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Going-Commando/docs/plan
ReaperOfVeriod 36641b4cf8 Parse tfrag terrain blocks and decode all vertex positions
Adds gc-formats::tfrag and a gated real-disc test that decodes every
terrain patch on all 27 levels.

Two rules decide whether this works at all, and both were wrong on the
first attempt:

The vector format is encoded in the VIF command byte, not the immediate.
Bits 2-3 are vn (component count minus one) and bits 0-1 are vl, giving
element_size = ((32 >> vl) * (vn + 1)) / 8. Terrain positions are vn=2,
vl=1 (command 0x69) at 6 bytes. Reading the format from the immediate's
low nibble -- the more commonly quoted layout -- yields 12 or 16 bytes
and misaligns everything after it.

Unpack payloads pad to 4 bytes, and several non-unpack commands carry
inline data: STROW/STCOL 16, STMASK 4, MPG num*8, DIRECT/DIRECTHL
imm*16. Ignoring those desynchronises the walk, and a desynchronised
walk still finds code words that look like positions.

Positions are also not all in one list. vert_count is the total across
three tiers, the LOD-2 list precedes the common one in offset order, and
the LOD-0-only list starts at shared_ofs + lod_1_size*16 rather than at
an offset of its own. Scanning only the common list matches about a
quarter of patches, each exactly -- which is what made it convincing.

The invariant is that every patch yields exactly its own vert_count. It
caught both errors, so tfrag_positions returns None on a mismatch rather
than partial geometry. All 27 levels: 18,102 patches, 821,439 vertices,
zero mismatches.

Still open: strips, triangle indices and the RGBA vertex-info arrays.
Positions alone are not drawable.
2026-10-10 02:07:02 +02:00
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