Progress, Milestones, Current Blockers

[Pherakki]

Overview

This discussion is here to lay out the current state of the project, including the current tasks that need to be investigated and overcome in order to advance.

Milestones

v0.1

This will represent the "minimal viable product": in principle ready to use for mod-making. COMPLETE

v0.2

General improvements to the code behind-the-scenes. Performance improvements and convenience features.

Planned Features

v0.2

• Improvement to AnimReader read performance
• Improvement to AnimInterface write performance
• Improvement to BlenderIO vertex merging algorithm
• Improvement to BlenderIO vertex splitting algorithm
• Add loader for individual animations onto a model

v1.0

Planned Features

• Option to export a mesh as a billboard
• Remaining file types: DETR, NAVI, NOTE, PHYS, SPRK
• Allow import of cameras
• GeomReader: Fix bugs with bounding box calculation (related to skeleton inconsistency between skel and geom files)
• MeshReader: Fix bugs with bounding box calculation (might be fixed - this was not a bug, just skeleton shenanigans)
• MeshReader: Find the purpose and implement the use of the remaining unknown vertex components
• MaterialReader: unknown_0x00, unknown_0x02, unknown_0x16
• Some meshes seem to be billboards (see effect files); try to find out if this is true and if so, where the flag is

[Pherakki]

Animation format is (probably) now understood, with the exception of the data type representing bone rotations. This one is causing a bit of a headache.

[Pherakki]

Rotation format probably cracked, but some small bugs with keyframe definitions currently remain to be dealt with. Animation import/export should be ready for initial release after those are ironed out.

[Pherakki]

First pass on the animations has been uploaded. There are still a few errors on some models (perhaps down some default bone rotations being incorrect) and export isn't yet supported.

Edit: Fixed by fixing the bone rotation import

[Pherakki]

Spotted an error in the skeleton construction whilst investigating how to implement bone scales - it seems that skeletons are built from the bone data in the skel files rather than the geom files (who would've guessed?). Recently found (most of) the relation between these two data sets so I plan to re-write the skeleton import using data from the skel files rather than the geom files (the geom files are, on the surface, much easier to build armatures from in Blender because they use coordinates relative to the origin - looks like a few of these coordinates are wrong though!).

[Pherakki]

Looking into the skeletons somehow turned into figuring out a bunch of data in the materials data blocks... and it looks like the relationship it has to the shaders is a little complicated. It looks like a refactor I've had planned for a little while will be necessary before continuing to add features. Assigning shaders to the model also might need to be done by an external program to keep the data consistent and the preview faithful to the in-game rendering. Time will tell.

[Pherakki]

Latest commit should make it possible to export any model in the DSCS format as long as it adheres to certain restrictions (i.e. make the model structure look like a DSCS model that the tool imports). Still pretty experimental so no detailed instructions yet. Next on the list is to get the animation export functional, at which point I'll make some wiki articles on this repository describing how to export models successfully.

edit: some export instructions available in the wiki.

[Pherakki]

The worst of the animation export code is done. There is still at least one bug in the code (which I think is related to the interpolation of keyframes required by the animation format) and the code needs to be integrated with Blender, but other than that it's mostly there.

[Pherakki]

Added animation export functionality to the repo. It's probably not bug-free, but all the tests I've done with it work fine.

[Pherakki]

I believe I've figured out how the skeletons work now. Other than that, the features I think need to be both researched and functional before a full release can be declared are:

• Texture animations
• Full description of the remaining unknown material components
• Cameras
• Whole-object/environmental shader inputs (I think?)
• Bone anchor points

Once these features are done, there's only a few scattered unknown variables left in the four file types currently considered. I'm hoping these can be ignored and it will then be time to move onto the other file types.

[Pherakki]

Several chunks of unknown data (including what I previously referred to as "bone anchor points") have been revealed to be string hashes. This is one more step towards completion.
Focus is still getting the animations to work in a sensible way, which may simply not be possible in Blender.

[Pherakki]

Skeletons and animations finally seem to be exportable in a reasonable manner. Next on the list is fixing the vertex normals and implementing cameras.

[Pherakki]

Both normals and cameras seem to be working. Need to tidy up some code and hunt for bugs before releasing v0.1.

[Pherakki]

First full release! All v0.1 features implemented.