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

[shak-otay]

On 12/10/2025 at 2:12 PM, Eilde said:

so please forgive me for not formatting this properly

Seems, there's no forgiver.

[Eilde]

On 12/14/2025 at 10:45 AM, shak-otay said:

Seems, there's no forgiver.

C'est la vie. That is life.....

[shak-otay]

If you think so - I think, form matters.

Quoting AI

Content and form are both crucial and interconnected; great content needs good form to be effective. 

 

[Eilde]

24 minutes ago, shak-otay said:

If you think so - I think, form matters.

Quoting AI

Content and form are both crucial and interconnected; great content needs good form to be effective. 

 

I never stated it didn't. Form matters only to a certain degree. The important factor is getting information across/transferred that can be used. Too much "form" can cause more confusion.  An example of this, is the difference between showing an equation like this example 𝛥𝑆=𝑄𝑟𝑒𝑣/𝑇 - Δ𝑆=𝑄𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑇 or explaining the equation using simple to understand words.

Form can disrupt the flow of information for some while making it easier for others. Since I am "new" still to using forums let alone this website. I decided to go with what I believed at the time would be the best way to relay what I was wanting to say to others rather than try to be overly complicated or compress everything to where only a few would understand.  Balance in all things. Either way, thanks for the feedback. Didn't want my post to turn into a rebuttal session about form when it should of been about Garou Golden Knight's animation files.

In the future I will try to improve "form" with the main topic of posts.

[shak-otay]

I fear there's not too many who dealed with PS2 animations in this forum, me included.

Do you have skeleton data?

I checked the dff mesh, looks doable, but usually I don't like to work from scratch:

 

[Eilde]

2 hours ago, shak-otay said:

I fear there's not too many who dealed with PS2 animations in this forum, me included.

Do you have skeleton data?

I checked the dff mesh, looks doable, but usually I don't like to work from scratch:

 

The armature is with the model. When you import the DFF using DragonFF in blender it will have the armature with it. The bones are very small. You can use the side menu GUI to better find the bones.  Models and Skeletons are 100% workable. It is the custom renderware animation format that is the problem here.  In the files I uploaded in the topic post, there should be two rwanm files. Those are some of the animations. If you have the game I can give you one of my scripts that will extract everything for you so you can go through all the files for testing. I tried figuring this out through the elf file. Let me know if you want my script so you can poke at all the animations in the game.  There are two different sets of animations per character even if they don't have a weapon.  The animations specific for weapons would be much easier to look at since they are smaller. There are mot files that give some additional information but for the most part they are irrelevant. Mot files for this game is more of a listing of animations and positioning for static model pieces. Not the main animations. I am uploading the mot file so you can see it is mostly just for static pieces. The txt file for the character abbreviated with gar that states all the files for him and the gmobj data base text for it as well.  I used a renderware tool "forgot the name of it" that allows me to look at how the files are structured. Sending you a section_tree.txt that was made by that program. I was offered a job to make a modding tool for this game that would include editing animations..... As it stands, I don't believe I will be able to finish it. Will just make everything I have for this game public if that happens. Adding two scripts as well. The gar_rws_test.py script does a simple test on the files for the correct compression to decompress the files so you can get everything basically. The garou_rws_extractor is a slightly upgraded version that needs work. On aluigi's website there is a bms script called ougon_kishi_garo. That would be your first step to getting all the files out. Then you will have to use the scripts I posted here. The unfinished one will have errors. The test one will work better.

gar_mot.rar gar_files_txt.rar gmobj_DB_Files_txt.rar Section_Tree_txt.rar gar_rws_test.py Garou_RWS_extractor.py

Edited 16 minutes ago by Eilde
Bad grammar and mistake.

[Eilde]

2 hours ago, shak-otay said:

I fear there's not too many who dealed with PS2 animations in this forum, me included.

Do you have skeleton data?

I checked the dff mesh, looks doable, but usually I don't like to work from scratch:

 

I am uploading all animations for the character gar here. I should have done that in the previous post but it slipped my mind. So now you have a complete set of animations for one character.

gar.rws.dec_be_-15_extracted.rar

Edited 21 minutes ago by Eilde
Bad grammar.