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Chum World wiki

This is mostly just a documentation of all of the known structures and their contents. See the sidebar for more details.

Archive format

Format for the NGC/DGC or NPS/DPS archive format: https://github.com/Jellonator/chum-world/wiki/BigFile

Cutscene voice line format

https://github.com/Jellonator/chum-world/wiki/SGC-Format

Pages for individual file formats

type	status	usage
ANIMATION	Structured	Mesh/skin animations
BITMAP	Solvedish	Textures/bitmap data
CAMERA	Solvedish	Camera node, related to cutscenes
CAMERAZONE	Unsolved	Unknown but most likely related to cameras
COLLISIONVOL	Structured	Invisible, rectangular triggers, e.g. warps to other levels or checkpoints.
GAMEOBJ	Solved	List of NODE-based prefabs.
HFOG	Structured	Seems to apply fog effects to child nodes.
LIGHT	Structured	Directional lights, such as a sun
LOD	Structured	Unknown, but most likely means "Level of Detail"
MATERIAL	Structured	Used to apply materials to meshes or surfaces.
MATERIALANIM	Structured	Animated materials.
MATERIALOBJ	Solved	A list of MATERIALANIM references.
MESH*	Solved	3D mesh data
NODE*	Structured	Node data, arranges game objects as some kind of node tree
OCCLUDER	Partial	May be related to ambient occlusion or occlusion culling
OMNI	Structured	light that emits in all directions
PARTICLES	Structured	Particle emitter data
ROTSHAPE*	Solvedish	Rotating shapes that face the camera.
RTC	Unsolved	Realtime cinematic
SKEL*	Unsolved	Does not appear to actually exist in game files, only ever referenced.
SKIN*	Readable	Stores skinning formation about models (vertex groups)
SOUND*	Solvedish	Sound effect data
SPLINE	Solvedish	Used for 3D paths (e.g. Jellyfish or the Squidward race)
SURFACE*	Readable	3D Surface files, used for level geometry and collision shapes.
TXT	Solved	Text files, translation data, and compiled Python scripts.
USERDEFINE	Solved	Custom tags applied to NODE files.
WARP*	Solved	Skybox
WORLD	Partial	World data, contains the layout of all of the entities.

*These file types have separate classes which handle loading in the PS2 release of the game, meaning they have significantly different structures than their Gamecube counterparts.

Solve status:

• Unsolved - Format is almost entirely unknown.
• Partial - Part of the structure of known, but not all of it.
• Structured - The structure of the format is known, but the purpose of certain values are still unknown.
• Readable - The format is known well enough to extract the data from the game.
• Solved - Format is known to the point where data can be read from and written to the game, allowing for modifications of that file type.
• Solvedish - Solved, but there's a couple unknown values which have safe defaults.

Note that the solve statuses only apply to the Nintendo Gamecube build of the game. The PS2 build is much less well known, although many of the structures are very similar. Keep in mind the PS2 is little-endian while the Gamecube is big-endian.

Common structures

Here are some common structures that appear throughout the games' data:

struct Vector3 {
    float x;
    float y;
    float z;
}

3d vector

struct Vector2 {
    float x;
    float y;
}

2d vector

struct Mat4x4 {
    float transform[16];
}

3d transform. Matrices are stored in row-major order. The translation is stored in transform[12], transform[13], transform[14]. transform[3], transform[7], and transform[11] are typically 0.0 and transform[15] is typically 1.0.

struct Mat3x3 {
    float transform[9];
}

2d transform

struct Quaternion {
    float i;
    float j;
    float k;
    float w;
}

3d rotation stored as a normalized quaternion.

Transformation header

Many files contain a 100 byte header that consists of the following data:

struct TransformationHeader{
    float unknown[4];
    Mat4x4 transform;
    char junk[16];
    uint16_t type;
    uint16_t subtype; // ?
    // Rest of file's data begins here
}

These are the file types that contain this structure:

Name	Type	Valid Subtypes
SURFACE	1	392, 396
SPLINE	2	56, 184, 312, 440
SKIN	3	0, 2
ROTSHAPE	4	0
LOD	5	0, 2
MESH	6	0, 4
CAMERA*	7	32
OCCLUDER	10	56
CAMERAZONE	11	56
LIGHT	12	48
HFOG	13	48
COLLISIONVOL	14	16
OMNI	16	0
PARTICLES	18	96

* This type has junk data in place of the transform value.

The purpose of the type value is so that objects know how to interpret the file when they are loaded; for example, an object may load a LIGHT or an OMNI light in the same location, and the type byte lets the object know how to treat this file.

The purpose of the subtype value is unknown. It seems to be some kind of flag value.

Other information

Junk Data: https://github.com/Jellonator/chum-world/wiki/Junk-data