[PSX] Colony Wars Red Sun - Player ships

[suXin]

For a past few weeks I was hooked on ripping ships from one of my most favorite games.
My approach to PSX ripping is attaching Cheat Engine to the emulator and figuring out PSX memory contents, after I reverse engineer structures and find related pointers - I automate the ripping process.
Rips are not 100% accurate becase of occasional texture and UV problems that I decided to manually fix instead of wasting hours on making the ripper better. These usually occured because of two textures occupying the same face, sometimes UV just went wrong for some reason.
I also moved torpedos and rocket meshes closer to the ship, because otherwise they were floating.

You can download old and edited rips of ships here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uesm9ucdrjtkic...n_Ships.7z
And here are all game models extracted: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qhnmt515sr5ccz...ls.7z?dl=0
Each ship includes Blender scene, textures in .png format, .obj and .mtl export, .fbx export

Source code of the ripper is on the GitHub and you can try using it yourself: https://github.com/suXinjke/RedSunRipper
When I get into the mood, my next challenge is ripping in-game models, and that means enemy ships.

Magentech CR8 Snapdragon



Zaibatsu Zu-7 Ryusei



Zaibatsu Zu-15A Shinden



Harper-Jones H2S Cobra



Harper-Jones H4E Magnum



BSI 919 Medusa II



BSI 303 Hyper Zeroid



Sha'Har Fighter

[Friedslick6]

I forgot to post before, but these are such neat models! I love retro sci-fi ships like these.
I would note that they should be rendered without texture interpolation, as they would be on the original platform, to fully appreciate the details that have become blurry.

I'm also very impressed with your extraction method. Why did you take this approach over reverse-engineering the game's file formats directly?
I don't know if you officially submitted these to TMR, but if so, thank you for your contributions.

[suXin]

I forgot to post before, but these are such neat models! I love retro sci-fi ships like these.
I would note that they should be rendered without texture interpolation, as they would be on the original platform, to fully appreciate the details that have become blurry.

I'm also very impressed with your extraction method. Why did you take this approach over reverse-engineering the game's file formats directly?
I don't know if you officially submitted these to TMR, but if so, thank you for your contributions.

Direct in-memory approach seemed faster to me because by altering the memory I can see model changes immediately and thus understand structures based on observed changes.
If I tried to rip straight from game files - I wouldn't even know where to start, while with in-memory approach I can guess/find the model location by atleast looking for pointer changes.

Maybe after I figured the structures out, I could try to look for them in game files just with byte search, unless they compressed/encrypted models. I wouldn't like to bother with it, which might be another reason why I'd prefer in-memory approach.

I didn't submit these to the main website because I also ripped a ship from Colony Wars Vengeance long time ago in simillar way and it's still pending either because of long queue or whatever reason I'm not told about. It seemed like there was no point to upload this large pack for now.

[suXin]

Hey there, it's been awhile, but I've found myself getting into Red Sun again.

This time I was targeting GAME.RSC file directly, and I managed to rip all 3D models. Here's the final form of Red Sun.
You can see more on #ColonyWars Twitter hash tag, I've been recently posting there alot, both of ripped models and problems I've experienced

Before I consider sharing the models, I'd like to write on my experience first. I may also consider posting some of the models on VG's frontpage.

[suXin]

Alright I'm done with documenting my experience which you can read about here

And download all ripped models here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qhnmt515sr5ccz...ls.7z?dl=0