The .MOT (TvC, Naruto Animations) Research Thread

[IWasAPerson]

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.

[Psycho Philia]

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?

[IWasAPerson]

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...

[Psycho Philia]

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....

[IWasAPerson]

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.

[Psycho Philia]

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.

[VILE]

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

[IWasAPerson]

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.

[RandomTBush]

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.

[VILE]

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).

[SSJCerious]

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

[IWasAPerson]

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  )

But again, thanks for this, really appreciate it.

[VILE]

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  )

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?

[IWasAPerson]

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.

[VILE]

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.

Code:

Check first post

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.