XeNTaX

elric03200 wrote:Hey ! It's been a lil time =)

I have an idea : Can we try to ask to the tool's creator if there is a way to repack this ???
He can make tools to extract, he can maybe even make a repacker no???

Even if we have to give him paypal donates right ?

I guess there is no harm in asking Mr. Adults if he could do that, but I believe he is pretty busy. I'm sure he'd appreciate donations, but that in no way obligates him to do things for you...

Hello everybody ?? How goes the searches in these times?

Um... Well I hate to tell you that you may have been wasting your time, but Noesis can export FF9 models, textures, animations, and possibly the disc's archives(I've not tried the archive/disc image export since I had the files already) already.

The only thing I recall not being able to export is the field map textures (which have a palette in a separate file I believe) and the world map objects... which are so few I don't think they'd be of much use anyway... but nonetheless.

But in any case, noesis has FF9 support for a majority of things, and the plugin is open source; get it here:
http://oasis.xentax.com/index.php?content=downloads

So it can extract precisely what we know how to extract
It is very handy, mind you, but as long as a topic like this exist there's a hope of figuring out the other stuff, like summons. Also, when you say models, does that include the NPCs? Or just battle models?

World map objects do include airships too, there's some nice ones. But just like NPCs the location of their textures is not known (apart from that map models are just like any other).

It extracts precisely what we know how to extract, because it is the culmination of the documentation on the qhimm wiki, which I forwarded to MrAdults and he turned into a plugin for Noesis

It will extract NPC and etc models from the field map data, which includes sky cabs a few airships, tons of NPCs (I have Mikoto ) and their animation data.

It's important to note that animations are stored as separate files, and multiple Models can use the same animations, however, some animations and models are not compatible (Due to having different numbers of bones)

What it doesn't export readily is the textures for Field model NPCs and etc objects, as they are a different, slightly modified TIM format, and are often packed together in groups, so Mikoto is packed together with about 7 other NPCs and objects, and each field map contains its own set of NPCs and animations. Some maps may have the same models, but there are more or less animations available for them. (Honestly I think they'd have saved space by putting the models in a master archive and calling them from that at the cost of one or two more cycles during map load, rather than storing each map multiple times for each set of NPCs it can have... but whatever)

However, it IS possible to obtain NPC textures through things like PSX-VRAM, however you do need to have a savestate in the proper map to get the textures that way.
You can also use Tile Molester or GGD (If I remember correctly that is) to search through the map file and export the textures and palettes that way.

The textures are 4bpp format, and the palettes are many for each texture as there is a palette for each NPC, but multiple NPCs' textures are stored as a single image, usually 512 x 256 in size...or possibly 1024x512. It's an array of 4 NPC textures by 2 NPC textures in hight.

The UVs for NPC models are set for those dimensions, so you need all 4x2 textures in the image for them to map to the model properly.

Bones fully supported, animations apply properly when exported.

I don't remember whether or not overworld objects are available or not, I haven't tried.

Field models are stored in several hundred files in the 04 folder. The files are unnamed so you'll have to look for the models by eye.

Battle model and player field model animations are interchangeable, as the battle and field models are identical save for the texture mapping, also it seems a few characters' animations can be swapped.

Field map background images are, as I recall, stored in the same DB file as NPC textures for that map, but are 8bpp... as I recall.

If you want to choose a single disc to dump, use disc 4 as it contains nearly all of the previous discs' models.

I hope this answers your question.

A few things to note:

1) I recall quite a few things were wrong in the specs I got from...I don't think it was from that wiki (which was down when I tried to look at it), but the docs were probably sourced from there. But in any case, the plugin code with Noesis is probably a better source of info than any docs out there, since it actually works.

2) I didn't see an automatic way to detect the TIM textures that have fixed tiled/paletted data that doesn't correspond with actual TIM specs in them, but those are easy to decode when you know you're looking at them. Those textures are mainly used for world stuff and backdrops. The only reason Noesis doesn't handle them is because I didn't feel like trying to hardcode in paths to figure out what was being looked at in terms of textures. If you wanted to hardcode the plugin to handle them, though, it would be pretty trivial.

3) I recall anim data for the summons was pretty similar to battle/field models (at a glance from the hex), but I never really looked into it. I only spent a day or 2 on that plugin, and figured the source being out there would lead to other people adding support for the other formats if anyone actually cared. You should have enough to work from right there to get all of the models/anims figured out. It's not like FF7/FF8 where the formats and anim storage actually tended to differ in significant ways between field/battle/summon models.

Oh, and 4), since you mentioned location of airship textures and crap aren't known. They are known, I recall coming across texture reference chunks usually paired in the same "DB" file as the models themselves. I recall they contained references in an order that corresponded to texture ID's in the mesh(es) as well. I had them figured out enough to load textures from them, as I recall, but all my notes on them are back on my machine in Arizona. As is all of my FF9 content. So that's about the extent of my usefulness there.

If you just want textures to go with the white meshes, just go to the textures resource. Someone managed to rip some there.

I already knew where to find the NPCs, just not their textures (going through PSX-vram isn't really what I'm going for, I'd like to create something that can get it all), and not how to match animations to the right NPCs (my viwer really just tries everything and displays the ones that decode correctly, so it will still display animations that aren't meant for a given model).

Regarding 4), well, my bad. Whichever half-assed method I was using to crawl the DBs to find textures missed them for th map models. I guess I'll have another look.

Regarding 3), my main problem would be that I don't get how the special effects directory (the one that contains the summons) is organized, it seemed different from the others, so I never could hook the model viewer on anything since it relied on the directory structure.

I guess I'll have to brush the dust off and at least get the airships.

I might be stupid but I have no clue how to look at/export FF9 models.

First I downloaded a FF9.bin version and that gave me nothing. Then I downloaded your zip file with .db's. I also downloaded a FF9.img version

I used db_Extractor on your files and get .model and .animation. Nothing in newest Noesis opens up and the .img file I cannot do anything with inside

Some pointers would be nice

Are you looking in the FF9.bin file that's stored on the disc, or are you looking at a disc image called FF9.img?

If what you downloaded is a disc image, mount it with daemon tools or the like, and look inside the image for a file called ff9.img, there should be one as I recall.

The contents of this post was deleted because of possible forum rules violation.

Thanks for this long and very useful post. I think I did have the ff9.img in noeses but it just said it could not preview, nothing about trying to export etc.

I am at work now but will look asap. I hope I did just something minor wrong but I did have ff9.img + latest noesis. I wonder why I did not get same prompt like you

Regarding the weapons, they don't map correctly because in-game the weapon textures are blitted into a blank spot in the character's texture. For all practical purposes that means you should offset the v coordinate by 14 texels if you're reading from dir08 and everything will look fine, which I guess isn't implemented in the noesis plugin yet.

From my old viewer:



I got the dir03 textures too now, except they're kinda weird, they're declared as 16bpp in the TIM file but they look like 4bpp.

EDIT: oh, I get it, it's like the NPCs in room files, 4bpp and they declare them as 16bpp so it won't load palette data since the palette is already contained elsewhere.



So now I need to figure out how to get the CLUT and page informations (the tent's nifty because it's aligned on the right page but it's the only model that's that well-behaved).

pixellegolas wrote:Thanks for this long and very useful post. I think I did have the ff9.img in noeses but it just said it could not preview, nothing about trying to export etc.

I am at work now but will look asap. I hope I did just something minor wrong but I did have ff9.img + latest noesis. I wonder why I did not get same prompt like you

I think you need to re-name the FF9.img when it's ripped from the ISO, it doesn't have the .img in the title, so noesis can't pick it up. Just make sure the file is called " FF9.img "

Chev wrote:Regarding the weapons, they don't map correctly because in-game the weapon textures are blitted into a blank spot in the character's texture. For all practical purposes that means you should offset the v coordinate by 14 texels if you're reading from dir08 and everything will look fine, which I guess isn't implemented in the noesis plugin yet.

From my old viewer:



I got the dir03 textures too now, except they're kinda weird, they're declared as 16bpp in the TIM file but they look like 4bpp.

For Chev, How or where did you offset the v coordinate, is that in the Data Viewer? Makes sense, but not sure where to adjust the v-axis. Is there a setting in an older version of Noesis? Oh and the Dir3 textures may be 8bpp I think, cause you can view them in PsxVram with that setting.
- Thanks.

Kujo99 wrote:For Chev, How or where did you offset the v coordinate, is that in the Data Viewer? Makes sense, but not sure where to adjust the v-axis. Is there a setting in an older version of Noesis?

Well, I'm using a custom FF9-only model viewer I made long ago, not noesis, so I have different options (and a crappier UI). Maybe look in the texture settings

Glad you got your colors for NPCs. For the map models 4bpp really is the only way to decode the indices though.