Gregory's ServerUGH I gotta write a program to parse the font files
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70 comments
 it has been zero days since I have broken the emulator I'm using to reverse engineer a game ugh. they're doing something "clever" here and I don't like it. I can parse the usual bundle (mostly) fine, but the SharedAssets one has perfectly formed indexes that point to wildly wrong offsets like it'll be "this file is 5 megabytes and located at 24mb into the file" and the file is 34 kilobytes I think they're doing something weird where SOMETIMES those fields mean completely different things, based on flags. the compressed size is ALMOST the size of the "ROM" (the .DOL file), and their engine does support loading resources out of "ROMs", but the offset is still out in 1.2 gigabyte land, on a console with 80mb of ram fun fact: the engine calls it a "ROM", although from what I can tell, this engine has never run on any console with ROMs (do not @ me about the fact there were technically PC ROMs, I know and I made some of them) why did these punks hardcode a font ID. WHERE ARE YOU GETTING ALL THESE FONTS, GAME? I've got a breakpoint on the font loading code and it keeps getting called on fonts I don't see getting loaded! I'm gonna have to figure out how to dump these fonts out of RAM. in an emulator with no scripting support. ugh what if I just extended the "conditions" function to add a new datatype, which is HUGE HEX STRINGS that get dumped to the log? Delightfully devilish, Foone! I'm now sorting fonts by how big they are, since I can see their load sizes and compare them against the files on the disk. A full boot of this game loads FIVE fonts. I know the IDs of three, and the names of TWO I found another by dumping all resources that were 2,528 bytes long and then hex editing them to see if they're a font buh suspicious okay so I figured out when and where that one is loaded so I miscounted. 6 fonts. I have names for three, IDs for 5, and source files for 4. I could get the final source file if I could parse the Weird Bundle, and I could get the filenames if I could parse the filename trie. ANYWAY I think I have what I need for my current hax this font file ALMOST makes sense. Like I'll look at 19 out of 20 characters and they'll match perfectly and then one will just be completely wrong. well I manually extracted the hidden font, good ol' GENERICFONT.FDX.PRD. NOPE! it's similarly aligned, so it's not the right one either. the fuck? okay after matching all the dumped textures with the fonts by process of elimination, this is the font I want: that symbol in the top left, which appears to render as "ss", is §. what the fuck are they doing, exactly? there is a SLIGHT chance that it's actually ß and they invented a new encoding that's a hybrid of utf-8 and MacRoman. But I really, really hope not why is this function being called with this->__vt set to 5? I'M PRETTY SURE YOUR OBJECT'S VTABLE IS NOT AT ADDRESS 5, GAME especially considering that this is PowerPC and it'd presumably generate an unaligned address fault, and OH YET THE WII HAS NO MEMORY MAPPED AT 0 So it's a 16-bit RGBA color format. You might say "I can do basic math, and 5+5+5+3 isn't 16", but guess what: it's weirder and worse than you imagine! it's two formats combined into one. well I tried to decode one these images and I got this. I think that's supposed to look like this, just guessing from the dumped textures. oh yeah it's a blocked format, because Nintendo hates the idea of storing pixels in an order that makes sense this is a 32bit console doing 3D rendering! okay I can decode it now. I basically just took my existing parsing code and made it pretend every texture was 4x4, then ran it (width+3)//4*(height+3)//4 times for the whole image, compositing all the subimages together. ugh. I'm like 99% sure the game's texture format doesn't store the size. ah-ha. look at this. both res_ids are identical, but one is only 16 bytes, uncompressed. This is a res_id for a texture. and 16 bytes is exactly the same size as the WiiTextureHeader structure used by the engine! so they have two copies of the resource in the file, but one of them has different FLAGS, which presumably indicates "hey this is the metadata", which has stuff like the texture format and image size. both of them. I'm gonna have to modify the extractor I'm working on to do two searches and find the CFLAGS=64 version, get the metadata, then extract the other one separately. the datafile has 1938 matches for "CFLAGS 64", so... does this game have 1938 separate textures? maybe! fun fact: just about every other game and file format in the world solves this complex problem by JUST PUTTING A FUCKING HEADER IN THE FILE WHAT ARE YOU DOING okay having written an extractor for that format, I move onto the next format: GX_TF_RGBA8. OH GOD NOPE. So a 4x4 RGB8 chunk looks like this: ARARARAR ARARARAR my favorite part is that nintendo literally calls this RGBA when it's not in RGBA order. |
fools will spend hours writing a program to parse font descriptions rather than manually transcribe the following PNG
(it's me. I'm fools)