06-23-2025, 04:05 PM
A couple of months ago, I started playing around with .CLAY files from Castlevania: The Arcade. I chipped away at it and recently made a Noesis plugin that can load the enemy models. It loads the meshes, along with any diffuse, specular, and normal textures it finds in the same folder as the .CLAY file. I also started to look into the .x files (cue theme song) which seem to store the skeleton and animations, but I didn't get that fully working yet so for now it just loads the meshes without rigging.
This only works with enemy models (m_001_skl.CLAY, m_015_mag.CLAY, etc). I might look into map objects and environments too some other time, but for now those don't work with this, since I was just focused on the character models.
Some models also include _r textures, which mostly seem to be the same shared texture used over and over. These textures don't appear to correspond to the UVs, so the plugin doesn't automatically assign that to the model's material. But any texture that's not _d, _n, or _s will still be loaded, and you can view it in Tools > Data Viewer. For some reason a handful of raw file names in this game are written with random full-width characters in places (for example, m_006_gｌd instead of m_006_gld). These will still be loaded, but the names as a result might look a little strange in Noesis. If that bothers anyone you can just rename the raw files before loading.
I actually played this game once at an arcade outside of Chicago. It was pretty cool, but I had no idea what I was doing. I made it to the first boss, and Death killed me. And then I had to go, and I never played it again, haha. Anyway, feel free to play around with the attached plugin. I'm not sure if I'll update it again anytime soon but I had fun working on it so far.
This only works with enemy models (m_001_skl.CLAY, m_015_mag.CLAY, etc). I might look into map objects and environments too some other time, but for now those don't work with this, since I was just focused on the character models.
Some models also include _r textures, which mostly seem to be the same shared texture used over and over. These textures don't appear to correspond to the UVs, so the plugin doesn't automatically assign that to the model's material. But any texture that's not _d, _n, or _s will still be loaded, and you can view it in Tools > Data Viewer. For some reason a handful of raw file names in this game are written with random full-width characters in places (for example, m_006_gｌd instead of m_006_gld). These will still be loaded, but the names as a result might look a little strange in Noesis. If that bothers anyone you can just rename the raw files before loading.
I actually played this game once at an arcade outside of Chicago. It was pretty cool, but I had no idea what I was doing. I made it to the first boss, and Death killed me. And then I had to go, and I never played it again, haha. Anyway, feel free to play around with the attached plugin. I'm not sure if I'll update it again anytime soon but I had fun working on it so far.