3D Track Simulations - Fly through and Free View

[Hellfire_WZ]

I'll just leave this here ;)

http://phoboslab.org/wipeout/

[Cipher]

Whoaaa!! This is amazing!! :D

Mad props to the guy for reverse engineering it, been there as well for Lode Runner TLR and you can quickly lose your mind in all the mess of hexa of headers, blank space, compression and all that crazy stuff! Mad mad props!! Also a very cool project, the lighting is much better than in the actual games too ^^

Cipher

[Hybrid Divide]

Wow. Just wow.

I nominate this guy for the 2015 Golden E-Pak award. Seriously.

Just wow.

Wonder if he'll do the same for 2097. :D

[Hybrid Divide]

Also: I will happily donate money to whoever can turn this into a Windows screensaver.

[AGgamer]

For some reason this makes my computer overheat like crazy.

[Chill]

That is SICK!! Here's to the possibility of a remake! Maybe dreams can come true!

[Sausehuhn]

This is awesome. I never really got the same connection to WO1 as I got with WO2097 – not to mention WO3(SE). Probably because it was one of the last WO games I got to try and, seriously, this game is hard to master. But it’s lovely to explore WO1 this way – especially in free mode. So much atmosphere in so few pixels and polygons. I would love to see the same for WO2097 and WO3(SE), but that’s probably too much to ask.

If I recall correctly, there was even someone trying to extract WOF’s track data. Would like too explore these too with all the added Detail the PS2 brought into the game.

Anyway, thanks for a fantastic WO1 revival.

[Xpand]

That will make making this much easier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDCEoRTjOZk

[vincoof]

For some reason this makes my computer overheat like crazy.

Maybe try with another web browser. The WebGL support is very inconsistent between web browsers. Currently, Firefox and Chrome provide the best support most of the time.

[tigrou]

Wow, this is really impressive !

[stin]

That was seriously impressive videos of these tracks, so smooth as hell and loving it!

stevie :clap

[aybe]

Hi all !

I've started working on a remake :g

http://img11.hostingpics.net/thumbs/mini_117192snap0788.jpg (http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=117192snap0788.jpg)
TEAMS.INF

http://img11.hostingpics.net/thumbs/mini_132963snap0789.jpg (http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=132963snap0789.jpg)
EBOLT.INF

http://img11.hostingpics.net/thumbs/mini_377431snap0790.jpg (http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=377431snap0790.jpg)
MISS.INF

http://img11.hostingpics.net/thumbs/mini_276697snap0791.jpg (http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=276697snap0791.jpg)
PBAR.INF

The road to victory will obviously be very long but I guess it can be done.

I first would like to thank Dominic Szablewski (http://phoboslab.org/log/2015/04/reverse-engineering-wipeout-psx) because without his work there wouldn't be anything to start from, coincidentally I started to look at the files just two days ago before his post (http://phoboslab.org/log/2015/04/reverse-engineering-wipeout-psx) and it's crystal clear to me that I wouldn't have figured out all he did figure in his WebGL experiment.

The project and its status:

using C# and MonoGame
implemented out pretty much all he did in his experiment
coded a scene parser/renderer and a bunch of other things
a GUI app. to preview and reverse engineer remaining things (WIP)


Once I feel there's a decent workspace for potential contributors I will push onto GitHub as well as making some RSS feed about the progress. Let's see what emerges from this project say within a 1 month time frame ...

Help is welcome !

[DIXI200]

o_O "Curiosity amazing" I do not understand much about this because it's not my job, but what you are doing is a great job. This is the continuing human evolution.:g "Leonardo Da Vinci" dissected corpses to understand the human body. Sigh..Sigh .. my little "WO" what you are doing?:g I hope that "WO" as the "Phoenix" .. can rise from the ashes :hyper

[Hellfire_WZ]

aybe - I have already had this discussion with another member over a remake of the original game. You need to be aware that any use of the Wipeout IP and all associated trademarks would be in breach of copyright

[tigrou]

I would also want to add that doing a remake is a LOT of work, something that is usually underestimated.

Making a track viewer is quite easy (unless you have to reverse engineer most of data format yourself, like Dominic Szablewski / Phoboslab did). While it might looks like a huge step have been done, this is actually 5% of the job.

Doing a complete game (remake) with all bells and whistles is another story. Not to say that it would require to carefully reproduce the physics from original game (AFAIK, we have no clue how exactly it works), making a gross approximation that is great to play but not faithful to original would make the remake a totally different game.

@Hellfire_WZ's yes you are right. Anyway, copyright issues can be avoided by forcing players to bring the original data by themselves to play the game (so original CD would be required and remake executable would read data from there directly). If you do it like that you should be fine. Importing the original 3D models in a 3D editor and distributing them freely with the remake is totally illegal (copyright infrightment).

About copyrighted names and associated trademarks : the remake should not include any of theses. Using alternative ones should be ok (like SpeedExtreme instead of Wipeout). This is what CorsixTH (aka Theme Hospital) did. And it is just fine (until today).

[aybe]

@Hellfire_WZ: I know, I think like @tigrou that basically we'd expect a player to possess the original game files; the project by itself will contain no copyrighted material at all.

- - - Updated - - -

@tigrou : clearly it's a LOT of work, I know what it takes when it's about programming ... as I said let's see what emerges within a month and maybe one can envision a bit more than an editor/viewer. It's probably irrealistic as a one-man job because of time and social constraints, hence my idea of bringing an incentive starter-kit and making it public in GitHub after. Obviously one can not achieve every aspect of this project, while I think I can personally achieve most of the low-level plumbing it's quite clear to me that help will be needed in regards to physics and testing, for instance.

Let's positive a bit ! and see if it gets any attention within the next weeks :hyper

- - - Updated - - -

@DIXI200 : sorry forgot to reply ... I hope too, we're a bit far from Da Vinci or corpse dissection though :g

[twenty90seven]

I think like aybe says, one step at a time, see what progress can be made.

Just about copyright, have a read of this tale of woe about a guy that made a Smurfs fangame for the Amiga using backbone
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=76750

Separately I had a poke around the PC version of Wipeout 2097 and the Amiga version of it last night. They both use the same files apart from some PowerPC loaders required for the Amiga version. The Amiga version was smoother and could be rendered in higher resolution but the data is the same. The PC version has BMP files of the images used, quite easy to view.

[aybe]

That's quite ironic from the communist cartoon that the Smurfs is ... one thing though: he ripped things from a 2011 anime which is probably still being sold as a DVD. Lesson learned, it's also wise to not send any money next to an e-mail received online, those companies know that most people would be intimidated this way and might pay right away though they didn't necessarily employ the legal procedure. A legal and safe way is simply to not ship any copyrighted content, period. We live in a world where some people even wants to privatize a free and universal good : water ...

That said, I had a quick a look at Amiga WOXL files since Alex Power was kind enough to share them, they look pretty identical and I'm not even sure it's in big-endian (haven't checked though). Haven't really done anything on the project today since I was fighting with C# a bit, @tigrou is right but you are too, to exist this thing has to be realized and it's not gonna happen by magic and in one day. I just hope that the initial motivation/passion will not fade away, it's a critical aspect right now for this project to see the light of the day.

As soon as I've made more progress, I'll see if either the admins here would let me have a dedicated thread or I'll setup a place in my domain.

[vincoof]

@Hellfire_WZ's yes you are right. Anyway, copyright issues can be avoided by forcing players to bring the original data by themselves to play the game (so original CD would be required and remake executable would read data from there directly). If you do it like that you should be fine.
That may be true but then it’s pretty much what a PSX emulator would do. Having a dedicated software wouldn’t add much (versus an emulator), unless you wanna add new game modes or new ships or things like that, and then enters the topic of alteration of material.

[Hellfire_WZ]

Aaaaanyway... back to the topic? :?

[tigrou]

Aaaaanyway... back to the topic? :?

Yep, I have some news : the model viewer given in OP is fully compatible with Wipeout 2097/XL.

I was able to view most tracks without effort, by just extracting the 2097 game ISO.

[aybe]

Great work !

Side note, been looking at the files from beta of WOXL : every track folder has an .OUT text file (and a few others) with intriguing infos.

Looking to track for more infos esp. for WO1, currently there seems to be a beta/pre version in the Demo 1 [EU] disc, still need to verify the content.

[Sausehuhn]

the model viewer given in OP is fully compatible with Wipeout 2097/XL.

Whoa! :P Now what about WO3(SE)? :eek

[tigrou]

Whoa! :P Now what about WO3(SE)? :eek

I already checked and it seems it use a totally different format.

maybe they are internally using the same format as W1/W2097 but, on the CD they have been but put in sort of container (to protect them from editing).

The content of the track files seems to be total binary garbage (no string or things like that) like it has been encrypted/compressed.

[aybe]

Those PBP files all have a header, series of (mostly) sequential numbers ... once we figure out how this work we can proceed to step 2 : extraction ... a rough guess is that these are significantly different than other games :g

As laid out @Hellfire_WZ's, maybe we should have a dedicated thread for this (modding, RE, whatever) ?

[Xpand]

Wo3's files are completely encrypted. It'd take some god-like hacking to get anything out of there without knowing the encryption algorithm.

[aybe]

Wo3's files are completely encrypted. It'd take some god-like hacking to get anything out of there without knowing the encryption algorithm.

Never say never, all things have a beginning but if we don't start we have zero chance to succeed :g

I took a quick look at the format and here are my findings:

http://img11.hostingpics.net/thumbs/mini_275356snap0794.png

(http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=275356snap0794.png) http://img11.hostingpics.net/thumbs/mini_721806snap0795.png (http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=721806snap0795.png)

Header (in UINT32 units)

at offset 80 it is the number of entries in the container
at offset 88 starts the 12 bytes struct of each entry
1st value is absolute offset in file
2nd value is unknown
3rd is the length of the entry
i've checked on multiple PBP and they fit perfectly with their length


We can already get the individual parts of these PBPs and try to get to next step :hyper

IMO these files are certainly compressed but not necessarily encrypted, there used to be some entropy detection software that could help but can't remember the name actually ...

EDIT

Just wrote a tiny unpacker, it swallowed every PBP :hyper out of WO3SE from \WIPEOUTC and \WIPEOUT3; there is always between 58 and 60 files in each PBP. With time and patience we'll decipher them :cowboy

EDIT 2

I don't know where he got these infos (http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?1207-Modifying-Wipeout-3-SE&p=14652#post14652)from but they're hintful.

EDIT 3

Some progress ! :hyper

There are VAG files in these containers: (ship thruster sound)

http://img11.hostingpics.net/thumbs/mini_296345snap0796.png (http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=296345snap0796.png)

There are also a bunch of files which I suspect are textures since there are many entries in their header have a 0x40 value (64 pixels), not .TIM files though. We should prioritize in searching for files from the official formats in the SDK, if not then it could simply be a form of RLE encoding.

There are also files that looks like polygon data but it's a bit premature IMO :

http://img11.hostingpics.net/thumbs/mini_544004snap0797.png (http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=544004snap0797.png)

The left-most pixel rarely changes and could indicate the polygon type as it can be seen in no$psx debugger.


Also many of these files are duplicate, basing myself on studying a group of files from the link posted in edit 2.

2 be continued

EDIT 4

@tigrou

Can you provide your updated WebGL experiment that loads WOXL tracks ? or tell what files you replaced ? thanks!

[Jonny]

Woah, that's awesome.
Keep up the good work :+

[tigrou]

@aybe: nice findings. I would suggest as other members that you open a new thread in Wipeout3 section (and edit your answer to remove content).

about W2097/XL WebGL experiments : I have open a new thread for this (http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9951)

@Xpand : if it is not possible to find out format by just looking the binary data the best bet would be to ran the game in a debugger (like NO$PSX) and go step by step to see how data is parsed.
Hard, but not impossible.

[Xpand]

Yes there's also a way to dump 3D objects from PS1 emulators through OpenGL or DirectX.

[aybe]

@aybe: nice findings. I would suggest as other members that you open a new thread in Wipeout3 section (and edit your answer to remove content).

about W2097/XL WebGL experiments : I have open a new thread for this (http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9951)

@Xpand : if it is not possible to find out format by just looking the binary data the best bet would be to ran the game in a debugger (like NO$PSX) and go step by step to see how data is parsed.
Hard, but not impossible.


New place for the PBP format

http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9953-About-the-PBP-file-format

Experiment

see my updated fork which,


adds WOXL tracks to the menu
adds Moongoose tiny web server so you don't have to mess with your browser or source files, simply run it and it will open the page on your default browser (Windows-only)


https://github.com/aybe/wipeout

http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9951-How-to-view-Wipeout2097-XL-tracks-using-Phoboslab-viewer-(tutorial)&p=243174#post243174

no$psx

Sadly I don't know MIPS assembly which would otherwise make the thing relatively easy, basically once you know which address references a file name, you'd simply step through the code and sooner or later would understand how many bytes are read and what's being done with them and so on.

One hope is that no$psx can return a vertex's data, if yes then we'd run few searches on these files to see whether vertex data is here as-is or is encoded.

- - - Updated - - -

Notes for WOXL:


camera will go berserk at times
some of the textures are wrong (picked from WO?)


- - - Updated - - -

EDIT 1


Wo3's files are completely encrypted. It'd take some god-like hacking to get anything out of there without knowing the encryption algorithm.

actually they might not be out of reach -> more PBP stuff : http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9953-About-the-PBP-file-format&p=243171#post243171

they are encoded using LZ77 (like CMPs)

- - - Updated - - -

EDIT 2

Vertex data is on its way !

http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9953-About-the-PBP-file-format&p=243171#post243171

[aybe]

I'm pretty sure we'll get the WO3 data (http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9953-About-the-PBP-file-format) in the real format but I'll clearly need some help in interpreting them !

- - - Updated - - -

Dominic has just updated and fixed the experiment with WOXL : http://phoboslab.org/wipeout/ :hyper

[Snakenator1]

I have this bookmarked on Google Chrome, such an interesting way to see how the tracks were designed and the level of detail that the PS1 was capable of and how much effort from SL they put into the game :)

[multibodydynamics]

Dominic has just updated and fixed the experiment with WOXL : http://phoboslab.org/wipeout/ :hyper

The site is not working for me anymore. I visited it today and I can't select any tracks...
Update:
Ok, it is working now. For some reason the site works in Internet Explorer but not in Firefox for me.

[vincoof]

Dominic has just updated and fixed the experiment with WOXL : http://phoboslab.org/wipeout/ :hyper
A few ground textures are not correct (too many chessboard textures) but maybe this is because of my browser (Firefox). Overall the tracks look great.

[Jonny]

Aren't these the checkpoints?

[Hybrid Divide]

Amazing. Though I wonder why some of the track textures look off... hmm...

In either case, this totally made me happy! :D

[aybe]

A few ground textures are not correct (too many chessboard textures) but maybe this is because of my browser (Firefox). Overall the tracks look great.

no, that's not your web browser,

@all: you are welcome to report an issue at https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout/issues.

[aybe]

Just released the PBP unpacker, at this page : http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9953-About-the-PBP-file-format

:hyper

[qp6015309]

no, that's not your web browser,

@all: you are welcome to report an issue at https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout/issues.

https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout/issues/6

;)


Just released the PBP unpacker, at this page : http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9953-About-the-PBP-file-format

:hyper

Did you also have a look at WipEout 64:

https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout/issues/4

?

[aybe]

https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout/issues/6

;)



Did you also have a look at WipEout 64:

https://github.com/phoboslab/wipeout/issues/4

?

Great, as time goes on, we might get a better picture thanks to bug/issues reports.

Sorry but not likely anytime soon, we are already trying to understand Wipeout 1/XL and slightly looking at WO3. But for WO64 this will certainly be another story. AFAIK the content of the game is not easily available (no files to look at, just a ROM and this clearly requires strong knowledge of MIPS/R4000, not my case). Never say never though :P

[zeeZ]

Heh, I wanted to share this here too, but was torn because reverse engineering and stuff. Dominic is the master of randomly whipping out just because.. well.. he can?

It's interesting to see how technology advances compared to the stuff we know. When will our browsers on your average desktop be able to emulate PS3 era games? :P

[aybe]

Some good news here : http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/showthread.php?9955-Reverse-engineering-of-Wipeout-3-SE :D:D:D