Kitty Corp Meow Mix Forums

Original Post:

I finally got around to making a copy of all the character files from Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. Between looking at them and seeing what people have said/documented about .mot files (which is little to nothing), I wanted to take a crack at them, figure out how to open them up in BrawlBox. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the motionetc.pac header (and I'm having a lot of trouble finding documentation) to hex it to the .mot files, but they seem like they're similar. I'll keep going through them with a hex editor and look for patterns.

This is what I knew about .mot files prior to researching:
The format is similar to motionetc ARC files
They do indeed contain the animation files for each character
If a header is placed on them, they will open in BrawlBox.
Brawlbox displays an AnimationData string but has an odd ID.

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VILE and I are working on this, but we can use all the help that we can get. If you know anything about hexing, then it would help out the cause a lot. And VILE and I will update this post as we get more info. Also, I'll clean this up when I'm less busy.

Just a question, the Zero model, from what file was it extracted? What type of file? A bin file or an other format of file?

That was made from a brres file. You have to extract 0000.fpk from Zero's folder using the fpk extractor, then use FortWaffle's automatic mdl0 hexing program on 0000.brres. Then you have to resize the model to about 11 times it's size and fix any inherent problems with the polygons or shapes. In Zero's case, the palette was bad on his mouth.

Hope that answers your question...

Yeah it answered my question. Unfortunately, it seems the animations of this game are not in the Chr0 format isn't it? I mean, in this brres file, you didn't found these letters did you, I mean when you opened this file in your hex editor?

If it's the case, it should be much harder to get Zero's animations....

I never found the chr0 string, but there are some areas that look very similar to chr0 format. And based on what I've read TvC uses the same format for animations as Brawl, what I have found for animation has backed that up. I just can't find the start or end of something.

No one ever said it was going to be easy, and it's bugging me enough for me to make it a challenge. But, my first thing to do is start messing around with the header.

If you have the time, can you upload for me the file where you got the model and where the animations should be of course? Send me it by private message if you can. And if you want too.

You want any help with this? I'm pretty interested in this actually.

Yeah, definitely, I could use all the help I can get on this since it'd help a lot with character ports. So, please, help out however you can on this.

Also, I'm taking a look through the .seq files to see if there's anything interesting in them. So far I've found a few labels but I'm trying to figure out what they're supposed to do.

As far as I know, the *.SEQ files are basically for the AI of the characters.

I wrote a quick program to extract .mot files.

Here is what I got from Zero's .mot file.

http://www.mediafire.com/?n6no12p8bnbq6fz

Keep in mind that .anim is not the actual extension and the names aren't correct either, these are just temporary since these motion archives don't use any sort of naming protocol (not that I know of anyway).

These files, they arnt previewable in anyway are they? Theyre just individual animations, with no way to view them, right?

As far as opening up the file, it's not going to work. Slapping a Chr0 header on them isn't going to help out, either. Since they seem to have distinctive patterns on them I'll take a look at them, but at the moment my video drivers got trashed so I may end up having to reinstall them all night.

Thanks for your work on this Vile, these are making a bit more sense now. And adding different headers to the .mot file yields different offset values. Hopefully I can try to figure out this stuff (or someone else does before I can, proving how horrible I am at reverse-engineering  :srs: )

But again, thanks for this, really appreciate it.

No problem man, it took under 30 minutes of straight work to figure out the archive and write an extractor.

I'm gonna start working on figuring out these .anim files. I'm thinking an appropriate extension for them should be .tcan or .tvca . When I get something to show would you mind if I made another thread or do you want it all to be confined to this thread?

It doesn't matter at all as far as a thread goes, you can make one if you want. I can update this OP so I feel kinda important and keep a log of everything. Also there isn't too much in this thread to begin with, but either way it doesn't matter.

I have an explanation for the random sets of 00's in the header, since I've done the same thing hacking other things. The dev team got really, really lazy and had done lots of other animations. They're all 32-bit non-byteswapped pointers, but everything that is set to all 0's is dummied out pointers. It explains the long gap of zero's before other pointers start up, especially when comparing other .mot's. For example, in that first long gap of zero's in Chun-Li's animation file, there is one valid pointer in the long set of blank pointers, and then follows back up. Plus, the length of blank zero's isn't consistent between .mot files.

So basically there's nothing significant about the sets of zeros. The developers got lazy (and I fall guilty to the same thing when hacking too) and didn't want to fix all of the pointers, so they deleted old ones.

What I'm going to do is see what happens with the animations when I change the pointers in the .mot files. I'm armed with Wiiscrubber and Dolphin, and if they do work when changed, I'll go and label all of Zero's .mot files.

EDIT: the FPK packer causes TvC to freeze, that's not going to work. So, I'll go start to look for patterns in each anim file.

I had a quick look over the .anim (.tvca I've decided to call them) files and before I got sidetracked, I got a little bit of info.


There is a big chance that there is no relocation data and those are just blocks to define bones. I looked at a CHR0 and these and they look fairly similar. I'm going to look more in depth today.

Have you compared these to the Naruto .mot files to see if they are similar?

I found out a bit more about the individual animations from the .mot file, mostly having to do with each animation's header. The value at 0x03 is the number of individual header definitions for each bone (I believe), and the header itself I'm still trying to figure out. I can only assume that the first three bytes set to 0 are because the value is set as float. Dunno why they did it that way but I guess if they needed it, then it would work out. I know for sure that each "header" is a consistent header format because it's a sequence of 0x20 bytes that follow a distinctive pattern, and I'm still trying to figure out what all of the numbers mean. But there is a main header from 0x00 to 0x20, then individual headers within the file.

I did find out some of the individual header's format, though. Each animation has relative pointers, meaning that it doesn't rely on it's position in the .mot file at all. Also, the first 4 bytes of each individual header leads to it's position in the .anim file (or it's relative position in the .mot file). Each animation (I presume that's where the data is kept, I could be very very wrong here) is preceded by the bytes "3C 88 88 89" without fail.

Since I'm on a roll here I'm going to keep looking into this, hopefully I can find something more interesting. And I might update the OP soon.

*Edit* - Got ninja'd, you beat me to it Vile. Also I was speaking in Genesis hacking-speak and changed that up a bit.

Nice finds! I cannot wait until this is finished, model imports will be flooding brawl once these animations are in .chr0 >:)

I'm working on CHR0 info (if someone knows where I can get Kryals notes, it would be much appreciated).

So, once you define each type of animation (chr0 and .anim), what would need to be done? Also, have you tried PM'ing Kryal on smashboards (or wherever he has an account, lol)

Erm...I don't actually have Naruto Shippuden, so I don't know if the .mot files are the same format or even the same revision. The only reason I included it in the title is because Smashboards research makes it sound like they are very similar if not the same format. Also, the game and TvC are both made by the same company, so it would only make sense.

Also, I fear that since there's no name container for any of the animations we might have to match them up ourselves and manually import them to make a chr0 file. On top of that, to get them to work in Brawl we'll have to multiply each translation keyframe in each animation by 11. But it'll make the process easier and a lot cleaner. So to answer your question, we'd have to transplant each animation data until we know what bone fits for each section, then observe what the full animation is, then multiply it by 11 on the Zero model (or whatever model being worked on).

Thanks for researching all of this, Vile, btw. With the Chr0 info this'll make things a lot easier. And does Kryal actually check his PM's? Or even Bero?

When both formats are figured out I will write a converter. Also I don't think Kryal is active anymore (or at least doesn't like to be active with hacking).

Also, a note to everyone, it might be a little hard to write a .tvca to .chr0 converter solely because there isn't name definitions (I'm not sure how the bones are defined, if they are relative to the model, which I doubt, but if they are it wouldn't be too hard).

Yeh last time I tried to get in contact with Kryal, he said very little and never replied after that, I got the message he didn't really want any involvement with what I was doing. As for Bero, I talked to him a little while ago to get on the Dev team for Brawl Box, he replied fairly quickly to me, but I doubt he would want involvement in something if he is already on a project of his own.

Double post and I don't care.

I'm pretty sure that each bone's frame information would have to be injected into an existing chr0 in order to get working (by testing on the Zero model).  Also, I'll start seeing if the data in the .tvca files match up with anything having to do with chr0 data.

I went ahead and updated the OP with my info (I also updated the CHR0 info).

There is definitely a similarity between TVCA and CHR0.

I'm gonna go on with TVCA info and finish off the CHR0 info later.

you can build a template in HexEdit to easily figure out new things you know ;)

why not add support for the TVCA file :/

Updated the OP with my notes on the tvca format, they're slightly different than what Vile has. I'll look more into it later.

Also, I always used HxD, but I can give HexEdit a shot. And iirc Mario Sports Mix uses .mot files slightly differently than Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom. Either that or it's simply a compressed version of it and I'm over thinking things  :-\

I updated OP with my MOT info, I'm gonna look at the TVCA files now.

I was looking at the TVCA files again, turns out my info was wrong, I updated with new info.

Ok guys I think I completely figured out the structure of TVCA files, we just need to define the unknown variables and write a converter. I'm taking the info down from the OP until I release something to show.

btw...

I know this is off topic,
but if anyone gets the time,

I'd like to put out a request for a CHR0 template plz :)

I'm so busy wrapped up in about 7-8 templates myself stretching from MDL0 to REFF...
I don't think I can be the only one actually building templates...

thanx, and your help would greatly be appreciated :)

Mario Sports Mix uses CHR0s for the animations, just compressed in the *.MOT files. I just never really bothered to extract them from the memory dumps I've been making, really.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v336/RandomTalkingBush/MSM-WhiteMageAnimations.png)

This topic must survive.

Castlevania Judgement also has .mot files and I am unsure if they match up with the TVC ones.
They do seem to have resemblance of a header...

Oh, when this is done.

i so want the animations for Ken the Eagle, Jun the Swan, and Joe the Condor.

http://forums.kc-mm.com/index.php?topic=26928.0

Heh, I wrote those after I lost my original notes. I tried to replicate them from memory, them seem about right.