Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze study

[Kold-Virus]

My acquaintance over at Metroid2002/Retro Modding, Paraxade, helped make a wiki documenting TF (and other Retro Studios games) and its internal formats.

http://www.metroid2002.com/retromodding/...cal_Freeze

My aim? To be able to rip properly from this game: models, UV's, bones, animations, etc. If we can rip from all other Retro games, I feel TF should be cracked as well. Heck, even Smash Wii U was ripped from first.

I would like to find the best extractors / rippers from this community at my side to help me crack this sucker. We can rip almost seamlessly from Returns, but with TF's engine and formats restructured, we'd need to figure things out.

We would upload all applicable assets (sounds, textures, models and sprites) to VGResource. So, is anyone up to it?

[Demonslayerx8]

"There's a lot of leftover remnants of a PC build running on DX11 that was presumably used during development, including an archive of compiled HLSL shaders, numerous references to DX11, and a controls setup for PC."

wait what...? they also had a PC version made while making this?
well that surprised me... xD


anyways... *ahem*.. you could ask TGE for help.. he can probably help with models, but as for animations... idk who u can ask for that.. sound... ask soneek.

[Kold-Virus]

I only have the sounds from Lord Fredrik's battle stage, as well as his basic mesh (nothing else with it)

I'll try TGE then.

[TGE]

Does the cmdl maxscript by Parax not work on the tropical freeze models?

[Demonslayerx8]

from what i've been told, no it doesnt work with models from tropical freeze, due to offsets being in different places or something like that..

[Kold-Virus]

Sorry for the double post. I have some of the extracted data from PAKs sent to me by Demonslayer. Anyone want to check those out and maybe try to reverse engineer? I have the following formats: (I'll send samples to anyone interested)

TXTR
CMDL
ANIM
CAUD
CSMP
DGRP
GENP
MTRL
ROOM
SMDL

I'm mainly seeking interest from the great RE experts in this community, RTB, TGE, and anyone else I've missed. I hope I'm not being a nag. XD

The files I want are mainly from a file called b0_frozen_warusKing.pak or something similar. EDIT: Which I just got. Thanks DSX8. And man, it's jam packed with files.

[Farlavor]

Sorry for the double post. I have some of the extracted data from PAKs sent to me by Demonslayer. Anyone want to check those out and maybe try to reverse engineer? I have the following formats: (I'll send samples to anyone interested)

TXTR
CMDL
ANIM
CAUD
CSMP
DGRP
GENP
MTRL
ROOM
SMDL

I'm mainly seeking interest from the great RE experts in this community, RTB, TGE, and anyone else I've missed. I hope I'm not being a nag. XD

The files I want are mainly from a file called b0_frozen_warusKing.pak or something similar. EDIT: Which I just got. Thanks DSX8. And man, it's jam packed with files.

To be honest, I love you started to begin a project with DK Tropical freeze. specially after I saw you are starting with a model of the Walrus boss I am interested to get.  

on the other hand... I feel kinda sad by knowing that our team has a very few reverse engineers like TGE and RTB... I was keeping my hopes up on the ripping of 3DS roms I have downloaded so far and getting help from them when the time comes, but not just only I have problems to access into the ROMFS content, but also even if I succeed at this, there's a few ppl able to help me, and even it cannot guarantee a 100% success at ripping the models so far. I cannot force RTB to do this... so it leaves me with only TGE... and I dunno the formats from the 3DS roms I will rip at the moment. So, I think the future of Nintendo 3DS model ripping is Pitch black. 

[Kold-Virus]

So. another new development:

According to RTB, the reason the textures are a pain to get is that the format is new and unknown. I thought it was all like other Wii U textures: swizzled and read in chunks. I have reason to believe they're not renamed/compressed/packaged GTX files,

What doesn't help is that we can't currently study PakTool and how it works, or know enough specs from the C/S/WMDL files to get their UV's, or from the Material or TXTR files. And even if PakTool's code was available, the format just isn't the same.

And @Farlavor: I want a perfectly textured/skinned/etc. Lord Fredrik just as bad as you do. Which is why I decided to start this thread,.

[TGE]

It's certainly not impossible, I mean there already is a lot of documentation on the formats used.

[Demonslayerx8]

It's certainly not impossible, I mean there already is a lot of documentation on the formats used.

this ^

just like i told u over FB yesterday, there's already alot of data on the tropical freeze file formats, so it IS possible to get the models AND textures.

[Kold-Virus]

It's certainly not impossible, I mean there already is a lot of documentation on the formats used.

Sweet. I don't want to be a pain, I'd like to... well, not "hire" you, but very much ask ya for help.

And @DSX8: I see. I guess we just need the right person to reverse-engineer them. I just hope someone's up to it.

EDIT: I think I've pinned down Lord Fredrik's mesh within the files. I isolated it so I could remember. I checked in HxD and saw a lot of references to stuff like "walrusKingGeo"

[Irastris]

I can't really contribute much format study wise, but I have the game files so I'd love to help perhaps by providing .paks or something.

I'm extremely interested in getting the models from this game, but shortly put, I know nothing about model formats, only how to use tools made from other peoples research.

[Kold-Virus]

Hmm, if ever DSX8 loses the files, I can count on you? @Irastris

I even found the SMDL that contains DK and the one for Diddy. Anyone wanna study them as well as Fredrik?

[Irastris]

Hmm, if ever DSX8 loses the files, I can count on you? @Irastris

Sure thing, I've got them all, plan to keep it that way too.

[Kold-Virus]

Okay, something strange.

The warusKing pak contains a few SMDL files, but a few of them... seem to reference the same shaders / files etc. Like I saw 2 Fredrik meshes, for example.