Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

[seangibbz]

• As TGE stated, the .arc files are standard U8 archives.  They can be opened in BrawlBox.
  
• .gpl is a "geopalette" that contains geometry information (i.e. 3d model).
  • Some information about it's file format can be found in the Nintendo Dolphin Character Pipeline SDK.
    
  • I've been doing my own research on these models and found a way to preview .gpl files.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get this to work with the specific files from AWL. This is likely because AWL was built using a more up-to-date version of the Character Pipeline than the version I currently have (v1.0, released in April 18, 2001).
    
  • Any .gpl file will require one or more .tpl (texture) file to render correctly.  These can be found by opening the .gpl file in a hex editor, then scrolling to the bottom until you see a block of text.  In the example below, real.gpl requires a real.tpl texture file to work.
    
    
  • If anyone has any more information on opening/editing these .gpl files, it would be greatly appreciated.
    
• The .tpl texture files are fairly standard and can be opened/modified with BrawlBox.
  
• .skn are the skeletons for models that require them (e.g. the player character, NPCs, harvest sprites, various animals, etc).
  
• .act stands for "actor". It's unclear exactly what these files are.  My best guess is that they list how the .gpl, .skn, and .tpl files should be combined to render the full model. There's some documentation on these in the Dolphin Character Pipeline SDK, but I haven't read it extensively yet.
  

It's also worth noting that a lot of AWL's files are contained within CLZ-compressed archives.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get these files successfully decompressed.  Any help would be appreciated.