Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

[Roxasguy]

Hello! I have been trying to rip models and music from the notorious GameCube game, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. Now, I opened this in Dolphin, and viewed the image file in the Filesystem tab, and the game is mostly composed of TPL, ARC, GBL, and ACT files. From what I see on the internet, ARC files are archives containing the files like models.

I downloaded yaz0dec.exe and rarcdump.exe, and dragged the ARCs into yaz0dec. Nothing happened. Then, I dragged it into the rarcdump.exe, and a folder was created called, "%filename% _dir" with nothing inside, then rarcdump crashes.

Any advice? Any way to extract the music, models, and textures from this game? So far, I'm stuck with using 3DX Ripper. It works for interior maps, but the exterior(in the valley) doesn't rip completely. When I say "completely", it doesn't extract all of the terrain(most likely because of some sort of occlusion culling).

If I didn't give enough info, let me know and I'll answer.

Thanks in advance.

[TGE]

Hello! I have been trying to rip models and music from the notorious GameCube game, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. Now, I opened this in Dolphin, and viewed the image file in the Filesystem tab, and the game is mostly composed of TPL, ARC, GBL, and ACT files. From what I see on the internet, ARC files are archives containing the files like models.

I downloaded yaz0dec.exe and rarcdump.exe, and dragged the ARCs into yaz0dec. Nothing happened. Then, I dragged it into the rarcdump.exe, and a folder was created called, "%filename% _dir" with nothing inside, then rarcdump crashes.

Any advice? Any way to extract the music, models, and textures from this game? So far, I'm stuck with using 3DX Ripper. It works for interior maps, but the exterior(in the valley) doesn't rip completely. When I say "completely", it doesn't extract all of the terrain(most likely because of some sort of occlusion culling).

If I didn't give enough info, let me know and I'll answer.

Thanks in advance.

It's been a while since I looked at the game, but I don't think these are Nintendo proprietary ARCs. The TPL files are, and can be converted. The model format looked like a variant of the F-Zero GX model format, however it doesn't import to anything. Try using Ninja Ripper, maybe you can piece the maps together with multiple rips because it tends to rip models in their native position.
Could you post an arc file?

[Mystie]

For GCN games that use un-rippable model formats (or those that have everything stored within one file), I screencap them with 3D Ripper DX or DXRipper, convert the scene to .obj (for DXRipper captures), delete everything that isn't the character or object I need, then resize and re-modify the model's dimensions if needed. If the character was not in a normal standing pose when I screencapped the scene, then I will alter them to put them in a T-pose or normal standing position.

Hope this suggestion helps.

[Roxasguy]

Hello! I have been trying to rip models and music from the notorious GameCube game, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. Now, I opened this in Dolphin, and viewed the image file in the Filesystem tab, and the game is mostly composed of TPL, ARC, GBL, and ACT files. From what I see on the internet, ARC files are archives containing the files like models.

I downloaded yaz0dec.exe and rarcdump.exe, and dragged the ARCs into yaz0dec. Nothing happened. Then, I dragged it into the rarcdump.exe, and a folder was created called, "%filename% _dir" with nothing inside, then rarcdump crashes.

Any advice? Any way to extract the music, models, and textures from this game? So far, I'm stuck with using 3DX Ripper. It works for interior maps, but the exterior(in the valley) doesn't rip completely. When I say "completely", it doesn't extract all of the terrain(most likely because of some sort of occlusion culling).

If I didn't give enough info, let me know and I'll answer.

Thanks in advance.

It's been a while since I looked at the game, but I don't think these are Nintendo proprietary ARCs. The TPL files are, and can be converted. The model format looked like a variant of the F-Zero GX model format, however it doesn't import to anything. Try using Ninja Ripper, maybe you can piece the maps together with multiple rips because it tends to rip models in their native position.
Could you post an arc file?

Thanks for the reply, guys. I'll upload an .arc from the game for you, and I'll also give this "Ninja Ripper" a try. I used 3DX Ripper, but it never extracted the full ground mesh of the Valley. (It's fine that it doesn't always get the buildings, I can always rip them individually later and add them to the ground mesh. But it'd be a huge pain to have to try and piece together the Valley. Especially since 3DS Ripper captures at an angle.)


Here's the cat.arc file, extracted from Dolphin 4. I'm pretty sure this contains the geometry for the cat models(As is the obvious assumption). Hope you can access Drop Box.

[TGE]

It's a typical U8 ARChive, which can be extracted by a lot of tools (Sharpii, for example)
.gpl seems to contain a tpl
.skn is probably something related to animations or bones.
I don't know if the gamecube sdk supports these formats, it might.

[AnimalCrosser]

I have also been having trouble with .arc files too. I got them from Animal crossing city folk and I have tried many things including Sharpii and yaz0 and each just open really quick and dont do anything.

[seangibbz]

• As TGE stated, the .arc files are standard U8 archives.  They can be opened in BrawlBox.
  
• .gpl is a "geopalette" that contains geometry information (i.e. 3d model).
  • Some information about it's file format can be found in the Nintendo Dolphin Character Pipeline SDK.
    
  • I've been doing my own research on these models and found a way to preview .gpl files.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get this to work with the specific files from AWL. This is likely because AWL was built using a more up-to-date version of the Character Pipeline than the version I currently have (v1.0, released in April 18, 2001).
    
  • Any .gpl file will require one or more .tpl (texture) file to render correctly.  These can be found by opening the .gpl file in a hex editor, then scrolling to the bottom until you see a block of text.  In the example below, real.gpl requires a real.tpl texture file to work.
    
    
  • If anyone has any more information on opening/editing these .gpl files, it would be greatly appreciated.
    
• The .tpl texture files are fairly standard and can be opened/modified with BrawlBox.
  
• .skn are the skeletons for models that require them (e.g. the player character, NPCs, harvest sprites, various animals, etc).
  
• .act stands for "actor". It's unclear exactly what these files are.  My best guess is that they list how the .gpl, .skn, and .tpl files should be combined to render the full model. There's some documentation on these in the Dolphin Character Pipeline SDK, but I haven't read it extensively yet.
  

It's also worth noting that a lot of AWL's files are contained within CLZ-compressed archives.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get these files successfully decompressed.  Any help would be appreciated.