(Mobile) Dead Space .M3G Model/Texture Bundles Help

[DreamingOxxy]

Hey model people, I like porting stuff and looking through game models, and I've been getting back into the Dead Space games again after seeing the tool made for extracting the first game, which reminded me that a few years back I tried finding something to extract the files from this game, it's an APK so that's an easy open but the actual files inside don't seem to work with anything made for games of a same or similar engine. The game seems to use J2ME with a JSR184 header for textures, which is normal from my looks around other files of the sort, but has the header IM-M3G for models, so it seems to be some sort of unique bundle of meshes, as I can't find anything online about it, and animations seem to be called for by the .bin file along with every model. Anyway, my little bits of research aside, I'll attach some models and textures for anyone who's kind enough to take a look into these for me, getting the skeleton out isn't super important, it's more of an added bonus, I can rig things myself, but if anyone out there could figure out some way to at least get the meshes out of these I'd be grateful! (Side note, there seems to be multiple mesh sets built inside the file, as the main character .m3g seems to contain all 4 suit variations.)

I've been trying to look into this the past few days with the whole hex2obj type stuff but man it just hurts my brain trying to learn all of it, I just can't understand no matter how hard I try, so I'm really hoping someone can help.

Vandal.zip

Edited January 25 by DreamingOxxy

[South Village]

Yes, I also tried unsuccessfully to extract files from this game. However, there is a way: using an Android emulator for PC and NinjaRipper. I haven't used it myself, but one guy managed to extract the Vandal model. Here is his post: https://www.nexusmods.com/guitarheroworldtour/mods/1067?tab=posts

[DreamingOxxy]

51 minutes ago, South Village said:

Yes, I also tried unsuccessfully to extract files from this game. However, there is a way: using an Android emulator for PC and NinjaRipper. I haven't used it myself, but one guy managed to extract the Vandal model. Here is his post: https://www.nexusmods.com/guitarheroworldtour/mods/1067?tab=posts

Yeah, I did that myself for it a while ago, just wish there was a better way, I don't want to play through the entire game in an emulator just to rip a few models at the end of the game, especially when I'll then have to go in and rig it myself.

[South Village]

8 minutes ago, DreamingOxxy said:

Yeah, I did that myself for it a while ago, just wish there was a better way, I don't want to play through the entire game in an emulator just to rip a few models at the end of the game, especially when I'll then have to go in and rig it myself.

This is very sad. I wasted a whole day on this and achieved nothing. At least I managed to extract the sounds from the game back in 2021. If you need them — I can share them or tell you how to extract them. But still: is this really the end, and is there really no other way to get the textures/models from the game?

[DreamingOxxy]

22 minutes ago, South Village said:

This is very sad. I wasted a whole day on this and achieved nothing. At least I managed to extract the sounds from the game back in 2021. If you need them — I can share them or tell you how to extract them. But still: is this really the end, and is there really no other way to get the textures/models from the game?

There is a way, I mean there always is, just no one cares enough to make one. Someone did it before but never posted the tools, if they even made any. I found it in some discord a while ago but it was purely the armor, nothing else, and no sign of how they did so. I think I already did get the sounds out before, there's actually some unused dialogue variants.

[South Village]

7 minutes ago, DreamingOxxy said:

I think I already did get the sounds out before, there's actually some unused dialogue variants.

Also, there's actually unused text too, but it's just lines of text without their own sound files. Honestly, I dream of a remake of this game for mobile phone.

[Nasrallah]

Hi, you cant open m3g files from Dead Space or any IronMonkey or Firemonkeys that have <IMxM3G> header with any tools made to be for standard M3G engine as these games uses proprietary implementation of modified M3G and later M3G 2.0 standard (which standard officially was never finalized) which are compatible with official standard M3G. You might be able to open some IM-M3G file by changing the header to standard <JRS184> and some non ASCII bytes (for example copied from other m3g file)  with whatever tool made for original .m3g.

I recently forked PyM3G library allowing parsing M3G file and added some very very basic support for IMxM3G (mainly dection of IMxM3G header as valid) but I'm not interested in adding more support for that format myself although I don;t think it would be very hard having the PyM3G base already and given that for example DeadSpace binary for android has a lot of symbols preserved so decompiled code from it would be actually very useful for reversing the parts added to .m3g format. So if you are interested in developing support for Dead Space models then I can guide you some more.

Also must say that this library makes it actually relatively easy to create .m3g files or convert them to different formats.

[DreamingOxxy]

3 hours ago, Nasrallah said:

Hi, you cant open m3g files from Dead Space or any IronMonkey or Firemonkeys that have <IMxM3G> header with any tools made to be for standard M3G engine as these games uses proprietary implementation of modified M3G and later M3G 2.0 standard (which standard officially was never finalized) which are compatible with official standard M3G. You might be able to open some IM-M3G file by changing the header to standard <JRS184> and some non ASCII bytes (for example copied from other m3g file)  with whatever tool made for original .m3g.

I recently forked PyM3G library allowing parsing M3G file and added some very very basic support for IMxM3G (mainly dection of IMxM3G header as valid) but I'm not interested in adding more support for that format myself although I don;t think it would be very hard having the PyM3G base already and given that for example DeadSpace binary for android has a lot of symbols preserved so decompiled code from it would be actually very useful for reversing the parts added to .m3g format. So if you are interested in developing support for Dead Space models then I can guide you some more.

Also must say that this library makes it actually relatively easy to create .m3g files or convert them to different formats.

Well that's good to know, and quite interesting, I figured they had a more proprietary format for their games, I looked across a few of their mobile games to see if they used the format for their other projects, and yeah, I couldn't find anything about the header they have. I looked into how the format works in general but I've been so busy with other projects and life over the past few months that I haven't really had the chance to sit down and try modifying the libraries out there, I think I grabbed one but after all my PC cleanup I have no idea where it is now. It would be helpful to have more info though, I myself am not too interested in putting files back in the game, I don't really do mobile modding stuff, but if it means being able to extract and view them, that would be quite nice. I'll look into it some myself when I have the opportunity, in the meanwhile any info you think would help is appreciated. One thing, is I'm quite curious on how the textures work, they have the standard header I believe, but I don't entirely know how one would go about converting or reading them.

[DreamingOxxy]

Okay, so, interesting thing. The M3G2FBX converter on GitHub, can covert some meshes and bones if the header is changed to one that it recognizes. The bones become nodes, not an armature, but they're there, unfortunately it only saves the static meshes, anything with weights/skin seems to just be skipped over, but the data it DOES output seems to be mostly intact, getting UVs, material names, etc.

Unfortunately I'm not smart enough to understand what to change to make it save those, but it can definitely read most of the data.

https://github.com/RaduMC/M3G2FBX
 

[Nasrallah]

I know about that M3G2FBX program it implements parts of the M3G specific to IronMonke's implementation but it's not designed for easy further development unlike PyM3G.

You say you are not smart enough but I think that if you read the M3G documentation's file format section, starting on page 257 (mabey with some explanation from ai). With comination of PyM3G parsing outputs you should get pretty good understanding of the format.