04-09-2020, 01:05 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-09-2020, 01:08 AM by Skybot437.
Edit Reason: Adding a bit of info.
)
I've done a bit more digging, and it looks like the issue may be that Capcom's many homebrew engines from before around 2006 have file structures that are a bit janky and different enough from eachother to confuse the current common extracting tools. To further complicate things, Capcom only used this engine for only 1 game besides Gotcha Force (as far as I can find), Mobile Suit Gundam: Federation vs Zeon, which I don't think was much more long liked, so it probably hasn't been looked into much.
All this basically means that Gotcha Force would probably need a specially developed tool to get properly usable model files out of it, and no one with the know how has come forwards to make one. There is ARCtools, which seems to be a working extractor of .arc's to be used for most the older Resident Evil titles and some of Capcom's other stuff, and depending on how different Gotcha Force's file structure is, a plugin may be able to be developed for that. However, from what I can tell, the tool was updated last on May 5 2010, so... probably not gonna be updated anytime soon. It's Python-based and on GitHub if someone knows the language and wants to dive into that, and there's some plugins places that you might be able to seek some sort of structural guidance from.
One pretty unlikely-to-work for obvious reasons solution might be to find the modeling software that Capcom were using at the time (1987 is when the files inside the extractable .arc's say they were created) or at least something similar to natively unpack the .arc's into some ancient but convertible file format.
Hopefully this is helpful to someone.
All this basically means that Gotcha Force would probably need a specially developed tool to get properly usable model files out of it, and no one with the know how has come forwards to make one. There is ARCtools, which seems to be a working extractor of .arc's to be used for most the older Resident Evil titles and some of Capcom's other stuff, and depending on how different Gotcha Force's file structure is, a plugin may be able to be developed for that. However, from what I can tell, the tool was updated last on May 5 2010, so... probably not gonna be updated anytime soon. It's Python-based and on GitHub if someone knows the language and wants to dive into that, and there's some plugins places that you might be able to seek some sort of structural guidance from.
One pretty unlikely-to-work for obvious reasons solution might be to find the modeling software that Capcom were using at the time (1987 is when the files inside the extractable .arc's say they were created) or at least something similar to natively unpack the .arc's into some ancient but convertible file format.
Hopefully this is helpful to someone.