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Dreamcast Grave robbing Geist Force

dark

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Jun 19, 2019
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dark
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Cool, I always liked the ship models in this game.
 
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Sifting

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Aug 23, 2019
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Warning: nerd stuff ahead!

I've learnt some more neat things about how geometry was stored. Models are broken down into meshes, each mesh has one material. Each mesh is composed of one or more triangle strips, which are sorted by increasing order. The highbit is set on the final vertex to denote the end of a strip. Each vertex references a point in an array stored at the end of the model file, and also defines UV and colour data. For some reason, it appears colour data is stored in both argb8888 and float32 formats, on the same vertex:

Code:
point, flags, uv, argb8888, a, r, g, b
54,1728(0) : 0.26,0.48 : FFCCCCCC : 1.00,0.80,0.80,0.80
23,736(0) : 0.23,0.53 : 00000000 : 0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00
7,224(0) : 0.21,0.47 : FFCCCCCC : 1.00,0.80,0.80,0.80
65,2080(32768) : 0.19,0.60 : FFCCCCCC : 1.00,0.80,0.80,0.80
tris: 2

Code:
Sega.MMat
12
0,0(0) : 0.50,0.01 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
2,64(0) : 0.63,0.01 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
1,32(0) : 0.50,0.20 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
3,96(32768) : 0.63,0.20 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
tris: 2
4,128(0) : 0.01,0.64 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
6,192(0) : 0.99,0.64 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
5,160(0) : 0.01,0.95 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
7,224(32768) : 0.99,0.95 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
tris: 2
8,256(0) : 0.01,0.39 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
10,320(0) : 0.93,0.39 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
9,288(0) : 0.01,0.62 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
11,352(32768) : 0.93,0.62 : FFFFFFFF : 1.00,1.00,1.00,1.00
tris: 2
faces: 6
punk
0 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00
1 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00
2 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00
3 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00
4 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00
5 -0.00 -0.00 -0.00
normals
0 0.00 0.00 1.00
1 0.00 0.00 1.00
2 0.00 0.00 1.00
3 0.00 0.00 1.00
4 0.00 0.00 1.00
5 0.00 0.00 1.00
6 0.00 0.00 1.00
7 0.00 0.00 1.00
8 0.00 0.00 1.00
9 0.00 0.00 1.00
10 0.00 0.00 1.00
11 0.00 0.00 1.00
points
0 -19.56, -16.00, -0.29
1 -19.56, 19.18, -0.29
2 23.43, -16.00, -0.29
3 23.43, 19.18, -0.29
4 -11.76, -0.23, 0.00
5 -11.76, 3.74, 0.00
6 0.47, -0.23, 0.00
7 0.47, 3.74, 0.00
8 0.59, -0.25, 0.00
9 0.59, 2.67, 0.00
10 12.21, -0.25, 0.00
11 12.21, 2.67, 0.00

Unsure why they did this. It does pad out each vertex to a nice 32 bytes though.

After the vertices, a list of what I presume are per face normals follows, as the count is the same as the number of faces in the mesh, then a list of vertex normals follows after that. The fact the normals are written separately when they could have been placed where the float32 colour values exist, is quite bizarre!

That all said, I haven't really found any bounding volumes. The models have what looks like one at the end of the file, but they're always set to +/- 10000, which can't be right. So unless they're hidden somewhere else, or generated at run time, then it's fair to speculate that the game might use per polygon hit detection, which would explain why they write out per face normals. It would also mean the game might not do any frustum culling on objects... both taken together would account for a lot of the speed problems.

Another unfortunate decision goes back to how the triangle strips themselves are stored. There are quite a few instances of strips with only one or two faces in each mesh, which means they each generate a draw call. The more draw calls, the less your frame rate in simple terms. Contrast this with Agartha, which batched all one and two triangle strips together into separate 'triangle' and 'quad' groups to reduce the number of calls needed.

Still though, the game was going to be a launch title. It's interesting to see these kinds of pitfalls, and how they were avoided by developers later on in the system's life.
 

Yakumo

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From the beginning (whenever that was)
@Yakumo Attached are the scripts in csv format, and the voice samples in mp3. I think only stage1 is used in the builds that we have though. Send them back my way when ever you get the time, and I'll see about getting a rebuilt GDI made. Kind of crazy to think this is probably the first time any development has been done on the game in... what? 23 years? haha

If you want to hear the matching audio file, use the values in column two to find the name of the mp3.

As illustrated:

View attachment 14272

Also, I saved the stuff as a .zip file, but the attachments thing wanted a .rar, which I have no software capable of making those. Kind of funny the site just let me rename the extension, but anyway, if your program complains, rename it to .zip
Cheers man. I hope to have a look through that this weekend.
 
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Leynos

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Thank you. I have never recovered from this game getting canned. Going to read this thread as this game means so much to me for various reasons.
 

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