G-Police .rdt archive

[WalterNEST]

Recently I developed (with some help from DKDave on your Discord) a Noesis Python plugin that can import most of the models and tracks from Wipeout for Playstation.
I am hoping to import models from a few other old games and the title highest on my list is G-Police. Another gem from Psygnosis with for the time stunning graphics. Major hurdle is that this game uses one large archive to store most of its files. I have only limited experience with handling archives and I currently can't figure out what do I need to do to get the files from it.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... LpO41v1gh1
There are 3 files - res.rdt seems to be the actual archive. The files don't seem to be compressed as there are text briefings readable as plain text inside the archive.
http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/Psygnosis_RDT
Your wiki has an entry for .rdt, but the file structure in my file does not match the entry. Is there anyone willing to help me with this? I am a quick learner and probably can do the actual work myself, but I need some pointers about what to do. Thanks in advance!

wipeout_ship_lineup_render_by_walter_nest_dehbmmb-250t.jpg

[ikskoks]

I have checked your samples, but I couldn't figure out more than we have already described on the wiki regarding those archives, sorry.
Psygnosis is using some weird resource manager for G-Police and Overboard which is hard to crack without debugging the game.

If the files are really not compressed, then the only option for making changes now is hex editing.

[WalterNEST]

I don't want to make changes. I was hoping to extract files - models in particular - from the archive and make a Noesis plugin that would read them.

[ikskoks]

Yeah, but it doesn't really change anything. Only solution left for now is manual extraction by hex editor (if you will be able to find model data in the archive).

[WalterNEST]

I was trying to explain that being to able to hex edit the files inside the archive is of no benefit for my purpose - it could be if I just wanted to do minor edits to the game.
Looking at the archive it seems it could be mostly files separated by padding of zeros. Unfortunately I don't know any file formats that the game uses so I could look for headers or familiar patterns. Is there some tool that would help me split the archive at the padding or something like that so I could try to sift through the resulting files and maybe find vertex positions, face indices or something else helpful?

[ikskoks]

You could try to write custom tool which is able to do one of the following:
1. Find padding areas endings and read data until next padding
2. Read hardcoded sizes and offsets and read data this way (but it requires putting those values in the tool first)
3. Recognize file signatures (if there are any) and read data until padding area

But I think I don't know any "standard" tools for that, only some general file rippers like this one https://i.imgur.com/JW7ebl7.png


So in my opinion the right approach would be do some debugging on this game and figure out how this resource manager work, but it will be hard and time consuming, so I'm not sure if anyone will be able to help you with that.

[WalterNEST]

Maybe the models could be dumped from the game at runtime using some of the ripping programs. I tried it before with no luck as PC version of G-Police seems to run on DirectX 5, but I am no ripping expert. If there was way how to make that work, it should be much easier than debugging/reverse engineering the game, which would probably be too much effort for what it would bring. I want the models mostly for curiosity - most of them actually don't even look very good when compared to something like Wipeout. G-Police while not a bad looking game suffered from just about everything having this sort of dark grey vaguely metallic-looking concrete slab texture