Luigi's Mansion 2 Research Thread

[CHEMI6DER]

I care, namely cause Luigi's Mansion 2 Dark Moon has been needing some good rips for quite a while now.


Out of curiosity, would your research work with Punch-Out Wii? They seem to be developed by the same studio, so you think that would result in working with both.

Good to see that someone cares! I'm not familliar with Punch-Out on the Wii and the series in general, but I'll see if I can figure anything out.
Edit: Oh wow. I just opened the files, and I saw basically the same directory structure! Also, as I've suspected from a string in each dict in LM2, .debug files do exist! Now I'm interested if the structure's the same just in big endian...

Edit 2: just for the sake of not creating a separate thread(let's be honest, LM2 and Punch-Out Wii do have too many things in common, so this makes sense), I'll dump anything on punch-out that I find in this post.

1. dict structure isn't totally the same(though has similarities to LM2), but features the same "signature" just in BE. Unlike LM2, this game doesn't use any compression on the data whatsoever.
And also this time we have a magical file \art\hashid.bin, which contains strings asociated with IDs! I should note that even if that file has ID reference, it doesn't neceserely mean that ID corresponds to your data(like texture hashIDs just correspond to some random stuff)

2. Haven't figured it out completely yet, but something Powe-alike seems to be here too. The section is 0x60 in size, starts with hashID in uint, followed by two ushorts that are widths and height. For not I wasn't able to find where in that whole structure the texture format is stored, but through analyzing this game in Dolphin emulator, seems to me like it uses two texture types: CMPR and RGBA8(following the same trend with using just two texture types like in LM2, aren't we NLG?). For now I have no way to autoextract those(cause IDK where texfmt is specified), but bodging pure texture data to a tpl file and altering it some, then loading in brawlbox resulted in success! Have this texture I randomly extracted from \art\fe\febundlefrontend(and I also very much noticed that the naming scheme is exactly the same between LM2 and Punch-Out Wii, even going as far that quite a few files are in the same place with the same names)

Spoiler

3. NLOC is exactly the same as LM2 format-wise, except for it being in BE this time. Can be extracted with RoadrunnerWMC's python script, you just have to state endian='>' when calling readNLOC() and it'll read it just fine! Also his assumption of NLOC standing for "Next level game LOCalization" is confirmed, since these files have ".loc" file extension in this game.

4. FENL is here too, I'm now pretty confident that it's layout data

5. Sound is still wwiseaudio, again using DSPADPCM for encoding, so no program will read it without transplanting the audio data into a compatible container(like .brstm, or putting the whole .wav into .genh)

6. "flow.data" seems to be a script file of some sort. Would be interesting to figure out the bytecode and decompile it