[FFVIII] Scene.out research (Battle formations structure)

[JeMaCheHi]

Thanks Maki, I'll ask Covarr for an account then.
By the way, I've been looking at your research on .x files, and I think the cameras in battle formations has much to do with .x files. Maybe you can find some useful info by combining .out and .x files...

 

[Halfer]

Well to answer the connection between scene.out and .x battlefields in game development aspect, if the scene.out file contains camera animations they are probably the winning animations for each character. It is waste of space to include the winning animations to each battlefield so they are in one file and it's in scene.out if there are no other files containing camera animations. This applies of course for every animations that are "global".

 

[JeMaCheHi]

Well to answer the connection between scene.out and .x battlefields in game development aspect, if the scene.out file contains camera animations they are probably the winning animations for each character. It is waste of space to include the winning animations to each battlefield so they are in one file and it's in scene.out if there are no other files containing camera animations. This applies off course for every animations that are "global".

No, I'm pretty sure that the scene.out doesn't contain any camera animations, but pointers or indexes to those animations, which has to be in other files. The two cameras I added today on the first post are relative to the entrance animation, and are dependant on the battle stage. That's why I supposed the actual camera animation is on the .x file. About character winning animations... I don't think they're on the scene.out. I mean, there's still 4 unknown sections, but they seem to be strongly related to each enemy... Maybe some of those sections are camera animations too... I'll think about it, thanks a lot Halfer.

 

[Halfer]

If they are not in scene.out then they may be in r0win.dat file. I'm really surprised if for some reason they are in battlefields, because that's just really bad optimizing especially for a game of this scale. Well I'm more than willing to help with these kind of things.

 

[JeMaCheHi]

If they are not in scene.out then they may be in r0win.dat file. I'm really surprised if for some reason they are in battlefields, because that's just really bad optimizing especially for a game of this scale. Well I'm more than willing to help with these kind of things.

Thanks Halfer I've always been suspicious about r0win.dat file, scene.out feels pretty incomplete. There's a lot of stuff you can't do just by editing the .out file. For now, I'm finishing that tool so everyone can test everything comfortably . When I end with it, I'll try to see if some of the unknowns corresponds to enemy animations or something...

 

[makipl]

No, I'm pretty sure that the scene.out doesn't contain any camera animations, but pointers or indexes to those animations, which has to be in other files.

This makes sense as replacing stages (renaming levels) crashed game in my test. So yes, scene.out is probably addressing cameras offset, thanks for this! Also:
Battlestages contains only intro animation and maybe final camera position. Battle stages does not contain any other camera animation like winning. Still totally unknown are the first ~0x5d4 bytes. My idea is to run looped analyzer on all stages and see which data is far different from others.

EDIT: r0win.dat has AKAO sequences.

I deleted r0win.dat, went to battle, won it and... HUD dissapeared and nothing happens. Game didn't throw exception nor froze. It's just endless battle.
Looks like this file is whole winning scene. Sound, scripts, camera animation...

FF8 loads only one encounter probably with (128*encounterindex) for 128bytes and MOV's it to FF8_EN.exe+19287DC (01D287DC)

@Update: Found the camera!

MOV:
FF8_EN.exe+10CC98 - mov [eax],dx = FOV
FF8_EN.exe+10CCBB - mov [eax+08],dx = FOV

X:
01D9778C (sint32) [FF8_EN.exe+16C66A - mov [eax],edx]
Y:
01D97790 (sint32) [FF8_EN.exe+16C6AE - mov [eax+04],edx]
Z:
01D97794 (sint32) [FF8_EN.exe+16C6F9 - mov [eax+08],edx]

Yes, scene.out points to camera just as you wrote in first post. Still can't find cameras in file.

 

[JeMaCheHi]

I've been playing around with the unknowns, but doesn't seem to have anything to do with camera stuff. Even if you nullify, or set to the default (the same value use for dummies), the enemies will still have all the same animations. I'm running out of ideas with unknowns so I'll start diggin deeper on the level byte until I have new ones...

 

[makipl]

Maybe it's Odin related? Like this fight can or cannot be zantetsuken'ed.

 

[JeMaCheHi]

Maybe it's Odin related? Like this fight can or cannot be zantetsuken'ed.

Then it should be a global parameter, not a per-enemy parameter... Also, zantetsuken inmunity should be coded in each .dat file... In fact, it's a good point, there's still some unknown fields on .dat files, maybe zantetsuken inmunity is one of those unknowns....