaded the AE86 Trueno 3 door model and pointed it to the offset where the values were. Pointed it to the faces offset and the result was:
Unlike the models in the console games the parts of the car aren’t separated with white space or padding. Each XYZ entry is padded with 24bytes but these bytes contain other data (which I’m not sure is at the moment).
There is a parts file which accompanies each MMDL file this must specify what parts to display.
Each MMDL file contains 3 tables and their pointers are at 0x04, 0x08 and 0x0C. “LDMM” is at 0x00. The 1st table contains the texture/material detail which references the texture name in the MIA file. Each entry is 160 Bytes. The 2nd table contains the XYZ data and the 3rd is the faces. So I only now need to work out the Parts file format and I should be able to export the car model.
I’ll then, need to perform the same with the TXR0 files and work on converting them to MMDL for use with SBOL.
I’ve not made much more progress with this file format but hope to get it worked out some day.