God of War 1, PS2, WAD files

[Wulf]

Does anybody have information on these files?

I'm playing around with speedrunning the game, and would like to see the layout of some of the levels. I've managed to extract the files from both layers of the disk, and locate what I believe to be the WADs that I care about, but haven't made much more sense of it than that yet. A discussion at viewtopic.php?f=16&t=4735&hilit=God+of+War leads me to believe that most of the work has already been done, but there's not much explanation there.

Any information on how to recreate what's shown in those screenshots would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Wulf]

As an update, it looks like the following link has some promising information.

http://ps23dformat.wikispaces.com/messa ... I/44926366

I'll be trying it out in the next day or two, and will report back on the off-chance anybody finds it useful / informative.

Edit: Using Cheat Engine, I can't seem to get it to search the data file without attaching to a process first. Would he be referring to an old version? Anybody know what my problem is? Or can recommend an alternate hex editor that would do what's needed? The one I use doesn't handle wildcards very well.

[finale00]

Do you have the wad files? Can you upload some? I just use a regular hex editor like 010 editor or hxd.

[Wulf]

I'm new to the forums, so a quick etiquette question first... Should I upload the WAD directly to the forum itself, or upload it somewhere else and discuss its location through PMs?

I was using FRHed, but have switched to Tiny Hexer. It can at least search with wildcards, though it doesn't seem to have the "select all between searchpoints" functionality that Cheat Engine is described as having in the previous link's instructions.

Thanks.

[finale00]

I don't think there are any preferences for that.

But the attachments are limited to 256 KB so you're probably going to end up using an external filehost anyways.

I would prefer

mediafire
dropbox
windows skydrive

Since those are probably not going to die out anytime soon and should be decently fast for most people around the world.

For the methods that the guys at ps23D use, I am not too sure about it because they use some sort of word document and copy things here and there. I think they just copy all of the vertex coords?

[Wulf]

I've installed Dropbox and have a WAD up. How do I share with you?

[finale00]

Just put it in public folder and post the public dl link.

[Wulf]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62428937/ATHN02D.WAD

[finale00]

I have never used cheat engine but that function sounds useful.

I use 010 editor and it supports wild card searches. Trial version is free and you get it for 30 days. Full version is like US$50 or something but I think it's worth it.
It shows you all of the search results in a table so you can quickly jump to different results.

It supports selecting by range, but you will have to manually specify the addresses (which isn't an issue if you already have all of the search results)
Anyways pack a couple more WAD's and upload them. Preferably some smaller ones cause this is pretty big.

I took a quick skim through the WAD you uploaded and the WAD format has a really nice structure to it.
It is token-based, so you can write a grammar for the structure and just parse it like that.

For example, if you read a token 0x28, you know there's going to be the start of a group struct.
If you read a token 0x32, then you know it's the end of the group.

You can build a tree structure from this, where each node represents one of the tokenized chunks, and parent/child relationships are defined by the beginning of a group (add a child node) and ending of a group (end of node, return to parent).

There are probably other more efficient ways to parse it as well, but all I can think of is a tree.

Code: Select all

WAD_Athn02D

groupStart
   groupStart
      ...
      ...
      groupStart
         ...
      groupEnd
      groupStart
         ...
      groupEnd
   groupEnd
groupEnd

Like, why not just use braces or something lol

Which probably isn't important to you though since you can use their method to extract models and apply textures.

[Wulf]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62428937/ATHN01EE.WAD
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62428937/ATHN04D.WAD
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62428937/R_WPN2_1.WAD

ATHN04D is about 66% of the size of the first one, and ATHN01EE is only 200ish kb. r_wpn2_1 is 145kb.

Let me know if you'd like more, or a better variety of WAD types. The level layout is what interests me the most so that's what the ATHN*.WADs should be. The R_WPN2_1.WAD would, I assume, be the model and textures of a single weapon.

Thanks.

[finale00]

This is god of war 1 or 2?

[Wulf]

God of War 1.

My links to PS23DFormat Wiki were to GoW2, as that was all the information I could find and the file structure seems to be very similar.

[finale00]

I wouldn't be surprised if it were.
But now I'm just looking for the vertices

Wish I had a tool that calculated half-floats on the fly as well.

[Wulf]

http://ps23dformat.wikispaces.com/God+of+War+II

I was able to find the submeshes as discussed at the bottom of that page, but I was unable to do anything with them. I'm also not sure if that's what you're looking for.

[finale00]

I typically start by looking for the vertices. If I can verify that, then I can look around and quickly calculate values like vert count, find where they are, and then combine that with a general skim through the format, have an idea of the structure of the format.

But so far I couldn't even find that. I can see the MDL's and the MAT's but don't know where the vertices start or end.
Like it says it starts with a particular hex sequence, but I didn't get any results (for something simple like 03 01 00 01)

But of course this is the format for the 2nd game...

EDIT: nvm I was looking at the weapon file and it didn't have those specific bytes. I guess they only cared about a specific model.