XeNTaX

Hi there!

I have found much pleasure in the game called "Metal Fatigue" made by Psygnosis a while ago (which doesnt exist anymore) - I would like to mod/explore this game's mechanics.

This game uses an archive file format name .TBD
This format is probably encrypted (dont know)
This format is not used in any of their other games.
These .tbd archives probably contain textures/sounds/model files

The .tbd file format header is as follows: The following file contains examples of this archive type:

http://filebeam.com/0fb7b3b4224f9612f799743e077a893e

I would appreciate it if somebody could look into this format!

Thanks,
T.avatar

I had a look at the format a while ago but couldn't find out very much.
At least some archives seem to contain only a single file.

Rheini wrote:I had a look at the format a while ago but couldn't find out very much.
At least some archives seem to contain only a single file.

So nobody knows how this format works?

Hmm, I had a look, it seems that the files where written in some sort of algorithom, ex an encryption. If you could provide the executable then I could further research it.

Ah I remember, it was that strange format having a structure similar to wav.

But they aren't encrypted, just have a look at the strings.tbd. I uploaded some more sample files.
http://uploaded.to/?id=7w6aow

Nevertheless, here's the exe:
http://uploaded.to/?id=fzw56k

Sweet, I'll take a look in ASM later.

Well I had a look but its tied in really deep. Sorry, I did see some basic things you can edit. You could also try editing sections and finding the result in-game.

So theres no hope in swapping textures in some of these files?

Well I cant say there isent hope, but its beond my skill.

grimdoomer wrote:Well I cant say there isent hope, but its beond my skill.

Thanks for taking a look! ... Is there anyone else that could maybe crack this?

Im sure there is but finding them and getting then to help might not be easy.

grimdoomer wrote:Im sure there is but finding them and getting then to help might not be easy.

Humm... Mr.Mouse ?

Have anyone attempted to unpack this file format yet?

Couple of years later im still attempting to crack this one

Re-upload:
http://filebeam.com/8cfed31a5fbe714b78755855e8cede84

i admire your persistence!


edit
found an old beta for the missing dll.

the header is read as 12 bytes [expecting "LIST" or "RIFF" as the signature | followed by remaining size | followed by "TBDF"]
looks for these segments (in order): TYPE, IMPT, EXPT, OFFS, DATA
segment signatures are followed by their size, and segments are read in 16kb chunks or less.

now there is indeed a hashtable - but im fairly sure the demo is different from the release

Thanks for the infoz, however... ive found an app called RIFF viewer which can read the contents of the tags you mentioned. However, the problem with these files that I can extract from the .TBD's dont have file headers, so you dont really know what type of files they are.

Ive got this far: I can extract sounds from the game from sounds.tbd with this little app I wrote:

SoundTBD_Unpacker - http://filebeam.com/1e27ca4819fbe9f50c7b90812eec51a4

Above link includes the sound.tbd file and sources.

Now my main problem is the fact that I can establish exactly HOW images or models etc is stored in these files... there must be some structure of how the game reads these "DATA" blocks in the tbd files. The sound files are simply RIFF WAVE sound files stacked one after the other in the tbd files, uncompressed, unencrypted.

Thanks again WRS for investigating.
Do any of you have any idea/method of discovering how of what structure the DATA blocks are read by the game?

Do I need to provide more .TBD files? Certain DLL's? EXE's ?

Thanks!