Fear Effect 3 Inferno .WAD files [Renderware]

[Morgen_Muffel]

Greetings everyone,

Some of you might be aware that a prototype build of the cancelled Ps2 game Fear Effect 3 Inferno has been made publicly available by Sega Dreamcast Info.

I have recently started to dig through the game's .WAD files, in hopes of finding more leftover content that is not accessible through normal gameplay. This might be helpful to get a better understanding of how far the Devs actually got and, (with a lot of wishful thinking) open up the possibility, for people with the right kind of expertise to build upon this vertical slice of the game. Since the game is running on the, back in the day, very popular Renderware Engine, I am more than confident that some of you fine folks will be able to crack this one.

 

As a first approach, I started with the PCSX2 0.9.8 Texmod Method, which allows you to capture the game's geometry and textures through PCSX. While being quite an awesome tool if you want to do some 3D modelling, this method only enables you to grab assets that are actually loaded in during gameplay. Therefore, you won't find anything that you haven't already seen when playing the game normally. So no new discoveries on that front.

My next intuition was to use some of the tools that have been developed for other Renderware titles such as GTA: San Andreas or Sonic Heroes. It seems that in terms of file structure, the game is built quite similar to the Ps2 Version of Rockstar's The Warriors. With Nick7's Warriors Texture Exporter I have been able to extract all the TXD files found within the Prototype build, which is already quite the win.

Nevertheless, these .WAD archives contain quite a few more things that are worth extracting: Mainly the game's 3D models (.DFF), animations (.ANM) and Level Geometry (.BSP). The game's audio files might also be stored in here, but since Sega Dreamcast Info stated that the developers created a custom Playstation 2 audio module for the game, I doubt that these will be of much use for now. 

In that regard, it should be mentioned that no other Renderware or Game Extractor Tool, that I came across yielded any kind of usable results. This is likely due to the fact that, for some reason, Fear Effect 3 Inferno does not seem to rely on a .dir file to structure its contents. Furthermore, the nomenclature .WAD can refer to a multitude of different archive systems with absolutely no internal similarities. So no Source Engine, Id Tech or otherwise common WAD Extractors were able to produce anything from these .WAD files. 

Since no directory based Tool was able to decrypt these .WAD files, the only viable option I see now is to use a program like QuickBMS and extract the files based on their hexadecimal properties. While there are thousands of BMS scripts out there, none of the ones made for WAD extraction or Renderware games were able to get anything substantial from these WADs. The only BMS script that came close was mx_simulator.bms which managed to pull some of the file names but none of the corresponding data.

 

And this brings me to the current state of this project:

Having to figure out how to write a BMS script specifically for Fear Effect 3 Inferno.

 

Naturally, I tried to follow the tutorial provided Struggleton! but this didn't get me very far. As you can hopefully see with these two examples, the WADs seem to begin with a listing of all the files they contain. The actual data of the files appears to be located much further down in the Hex table. Therefore, I have no idea where I should even begin to search for indicators or how to adress them in the script.

If anyone here in the forum is able to help me out on this one, it would be very much appreciated.

 

 

You can find all of the game's .WAD archives and the BMS scripts that yielded at least some kind of readable result down here:  

 

 

BMS Scripts.7z WAD.7z

Edited Friday at 06:01 PM by Morgen_Muffel
Spelling error

[BloodRaynare]

Here you can use the script that I wrote for the WAD files here:
 

## Fear Effect 3 Inferno (PS2) (Prototype) - WAD extraction script by BloodRaynare
## For use with QuickBMS

get HEADER_SZ long
get DIRS long # value is always 1
get DIRNAME string
padding 0x88
get ENTRY_OFFSET long # probably isn't needed since the script will always go to this offset after ENTRY_NUMS value is being read anyway
get ENTRY_NUMS long
for i = 0 < ENTRY_NUMS
	get FILES_ENTRY_OFFSET long
	get FILES_ENTRY long
	get FILES_DATA_SZ long
	get UNK long # something to do with file types?
	savepos ENTRY_OFFSET
	goto FILES_ENTRY_OFFSET
	for j = 0 < FILES_ENTRY
		savepos TMP
		get FNAME string
		string NAME p "%s/%s" DIRNAME FNAME
		padding 0x80 0 TMP
		get OFFSET long
		get UNK2 long # file type arrays?
		get SIZE long
		get ZERO long
		log NAME OFFSET SIZE
	next j
	goto ENTRY_OFFSET
next i

The models can be imported on blender w/ DragonFF addon as for the TXDs it can be opened with Magic.TXD
No clue about animations (ANM) or the other files (DBX, CCD).

Edited Saturday at 12:13 AM by BloodRaynare

[Morgen_Muffel]

26 minutes ago, BloodRaynare said:

Here you can use the script that I wrote for the WAD files here:
 

## Fear Effect 3 Inferno (PS2) (Prototype) - WAD extraction script by BloodRaynare
## For use with QuickBMS

get HEADER_SZ long
get DIRS long # value is always 1
get DIRNAME string
padding 0x88
get ENTRY_OFFSET long # probably isn't needed since the script will always go to this offset after ENTRY_NUMS value is being read anyway
get ENTRY_NUMS long
for i = 0 < ENTRY_NUMS
	get FILES_ENTRY_OFFSET long
	get FILES_ENTRY long
	get FILES_DATA_SZ long
	get UNK long # something to do with file types?
	savepos ENTRY_OFFSET
	goto FILES_ENTRY_OFFSET
	for j = 0 < FILES_ENTRY
		savepos TMP
		get FNAME string
		string NAME p "%s/%s" DIRNAME FNAME
		padding 0x80 0 TMP
		get OFFSET long
		get UNK2 long # file type arrays?
		get SIZE long
		get ZERO long
		log NAME OFFSET SIZE
	next j
	goto ENTRY_OFFSET
next i

The models can be imported on blender w/ DragonFF addon as for the TXDs it can be opened with Magic.TXD
No clue about animations (ANM) or the other files (DBX, CCD).

Holy Moly. You freaking did it!! All the files are here and from what I have seen so far, both the TXDs and DFFs are fully usable.

There are some viewers and converters for ANMs and BSPs on Github. So there is definitely a chance that these files can be made workable in contemporary software. 

 

I cannot thank you enough for this. You are a living legend and I salute you!