Ripping from a game with little to no files!?!? Or bad iso?

[DarkCelestian]

Uuu I need help. I'm trying to rip models from Gotcha Force. An amazing childhood game. I'm tryna rip the models as there is literally nothing on the internet where people have posted models of them for use in animations, etc. Probably coz it's not a very well known game but it's fun nonetheless.

So um. Can someone help me? Here's an image of what the iso's files look like. There's literally nothing...:

[solitonmedic]

This is tricky, I'm having trouble reading Ace Attorney 5 Dual Destinies and there's a truckload of files inside, with an unreadable format.

[TGE]

There's an AFS script for QuickBMS you can use to extract the afs files.

[Skybot437]

Yo, new here, love Gotcha Force.

I've succeeded at extracting the files from Gotcha Force's afs_data.afs and poq_adx_usa.afs (using AFS Explorer 3.7), but the resulting .arc files (model/texture/animation files) are always invalid when I attempt to open/extract/decode them with anything. I have tried several programs that deal with .arc files and Gamecube Tools already with no success.

What would you recommend be done differently?

[Skybot437]

Slightly older and sadly not much better informed me here.

I've gone through a couple cycles of relearning, retrying, failing, giving up, and forgetting this sense my last post, and have come across nothing new. Here's the process for any wayward souls who wanders in and wants to try their hand at figuring this out for themselves. Please let us know how if you figure it out, ye wayward one.

1.) Extract the files from the .iso with Dolphin.
   (Process: Right click game in Dolphin > Properties > Filesystem > Right click the disk > Extract)
2.) Extract the afs_data.afs file with AFS Explorer.
3.) (The problem step) Figure out how to turn .arc files or their contents into actual usable model files. Some of them can be eextracted with 7z, but I don't really understand the rhyme or reason as to which ones are extractable. Extracting from pl020ag_mdl.arc gave me [0] and pl020ag_mdl, and this naming convention seems to carry across most the extractable ones.

I've read in a few places that Gamecube games are mainly C and C++ with lots of Assembly strewn in there so it's very possible the process of ripping the models may require some sort of decompiler in one of those languages.

[Skybot437]

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.

[Studdie]

Hey. I have also been attempting to rip from this game too and I have also ran into the same obstacle everyone has ran into with the cryptic .arc, .pzz files etc that this game has.

http://prntscr.com/s4154u

I took some files as samples and I came to a theory that all of these files are somewhat related to each other. My (**stretch**) theory is that the _mdl files are the models. the .pzz file is the rig as some of these .pzz files have some kind of "anim_joint" data (http://prntscr.com/s41aah) but some other .pzz don't have these at all. hit.bin is some kind of file that states the hitboxes(???).

Also, the .pzz file extension is used for the 3D modelling program Poser. I tried opening the file with poser and that didn't work. However, there is a VERY small chance that perhaps an older version of the program might open the file but of course it's just a stretch and I don't see no success with it.

I do hope that somebody develops something that can open these cryptic-ass .arc, .pzz etc. files.

[Skybot437]

Poser was made in 1995, so it's possible. The creation date of the files in the extractable .arc files is 1987 though, so I have to assume the models were created before Poser was available, possibly even it's predecessor if it had one.

It's good to see someone taking interest. I really hope somebody with enough coding knowledge gets in on this too. In the meantime, the universal solution for model ripping is 3D Ripper DX. It only works with Dolphin 32-bit and it's... the epitome of jank, but it works. I'm in the process of jankily ripping a couple models with it and trying to rig/texture them properly. We'll see how it goes, and I'll try'n upload anything I get done.

[Studdie]

Poser was made in 1995, so it's possible. The creation date of the files in the extractable .arc files is 1987 though, so I have to assume the models were created before Poser was available, possibly even it's predecessor if it had one.

It's good to see someone taking interest. I really hope somebody with enough coding knowledge gets in on this too. In the meantime, the universal solution for model ripping is 3D Ripper DX. It only works with Dolphin 32-bit and it's... the epitome of jank, but it works. I'm in the process of jankily ripping a couple models with it and trying to rig/texture them properly. We'll see how it goes, and I'll try'n upload anything I get done.

Yeah. I've been using 3D Ripper DX to rip the models from the game and it is indeed such a stressful process especially having to fix it up to a T-pose and rigging it.

I recently managed to rip Battle Girl from the game and fixed it up too. This is a blender render of the model (Didn't add matcap to the metal though)

[Skybot437]

Oof, ya. The time it takes to fix em up sucks.

I've just recently started trying to get into blender, and have made a few GF models from scratch, but really don't understand textures yet. No replacement for finding an actual way to rip tho.