Dark Souls FLV file

[nyxo]

Yeah, all the static meshes, and the map pieces are all in the same format. So my app can load them all, as it stands right now.

[nyxo]

Things are moving along nicely.

[Mireneye]

When I saw your awesome progress I just had to get on these boards and congratulate you. (You and the joint effort of others on this thread just earned Xentax a 5, ^^)

Now, me coming from a 3d modelling background one thing I'm most curious about that I know by heart is not always possible because of other things getting in the way. Once you have sorted out the ins and outs of the format, are you far off being able to switch out meshes? like export a mesh from the archive, change it and then re-export it?

Keep up the great work! This is super exciting for me ^^

[nyxo]

That is the end goal, yes. I've already posted a proof of concept in another thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10038 . Although we're still a little ways off from automated repacking of the archives (and thus, being able to see our modified assets in-game), there's still progress being made in that direction.

[Mireneye]

Very cool ^^ I will await patiently, if there is some mundane task I can help with.. do ask! I'm not well versed in programming and backwards engineering but I'm kind of good with thinking outside of boxes

Thank you for your hard work and keep it up!

^^

[nyxo]

Here's an animation working for the Silver Knight:
http://youtu.be/E_Mp_WJLGIE

Now that I have that working, I'm going to spend some time cleaning up some code that got dirty, and abstracting a bunch of it away so it's easier to extend in the future. I also have a whole stack of TODOs in my code that I'd like to take care of.

Then I have a few more unknowns to take a look at in the material definition files (.MTD), that probably tie into the FLVER files: It looks like there's support for detail diffuse, detail bump, and light maps, so I'd like to take a look and see what I can find in that respect.

I've technically mapped out 100% of the FLVER file now, but there's a bunch of that "mapped" area that's just marked down as unknown values, so I'd kinda like to explore that a little bit too.

Once I've kinda cleaned up all of that stuff, I'd like to look into these "NEO" files that vlad001 had mentioned previously in this thread-- I think those files may only exist in the Xbox360 version of the game, which is what he was using, as they don't appear to exist in my copy (PC), so I'll have to see what I can find regarding them.

[Alsair]

Here's an animation working for the Silver Knight:
http://youtu.be/E_Mp_WJLGIE

Now that I have that working, I'm going to spend some time cleaning up some code that got dirty, and abstracting a bunch of it away so it's easier to extend in the future. I also have a whole stack of TODOs in my code that I'd like to take care of.

Then I have a few more unknowns to take a look at in the material definition files (.MTD), that probably tie into the FLVER files: It looks like there's support for detail diffuse, detail bump, and light maps, so I'd like to take a look and see what I can find in that respect.

I've technically mapped out 100% of the FLVER file now, but there's a bunch of that "mapped" area that's just marked down as unknown values, so I'd kinda like to explore that a little bit too.

Once I've kinda cleaned up all of that stuff, I'd like to look into these "NEO" files that vlad001 had mentioned previously in this thread-- I think those files may only exist in the Xbox360 version of the game, which is what he was using, as they don't appear to exist in my copy (PC), so I'll have to see what I can find regarding them.

Wow amazing, is this done in Noesis?

[nyxo]

No, this is done in my own app. I'm not sure what the limitations of Noesis are, but at least a portion of this should be quite doable in Noesis. When I release my formats notes on the FLVER files, I'm sure somebody will update the existing Noesis script to work with whatever is possible ^^

[Alsair]

No, this is done in my own app. I'm not sure what the limitations of Noesis are, but at least a portion of this should be quite doable in Noesis. When I release my formats notes on the FLVER files, I'm sure somebody will update the existing Noesis script to work with whatever is possible ^^

Ah I see, because I'm working on a Noesis script for a different game and am trying to parse bones and hopefully add animation support as well. Kinda stuck at the moment, feel free to take a look in my topic. (Its in this section)

Amazing work btw, it looks really good. What language is it coded in? C#?

[nyxo]

Does Noesis support bones and animations? I'm sorry, I'm not very familiar with the tool- I've only used it briefly.

With Dark Souls, the animations are stored in Havok .HKX files, which require a separate DLL to load (or manual parsing) - I'm not sure if Noesis provides a way to use an external DLL for anything...

My app is programmed partially in C++ and partially in C#. Although, I have a lot of supporting tools that I've written in a variety of other languages as well~

[MrAdults]

Noesis supports bones and animations. It would be trivial to load Havok files for a model, as it also allows native C++ plugin modules. There's already a native ODE implementation module that comes with it.

[Mireneye]

Well I'm all for having a specific "souls" tool. Less confuing work for the end-user. There's a huge gap in accessability between what a programmer can do and what a 3d-modeler can do, me being the latter I have very little programming knowledge and I appriciate and encourage these great leaps in possebility and accesability.

So thank you for your hard work! I hope you keep working on your own thing =)

But cheers for sharing information betweeen projects. It makes everything smoother.

(Just to make sure, I looked back at other posts, and certainly there's not a Noesis script as up to date as what you are working on now).

But as you said earlier.. Back to talking about deciphering data.

Something really wicked just entered my mind. If you could get the Demon's Souls data packed, maybe Dark Souls engine could read it? IE, could get Demon's Soul's to run in the PC version? Huge maybe, concidering so many things have to be the same, scripts, audio etc, etc. Might need a pretty powerful converter and even then some of the programmed commands in the engine might not be the same.

But hey.. one can dream, right? ^^

[TehDave]

won't ever happen, mainly because Demon's Souls executable is compiled for the PS3's cell architecture, so it wouldn't run on an x86 system.

Best you can hope for is added support for the file version Demon's Souls uses so you can view and export the files just like Dark Souls files.

Although if he figures out how to repack the archive and have the game accept it, you could possibly mod Demon's Souls, repack it and then reburn the modded files to a BD so you can run a modded version of the game on a CFW'd PS3.

That's probably beyond what the author wants to do.

Speaking of exports, what formats will the finished product support for mesh export? PSK is pretty good for weighted meshes.

[nyxo]

That's probably beyond what the author wants to do.

Actually, that's pretty much exactly what I've wanted to do right from the start (albeit, for Dark Souls, not Demon's Souls). I've already done this for a couple of games, and, assuming no debilitating roadblocks, Dark Souls will be no exception.

Speaking of exports, what formats will the finished product support for mesh export? PSK is pretty good for weighted meshes.

Exports are very low on my priority list, if they're even on it in the first place. I gather Noesis can export, and since we'll have a script for that soon enough, there's no point in me reinventing that wheel. My primary interest with this project is to create a user friendly, visual tool to allow most anybody to make mods for Dark Souls.

[Mireneye]

I'm confused.

All I'm saying is that if you can extract all the gamefiles and Dark Souls use the same gamefiles it MIGHT be possible to just insert scripts and everything and get Dark Souls engine to fire it up.

But that would like you say mean you have to figure out how to extract things from Demon's Souls. And yes, there is certainly the added difficulty of it being programmed for another system.

You guys know more then I do. I was just dreaming thinking if From Soft couldn't get Demon's Soul's to PC maybe "we" could. And hijacking Dark Souls engine (whatever it was named?) seemed like the easiest option. More so then building a separate engine that can read the Demon's Souls's file.

I guess that this talk is borderline piracy sadly :/ But at least we 'can' talk about it.