The Getaway (ps2) models

[DentistGuba]

I had a look at another mesh which is a single seat bench, still seems like there are no valid single tri faces so considering a simple script to strip any lone triangles. Will have to check some more examples though.

This bench did have some non co-planar quads in a strip together, in a partial face-loop spread between blocks.

With this model I noticed that it's split into 5 submeshes/mixed blocks with the first four being 60 vertices and the last being 40; there is no real order to the way they are separated (some quads seem to be shared between two) and I couldn't find any blocks longer than 60 elsewhere. I believe this means that is the max block length allowed (maybe to do with ps2 VU1 performance when creating faces etc?).

Might add a screenshot to show how this mesh is broken up later.

[DentistGuba]

Another random little find, was thinking about a good way to organise the OBJ files output of a script to make reassembling a scene easier (there are 'instance' blocks among the others in the archive so would be nice to enable a script to load models by name from there). For this purpose I went looking for any kind of id tag within the 'model' block.

Not yet sure if each mesh has an id given to it or if 'instance' just gives an offset to the correct one but I did find that the four bytes after the 'model' header (08 offset) seem to give the byte size of the model data (after the 16 byte header line) as a 32 bit int (or 16 bit zero padded, doubt there's any model in this game over 65kb).

6D 6F 64 65 6C 00 00 00 ---'model'
70 01 00 00 -----------------byte length
5C 81 1B 00 -----------------x,y,z offset?

As this value appears not to include the next four bytes surely they must be part of the header, should be something 'special'. I haven't seen the fourth byte be non zero and there are a lot of models with only one byte difference here so could this be x,y,z offset? (unless 'model' objects only get placed on the map by 'instance').

[DentistGuba]

Just another little update, started working on a little maxScript to import the meshes; had a fair bit of trouble til I switched from fileStream to binStream, now managed to get a 'model' header scanning function. Need to add an end of file check by reading the file size to avoid crashes if no header is found now so I can then iterate through all meshes in a file (and so max doesnt crash if you pick a file without 'model').

Now have a more robust search function, able to find and count all the 'mesh' headers in a file. Takes advantage of the 16 byte alignment by scanning the first byte of each row for 'm' before checking for 'o' and 'd' following so a fair bit quicker than string searching. got to work on reading each mesh now, already got the mesh data size and what I guess is position.

[oldschooler95]

Keep up the good work, dying to see more progress on this.
I suspect all of the cut vehicle models (including the Capri, Cortina .etc) are still in the files along with their textures, and that Team Soho put flags to block loading certain models ingame.

[DentistGuba]

hello oldschooler, this is a fairly oldschool game haha.

here's a little more progress then, got my gmax script (similarly oldschool program) to actually show something in 3d rather than just text logs.

gmax-getaway import.png

only works with models having a single vertex block for now, larger meshes will be cut off after 60 verts so shouldn't be put off too much by the less identifiable ones.
After I add an extra little nested loop to complete these verts, the next task is a cleanup routine for the junk faces (script just tri-strips the whole vertex list) which may be easier if I can get the normal format finalised; thinking I can delete any faces not matching the vertex normals. I know it's 8bit so signed byte with normalisation to -1 to 1 makes most sense? should expect to see lots of 0, 127 and -128 then (say for the shopfront I posted earlier, all axis aligned faces).

takes about 6 seconds to grab the 80 (partial) meshes from the 512kb block file, that's out of just under 300 blocks making up 134MB. Guess it would take 30mins for the whole lot but a couple of seconds out of the six have the log frozen so might just be max waking up and not be duplicated over longer imports.

The EE archive on disk is uncompressed and using a search algo means you could in theory just mount the disk or an ISO and run the script on it directly but crashes at 25 mins in might be a bummer lol. probably best if I can batch the 298 files separately, putting each 'art_grid' block into its own max scene (some files have a couple of these).

As for cars I haven't seen any sign of where to find them yet, racingFreak managed to spawn some beta cars in game, maybe he knows some 'handles' for them. With individual objects like cars you could probably get away with a 3d printscreen type rip as they don't need to fit together perfectly with another object like the map segments. For me the London map is the main thing to save, a lot of the iconic london vehicles have been made in higher detail since anyway, including some by modders.

[oldschooler95]

Yes, he got lucky with a quite a few of them. However, stuff like the Audi TT, all of the Fords, the Chrysler Voyager, the VW Golf, the civi Jag XJ6 .etc won't load ingame. I prefer this game's vehicle model artstyle than the fancy schmancy high poly Forza car models of today.

[RacingFreak]

Hi. I can for one confirm that Capri's textures still exist in the files. I will upload samples here later on, for now I can show this:

As you can see, it's a LOD texture. There are more but I haven't extracted them yet. That in itself is exciting enough, these completely cut vehicles are true works of art and comparing them with the "better-detailed" models in newer games is kinda ignorant. For its time, The Getaway models were damn impressive and they will definitely fit other games (even GTA3-GTASA). I'd personally take the initiative to port them to MM2 as I already converted the London map from MCSR. If you're successful in extracting TG's London map I would definitely love to get it in MM2 aswell, as it is simply the best London recreation ever made for a game

I'm really happy to see people caring about The Getaway. I bet the format isn't much different, so it will be quite easy to extract them. But I'm illiterate in that kind of stuff, so cracking model formats like this is outside my area of knowledge. Thanks and appreciate ya. I attached what I believe are LOD texture and model of the Capri.

[DentistGuba]

Thanks RacingFreak, will have to have a peek at those other models once I finish with the map. Will probably attempt to grab the extra areas from black monday to combine into one map as well though (interiors etc). Of course I would love to see people putting this map into any games they can think of, personally I mainly want to get it playable in GTA4 (in particular the UK stuff in the lcpdfr mod). To me IV felt more like a 'getaway new york' reboot than a GTA, not so keen on V and mods for that are on shaky ground right now haha.

[RacingFreak]

That will be greatly appreciated, many thanks! A mix of TG and TGBM maps will be a great idea, as TGBM map has a lot of places missing, and on the other hand TG map doesn't have any garages. Map conversion will be pretty easy once you get hold of it. Also - I recall once glitching the player car models in such way that it loaded random props such as poles, traffic lights, etc, so I strongly believe the format is the same. Speaking of this… I seriously gotta find out how I did that

Anyway, good luck and looking forward more progress! If you need to spawn inside certain interiors to grab textures, I can help ya.

[DentistGuba]

Been having a go at applying normals and UVs to the models in gmax, some good results but some models come out a lot worse than others.

this shows the uv map of what must be a crossroads, looks pretty close to how it should be.

uv test 1.png

Also a few issues with faces in that model possibly but it's easy to delete the wrong ones in cleanup.

other models seem to have a bunch of perfect uv faces then a bit of a mess, not sure whats up with those.

might be worth using texmod to replace game textures with a checkerboard for comparison, some of the minor distortions might just be part of the models with textures that don't show it.

Normals also seem ok on a few models but then on others you get one perpendicular to a face, a few models end up with normals all almost pointing in the same direction so they look flat shaded. I just tried averaging the vertex normals to get the face ones, maybe the first vertex in a triangle sets it instead or something. Need to find a way to display the normals in gmax without calling the mesh update which overwrites them to get a useful screenshot.

[DentistGuba]

Ok so it was definately a good idea to check uvs in game, turns out the house I 'shotted before actually does have bad uv's as in my gmax import.

GetawayTexmodChecker.png

Not sure what program they used to make the models or the game, guess they were in a bit of a hurry to build London haha.

some of the imports do seem too distorted to not notice in game though.

[DentistGuba]

And here's my current gmax script if anyone wants to join in looking for clues, kinda fun just trying to identify what you're looking at in itself.

Helps to disable backface culling in gmax and turn on wireframe to quickly spot parallel lines etc with the messier models

importGetawayV0.zip

put the file from this zip in scripts/startup then click the hammer icon in gmax, click MAXScript and select this script in the rollout

You can get gmax here: https://www.turbosquid.com/gmax

I think we may have to do some more hacking of the actual game to get confirmations of suspicions about how things work before we can get a useable map. Need to try editing the model values within the iso and test with pcsx2.

Just another little tip, use 'select by name' and 'tools-isolate' to look through the models in gmax as they all appear in one spot currently.

[DentistGuba]

Hmm, tried editing the vertex position values in the iso with hexedit but it seems the game then fails to load the 'bigfile¥1.big' chunk correctly and keeps looping through reading it. Could there be some sort of checksum there? maybe it would work better editing live memory.