Normals are per-vertex, and the tfrag's light records store them as an
azimuth and elevation *index* into a 256-entry sine table rather than as
angles. This decodes that table and builds normals for the renderer.
The reference reads the table from an ELF at BOOT_NORMAL_TABLE_VADDR
(0x165500) and notes every level overlay carries a copy. The overlay has
no ELF header -- it is a raw loadable image starting with code -- so there
is no program header to map a virtual address through, and the offset is
not fixed either: level 0 has the table at 0xb650c, level 5 at 0xcca30,
level 26 at 0xb6284.
So it is located by content. Every table starts with exactly (1.0, 0.0),
angle zero, and the scan then requires all 256 entries to match
cos(i*pi/128), sin(i*pi/128). Validating the whole curve is what makes the
search safe: a lone (1.0, 0.0) pair of floats occurs by accident in a
2.7 MB executable, and a test plants one as a decoy. The values are read
from the disc rather than recomputed, since those are the numbers the game
indexes.
A normal is (cos(az)cos(el), sin(az)cos(el), sin(el)) *negated* -- the
stored normals point into the surface -- and then given the same Z-up to
Y-up swap as positions, or the lighting comes out sideways. The azimuth
and elevation fields are stored signed but index 0..=255, so entry 200
must be read as 200, not as -56; there is a test for that.
Also frames and parses the level light bank from the gameplay extent, and
the pipeline now writes overlay.bin. The per-vertex lighting evaluation
is not written yet, so the renderer stays unlit by default. GC_ENGINE_LIT=1
substitutes a host directional light for inspection -- that is a stand-in,
not the game's lighting, and it is deliberately not the default.
The hash table is regenerated for the 27 new overlay.bin files: now 5,213
files and 5,762,497,559 bytes.
ReaperOfVeriod
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