Emperor XBF Tools

[Odrade]

Starting this topic as a placeholder, although it’s early days. After the recent excellent patch by Tom Mason that allowed playing the coop campaign again, felt motivated to dig out previous work on XBF, which seems to still have some obscure corners after all those years.

Two tools have been created so far, a Python library:
https://github.com/Lunaji/xanlib

And a cross-platform viewer/animation player, with a stand-alone Windows exe just released:
https://github.com/Lunaji/Xanadu-Animation-Viewer/releases/tag/v.0.1.0

What these do that, to my knowledge, has not been done before:
1 - Parsing compressed vertex animation data, where essentially each vertex is packed into 64-bits, including its normals. The files that have these may not be a lot - about ~170 among the ~1500 that come with the game, but they are important for human units and some other objects, like flags.

2 - Beginning to parse the FX Data header, which also contains information on animations (notably their names and frames of each), effects (including trigger frames) and particles. As far as I know, any mods so far would at best copy this section around, but not edit it per se or create it, and it has been a major roadblock in having new, functional 3D models.

The library is functional. In principle, it may be used to view, edit and export models from the game, or even import other models from other formats into it - there are examples and proofs of concept for each of these.

However, for the moment it is not very user-friendly. The fx data parsing is not done, and there remain a few bits and pieces to clarify.

In the end, these are just tools, conceived to explore and experiment. There exist many possibilities for their usage and evolution. For example the game menus and UI elements are also stored in XBF files, so technically it is possible to redo the entire look.
Maybe one day there will be again a concrete mod or remake that needs such.

Edited October 31 by Odrade

[Odrade]

A first draft of the full FX Data header as a ImHex pattern:

https://gist.github.com/Lunaji/c096127f21a3b0138d33d6eb71ba2f4c