renderware Garou Golden Knight - PS2 Almost fully modifiable except animations

[Eilde]

This is my first time posting on this website so please forgive me for not formatting this properly if such I made a mistake. Recently I have been reverse engineering a lot of different games for various old consoles or obscure hardware/software. Some due to clients "Paid commissions", other due to personal curiosity.  List is rather large. Recently, I came across the game Garou Golden Knight. I was asked to make tools and a system as to where people could easily "mod" the game. So far, I am about 80% there. Packing/repacking tools work. Decompressing the files is required before any file editing, etc. This game like many others uses Renderware for models, animations, etc. You could use the dragonFF model importer for the models though expect issues. Most models use a plethora of static parts "which is common with PS2 games using renderware among others" so you are not going to get a full single solid model but many pieces with a simple underlaying body and armature. Some animations are done literally through text based files and "in game load up" to attach some static models to specific bone/location/orientation. games uses a lot of txt based files making it extremely easy to mod. I have a client begging me to finish tools for this game which I am not fully able to and out of frustration about to tell them to pike off.  The animations for this game use a vendor I am not aware of for Renderware flavours. The format is the common rwanm but not the standard vendors/flavours like Climax, Eighting, etc.... 

For those that don't know about rwanm I will elaborate a little about these in particular. They are RenderWare Animation chunks (chunk id 0x1B). The version is  0x100. With these animations, they behave like expected (multiples of 16 pointing backwards). Others clearly do not. Many offsets point forward to keyframes that haven’t been read yet (e.g. 1248 when we’re only at keyframe 76, and 1248/16 = 78). There are also huge values way beyond keyframes_num * 16. If you were to try known renderware animation importers, they will all give errors or assign a wrong vendor to these.  Example being ValueError: 65226 is not in list.  Most of the time values, when interpreted as plain floats, are nonsense (gigantic positive/negative values, denormals, etc.), with only some near 0 or a few small fractions looking “reasonable”. These .rwanm are not the same “TM compressed rotation” variant of any vendor I have messed with in the past or for any known blender/noesis/3ds max importer.  It’s almost certainly using game-specific compression/packing on top of the base RW structure. If you try the well known blender animation importer for renderware it will try and associate these animations with trashmasters and only give errors due to misinterpretations.  This game has been giving me more trouble than any other renderware game I worked on. I spent 3 days straight now and still have made 0 progress while simply doing a whack-a-mole attempt at making a valid working importer for the animations.  If I can get help with these animations I could finish the modding suite for this game.

With this post I am uploading a rar file that has two animations. One small, one average, the texture file and the base skeleton/body for one of the characters these animations belong to.  At this point, with the amount of frustration I have had with this game... If I had some help with the animation format to successfully be able to get them into blender or even noesis.. I would then add that to the tools and make them public.  This game was/is more difficult than the King of Fighters Maximum Impact series with their animations.....  If I could get help with this I would be more than willing to release tools for many other games that have no public tools nor have a active modding scene. I know people like to steal from these games, that isn't the point of this. My work is for modders only.  While I hate writing this.... If you are replying only to try and get assets from this game, that won't happen. Any help with this would be most appreciated. I can't spend weeks on this and have too many other jobs to complete.  I will try to reply when possible to those offering advice/information or perhaps even a solution. Thank you in advance even if you just want to poke at the animations. Something is better than nothing.

 

Garou test files for public.rar