Going-Commando/docs/formats/core-data-regions.md

core_data region bounds

How a level's core_data lump divides up, and how each region is bounded.

The rule

A region's end is the next region's start, never core_data.len(). The last region in a layout is the exception, and when its successor is unknown the end is None rather than a guess.

This exists because region bounds were being re-derived per format during probing, usually by running from one known offset to the next with the last span running to the end of the lump. On level 0 that made the final shrub class a 925,008-byte span absorbing most of the lump's tail. Every aggregate computed over it -- record counts, value distributions, "this data looks random" -- was silently wrong, and nothing errored.

gc_formats::regions::core_layout computes these once. Callers use it rather than inventing their own.

Layout

region	start	end
tfrags	0	occlusion
occlusion	occlusion	sky
sky	sky	collision
collision	collision	first moby class
moby	first moby	first tie class
tie	first tie	first shrub class,
		else chunk container
shrub	first shrub	chunk container
chunks	chunk container	lump length − 0x38A10

Class regions start at the lowest non-zero geometry offset in their class table. A zero entry means absent, not position zero -- the same trap the occlusion and collision headers each fell into separately.

Not every level has every region: level 10 has no occlusion and no shrub.

The constant trailer

Comparing all 27 levels byte-for-byte from the end: the last 231,952 bytes (0x38A10) of every level's core_data are identical. Level-specific content therefore ends at len - 0x38A10, and the final region is bounded there rather than at core_data.len().

This is what closes the chunk container. The regions it separates from level content are measured on the disc: 2,033,776 bytes of shrub region across the 24 levels that have one, and 25,775,850 bytes of chunk container across all 27. The disc test asserts the bound on every level.

What the trailer is is not established. It may be fixed data, or padding from a fixed-size decompression buffer. Either way it is constant, which is all that is needed to bound the tail.

Found: the chunk container closes the class region

The offset ending the shrub region is not in the core index, and the class table that precedes the container carries no successor offset for it -- unlike moby and tie, whose boundaries fall out of the tables. Texture texels do not bound it either: they sit before moby, not after shrub. So the boundary is located in core_data itself.

Range measured: for each level, from the last shrub class's geometry offset to the constant trailer. Nothing outside that range is read.

Method: scan forward from the last shrub class for the pair (a) the constant two bytes f6 7c, sitting immediately in front of (b) a chunk signature -- a 16-byte header ending 0xff, ten zero bytes, then four or more 0xf0-tagged offsets. gc_formats::chunks::chunk_region_start.

Each half of that signature is weak on its own, which is why the halves are measured separately:

• the pair f6 7c occurs 25 to 103 times in a 5 to 17 MB lump, so matching it alone picks dozens of wrong offsets;
• the chunk shape matches random data often enough that parse_chunk demands four tagged offsets before a signature is believed.

Result: on all 27 levels the pair sits exactly two bytes before the first chunk header. The two are never found apart. This is the boundary, and core_layout closes shrub with it -- shrub's end is the container's start, and the container's own end is the trailer, so every byte of level-specific core_data now belongs to a named region.

Two controls, both asserted by the disc test chunk_container_closes_the_last_class_region:

• No signature inside the body. Scanning the last shrub body for a bare chunk signature finds none, on any level -- so the boundary search was not matching something it should have skipped, and the marker's job is corroboration rather than load-bearing disambiguation.
• The three levels without shrub (10, 25, 26) carry the same marker two bytes before the container. There the container closes tie instead, which is what makes the locator a property of the region rather than a shrub rule.

On level 0:

what	range	bytes
last shrub class data	16046800 .. 16047040	240
marker f6 7c	16047040 .. 16047042	2
chunk container	16047042 .. 16737344	690,302
constant trailer	16737344 .. 16969296	231,952

The marker's meaning is not established. It is constant across all 27 levels and it appears at exactly this position, but whether it is a terminator, an end count or a tag is unknown, so it is not named.

Correction this produces. The chunk-container measurements recorded below were taken over "the 900,000 bytes before the constant trailer" -- a window wide enough to contain the container on every level but not aligned to its true extent. Chunks sitting at the window's edge were truncated (27 of 1,123), and the region's size was never correctly stated. Both are now bounded properly: on level 0 the container is 690,302 bytes, not ~900,000, and the 25,775,850 bytes of chunk data across 27 levels are the measured total rather than a windowed sample. The chunk_containers_resolve_on_every_level test now reads the region from core_layout instead of measuring backwards from the end of the lump.

Correction: it is mostly texture data, not an unnamed region

Adding the region table to gc-extract probe made the gap visible immediately, which is the point of printing it.

On level 0:

collision       2615232 .. 8832192       6216960 bytes

but collision's own header declares a payload of 903,248 bytes. So the range between the collision header and the first moby class is 6.2 MB, and almost none of it is collision.

The first conclusion drawn from this -- that ~6.2 MB of unidentified data sat between collision and moby, possibly moby_anim -- was wrong, and it was wrong because of the same failure that produced the other two bad numbers this session: quoting a figure before bounding it.

Checking the bytes rather than just the sizes: the range is dominated by 8-bit indexed texture data. Byte-value concentration (a texture block uses a small palette; code and collision data does not) puts 18 of 21 sampled 4 KB blocks under 200 distinct byte values, against 249 for tfrags and 209 for collision.

So the real layout is:

region	start	end
collision	2615232	3518544
textures	3518848	~8832192
moby	8832192	first tie class

The texture table's data_offset values only reach 5326208, which is why the gap looked real: mip chains extend well past the last entry's offset. A region sized from a table of first-level offsets understates the data it points at.

The "3 of 21 blocks not texture-like" figure in the previous revision was an artifact of sampling every 256 KB. Re-scanned at 4 KB granularity the whole range is texture data: ~100 blocks stand out, and looking at them they are smooth gradient ramps -- sky and fog texture, exactly what gradient texels look like. A noisy gradient has a high distinct byte count without being code.

So the range between collision and moby is entirely texture data, and there is no separate moby_anim region there. Combined with the correction above, two claims made about this range have now been wrong: the "6.2 MB of unknown data" and the "3 unexplained blocks".

Where moby_anim actually lives is therefore still open, but it is not here. The remaining candidate is the unresolved tail after the last shrub class, which on level 0 is ~925 KB of real, non-zero data that nothing yet accounts for.

Where shrub data ends, and the region after it

Range measured: for each level, the last shrub class's data_offset field (class + 0x2c) through to the start of the constant trailer. Nothing outside that range is read.

Method: the last shrub class's body is an array of 8-byte records whose final two bytes are 00 00. Scanning forward in 8-byte steps for the first record whose trailing pair differs locates the body's end. This is a search for a specific stated pattern, not a statistic, so it either finds the boundary or reports that it did not.

Result: on 24 of 24 levels the boundary lands exactly on an 8-byte record boundary. Body lengths are 192, 208, 224 or 240 bytes -- the same sizes seen when shrub classes were grouped and diffed earlier.

On level 0:

what	range	bytes
last shrub class data	16046800 .. 16047040	240
next region	16047040 .. 16737344	690,304
constant trailer	16737344 .. 16969296	231,952

So the 690,304 bytes between the last shrub class and the trailer are a distinct region, not shrub data. What they contain is not established.

Two things are worth noting about how this was found, given the rule in AGENTS.md: the earlier NaN-filler search found nothing at the start of this range and was about to conclude the body had zero length, which would have been wrong. The last shrub class is a real class with real data, and the NaN filler only appears in degenerate ones. Checking the actual byte pattern rather than concluding from a failed heuristic is what caught it.

First structure in the region after shrub

Range measured: level 0, 16047040 .. 16737344 (690,304 bytes), starting at the first byte after the last shrub class's 240-byte body. Nothing outside that range is read.

Method: reading the bytes at +0x20 as u32 shows ten consecutive entries whose low halves increase by a constant 0x94 (148), followed by a zero. Read as u32 the high half is 0xf000 for the first nine and 0x0a40 for the tenth, so the table is ten entries long and ends at +0x48 (absolute 16047112).

Result, stated plainly: a ten-entry table on a 148-byte stride. What the entries mean, what 148 refers to, and why there are ten, are all unestablished. Ten does not match any count already known for this level -- 238 moby classes, 74 tie, 7 shrub, 93 tfrag textures -- so this is not yet tied to any structure elsewhere in the lump.

Follow-up: the 148 stride is a coincidence

Treating the ten entries' low halves as offsets from the region start lands on blocks exactly 148 bytes apart, the first nine of which begin 08 00 followed by a 16-bit id stepping by 0x40. That is a convincing-looking structure and it does not survive being extended: walking the same 148-byte stride across the rest of the region, only 14 of 4657 blocks start with 08 00. The first nine agree and then the pattern breaks.

So the ten entries are not a pointer table. The constant stride held for eight consecutive values, which is far more than chance should produce and far less than a structure needs.

Recorded because the lead was committed as a lead and this is where it goes. Nothing else about the region has been identified: it is real, non-zero data of unknown type, bounded, and unopened beyond these ~150 bytes.

The region after shrub has a repeating structure at stride 368

Range measured: level 0, 16047040 .. 16737344, sampled as the first 65,536 bytes. Cross-checked on every level that has the region, each sampled the same way from its own region start.

Method: autocorrelation. For each candidate stride, count how often a 4-byte sequence at offset i repeats at i + stride, as a fraction of comparable positions. A random control of the same size is measured identically and reads flat at 0.0000 for every stride, so the statistic discriminates.

Result:

stride	region match rate
368	0.1110
340	0.0935
337–339	0.026–0.029 (background)
random control	0.0000

Stride 368 is the strongest peak. On level 0, 340 is a secondary peak well clear of the background; the two differ by 28, which is unexplained.

Cross-check: the peak stride was recomputed independently for every level that has the region, and all 24 peak at exactly 368. That is the part that makes this worth recording -- a single level's peak could be a property of that level's data, but 24 of 24 agreeing is a format invariant.

What a 368-byte record is remains unestablished. This is the same position the shrub body was in before differential analysis identified its records, and the same method is the obvious next step.

Differential analysis at stride 368: no constant substructure

Range measured: level 0, 16047040 .. 16737344. 1,875 whole 368-byte records from the region start; variation checked across the first 60.

Method: the same differential analysis that identified the shrub body -- compare records byte by byte and record which positions differ.

Result: all 368 positions vary. There is no constant field, no padding and no header inside a record. Unlike the shrub body, where differential analysis immediately separated a varying payload from a constant two-byte tail, this format has nothing constant to separate.

That does not contradict the autocorrelation peak. Checking which byte positions carry the 368-stride matches over 20,000 positions: 168 exact 4-byte repeats, distributed evenly at 0.84% across all four byte offsets. So whole 4-byte sequences recur at exactly 368 while no individual position is constant -- consistent with records containing entries that repeat at a fixed relative index, rather than with a fixed-layout record.

So the 368 stride stands and the records remain unidentified. The shrub method failed here not because it was the wrong tool but because it needs something constant to latch onto, and there is nothing.

Sky opens with a 256-byte-row image

Range measured: level 0, 2192576 .. 2615232 (the sky region, 422,656 bytes). Periodicity start and end located by sliding an 8 KB window in 256-byte steps through the region and measuring the 256-stride match rate.

Method: autocorrelation as above, then a periodicity scan. A random control of the same size reads flat at 0.0000 for every stride tested.

Result:

• Peak stride in the first 64 KB is 256 at a 0.772 match rate. Strides 255, 257 and 4 score nearly as high, which is what a true period looks like smeared by sampling.
• Across levels the peak is 256 on 21, 512 on 5 and 128 on 1. 512 and 128 are a harmonic and a sub-multiple, so the fundamental period is 256 bytes.

Correction to the control. The original comparison used uniform random bytes, which read flat at 0.0000 -- and made the 0.772 look like an enormous signal. It is not: 91.8% of the region's bytes are the same value (0x07), so a stride-256 comparison matches trivially wherever both positions are 0x07.

The right control is the same bytes shuffled, which preserves the value distribution and destroys only the ordering. That control reads 0.512 at stride 256, not 0.0000. The true excess is 0.772 − 0.512 = +0.26, a real signal and a far smaller one than the original framing suggested.

And the extent is wrong too. Re-measured against the matched control, the excess over the value distribution is:

offset	excess
+0 .. +49152	+0.38 .. +0.45
+53248	+0.26
+57344	+0.07
+61440	−0.13

So the 256-periodic data ends between +53248 and +57344 — somewhere in rows 205 to 224 — not at +60160 as first reported. The original figure came from a raw threshold with no distribution control, and 91.8% of one byte value drags that threshold wherever the dominant run ends.

The 256-byte period itself stands, cross-checked on 21 of 27 levels with the remaining levels showing its harmonic and sub-multiple. The image dimensions do not: an earlier "256x236" is wrong and should not be used.

So the sky region is not one thing. Its first ~60 KB is an image; the rest is whatever the layer offsets address. Both halves still need work, and the image is the tractable one.

Re-verified: the 368 stride, against a matched control

The sky autocorrelation was found to be inflated by a control that did not match the data, so the 368 result was re-checked the same way.

Range measured: each level's post-shrub region start, first 65,536 bytes.

Method: as before, but the control is the same bytes shuffled rather than uniform random bytes. Shuffling preserves the value distribution and destroys only the ordering, which is exactly what the control needs to do.

Result:

• Level 0's region is evenly distributed: 256 distinct byte values, most common only 15.6%. Uniform random was therefore the appropriate control here, and the shuffled control independently confirms it, reading 0.0000 at strides 340, 368 and 4.
• Level 0 peak remains 368 at 0.1110, against 0.0000 for the matched control.
• Recomputed across all levels with matched controls: 24 of 24 peak at exactly 368, every one with excess above 0.05.

So the 368-byte period stands, now with a control appropriate to its data. The contrast with sky is the point: the same statistic on the same kind of question gave a real answer in one region and an inflated one in the other, and the only thing that told them apart was whether the control matched the byte distribution.

Sky sub-objects: structure is consistent, stride is not

Range measured: every level's sky region, from the count field at +0x0c through the sub-object offsets at +0x20. Each sub-object measured over its first 16,384 bytes.

Method: as above, peak-stride autocorrelation per sub-object with a matched control (the same bytes shuffled, seeded per level and index).

Field note: the sub-object count is a u32 at +0x0c, not +0x0a. Reading +0x0a gives 327,680 on level 0, which is not a count.

Result, level 0: five sub-objects at offsets 365760, 388880, 396432, 406784 and 414032, of lengths 23120, 7552, 10352, 7248 and 1536. Each has internal structure well clear of its matched control.

But the strides do not repeat across levels. Recomputing per level:

sub-object	peak strides seen across levels
0	4 (x6), 8 (x13), 32, 288
1	16 (x3), 32 (x6), 288
2	8, 16 (x5), 256, 288
3	8, 16 (x6), 216
4	8, 16 (x3), 512 (x4)

So the earlier per-index stride table, read off level 0 alone, was over-fitted to one level. What is consistent is weaker and more honest: every sub-object sits above its matched control, and most peak at a small stride of 4, 8, 16 or 32, which suggests 16- or 32-bit records whose stride varies with content rather than being fixed.

Level 2's header remains genuinely different: its count field at +0x0c reads 196,617 and is unusable, while every other level yields a plausible count. Whatever makes it different is still unexplained.

Sky sub-object 0: sparse, with duplicated entries

Range measured: level 0, sky region +365760 .. +388880, 23,120 bytes, read as 2,890 records of 8.

Method: record composition, plus the adjacent-pair and zero-density statistics below. The matched-control autocorrelation puts the peak at stride 8 (0.217 real, 0.000 shuffled), so 8 is the unit to describe.

What it is made of:

• 1,185 distinct u32 values across 5,780 words.
• Mean 6.99 of 8 bytes are live -- the previous revision of this file said "zero", which is inverted and wrong. The live-byte histogram is 0:15, 2:1, 4:31, 5:238, 6:461, 7:1030, 8:1114, so most records are nearly full rather than sparse.
• 549 of 2,890 adjacent pairs (19%) are exact duplicates of each other. The most common 8-byte record, appearing 283 times, is d7d7d780 d7d7d780 -- a 4-byte value stored twice. Others follow the same shape: 00051980 00051980, 00082580 00082580.

Byte 7 is anomalous. It takes only 14 distinct values where bytes 0-6 take 142-204. Its common values are 0x00 (1378), 0xff (806) and 0x80 (592) -- the high bytes of signed 16-bit values, which is consistent with byte 7 being an MSB of something rather than ordinary data. Unexplained.

Not decoded. A signed-16-bit reading was tried and does not obviously help: the values span -32743..32633, close to the full range, with no per-position structure (533, 371, 401 and 187 distinct at positions 0-3). Recorded as a characterisation, with its range, so the next attempt starts from the composition rather than re-deriving it.

Sky sub-object 0 is a slowly-varying sequence, not independent records

Range measured: level 0, sky region +365760 .. +388880, 23,120 bytes.

Method: Pearson correlation between the byte sequence and itself at increasing lag, against a shuffled control. This measures whether consecutive records are related, which the position-wise distinct-value counts could not show.

Result:

lag (bytes)	correlation
1	+0.050
4	+0.560
8	+0.746
16	+0.666
32	+0.602
64	+0.432
128	+0.140
256	−0.044
512	+0.304
1024	+0.247
shuffled control (lag 1)	+0.003

The profile has a peak at lag 8, decays to a zero crossing near 256, and then a second, smaller peak at 512 before decaying again.

This is what settles the earlier "no constant substructure" reading. The records do not share fixed fields, but they are not independent: consecutive 8-byte records are strongly related, and that relation repeats at 512 bytes, i.e. every 64 records.

Slowly varying values, related within a record, repeating every 64 records, is the shape of a keyframe or lookup table -- which is what one would expect to find in sky data, where a colour or fog parameter is sampled rather than computed per vertex.

Still not decoded. Nothing here names the values or the sampling. But the structure is now characterised well enough that a decode attempt has a shape to aim at rather than a field to hunt for.

Sky sub-objects share one shape, across every level

Range measured: sub-objects of the sky region on levels 0, 1, 3, 7, 13 and 26 -- 25 sub-objects in total, each measured over its whole length.

Method: as above, correlation at lag against the byte sequence.

Result:

quantity	range over 25 sub-objects
lag 8	+0.53 .. +0.79
lag 64	+0.16 .. +0.63
lag 512	-0.13 .. +0.42 (not universal)
lag 1024	-0.05 .. +0.37 (not universal)

Lag 8 and lag 64 are positive on every sub-object of every level tested. The longer lags are not, so the second scale seen in level 0's first sub-object is a property of that data rather than of the format.

So the sky sub-objects are all the same kind of thing: 8-byte units, strongly related to their neighbours, with a further relation at 64 bytes. That is a consistent description across the format, and it is the first result about sky that holds everywhere rather than on one level.

Not decoded. The 8-byte unit is still unnamed and the values are still not identified, but "same kind of thing, 8-byte units, correlated at 8 and 64" is now a statement about the format rather than about one level's data.

Sound bank SBlk has a 40-byte period (27/27 levels)

Range measured: each level's SBlk region -- the descriptor table between sblk_offset and daw_offset, from the sound bank header rather than from core_data. 17-20 KB per level.

Method: peak-stride autocorrelation with a matched control (the same bytes shuffled, same seed, every level).

Result: the peak is at exactly 40 bytes on all 27 levels, every one with excess above 0.2. The peak is also sharply isolated on level 0 -- 0.454 excess at stride 40 against 0.207 to 0.278 for strides 36 to 44 -- so it is a period rather than a broad tendency.

That is the first structural result about the sound bank beyond the container framing already committed.

Record count: 487, 443, 428, 494 and 447 whole 40-byte records on levels 0, 1, 2, 13 and 26. The region is not an exact multiple of 40 on any level (19484 leaves 4 bytes over), so 40 is a period rather than a record size with no remainder.

Unexplained: which byte positions are constant varies by level -- level 0 has 7, 11, 31 and 35 constant; level 1 has 15, 19, 23, 35 and 39; level 2 has 7, 23, 27 and 31. A fixed 40-byte layout would have the same constant positions everywhere, so either the records have a variable tail or 40 is a period in something else that the records sit inside.

Also measured, for the record:

• DAW, the sample region, shows no stride above threshold against its control. Consistent with ADPCM nibble-packed audio, and consistent with the container framing being the only part worth decoding.
• gameplay.bin peaks at 16 bytes (excess 0.267 at strides 16, 32 and 64).
• gs_ram.bin has almost no stride structure (0.043 at 32) but a lag-8 correlation of +0.503, so it is smooth rather than tabular.

Tie class spans: 16-byte unit, 48-byte period (dominant, not universal)

Range measured: every tie class span on levels 0, 3, 6 and every third level after it -- 386 spans of 16 KB or more, bounded by consecutive class offsets.

Method: peak-stride autocorrelation with a matched control, over the first 32,768 bytes of each span.

Result:

peak stride	spans
48	285
16	58
64	29
96	11
24	2
32	1

48 bytes dominates but is not universal, and the weaker peak is 58 spans against 285 -- so unlike the sound bank's 40, this is a majority rather than a constant.

Every observed peak is a multiple of 16 (16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96), which suggests a 16-byte base unit with a 48-byte period arising from how those units group, rather than 48 being the record itself.

This is weaker evidence than the sound bank's 40-byte result, which was sharply isolated and identical on all 27 levels. Here the peak is weaker (0.09-0.22 excess against sound bank's 0.45) and it moves between levels and spans. Recorded at the confidence it deserves.

Two independent measurements agree on moby's 16-byte vertex

The moby part table established vertex_offset + 16 * vertex_count == next_part on 43,467 of 43,467 parts, which fixes the vertex stride at 16. Autocorrelation over the spans reaches the same number without using that result at all.

Range measured: moby class spans of 16 KB or more on level 0 -- 60 spans, each bounded by consecutive class offsets, measured over the first 32,768 bytes.

Method: peak-stride autocorrelation against a matched control, searching strides 4 to 64.

Result:

peak stride	spans
16	43
8	8
48	4
32	3
24	2

16 dominates, and it is the same 16 the part table produces from a completely different argument -- a tiling identity over part records rather than a periodicity measurement over span contents.

Two unrelated methods agreeing is worth more than either alone, because the autocorrelation would be vulnerable to exactly the kinds of artifact this project has already been bitten by: a dominant byte value would inflate it, and a period that happened to divide the window would look the same as a real one. Neither applies here, and the tiling identity cannot be inflated at all.

This is the strongest form of evidence produced in this project: a structural invariant confirmed by two methods that do not share a failure mode.

Sound bank SBlk: a 12-byte marker that does not explain the 40-byte period

Range measured: level 0 SBlk, 24..19508 (19,484 bytes).

Method: positions of the 0x7f/0x47f marker words, and their spacing.

Result: those markers sit at 12-byte spacing on 144 of roughly 180 occurrences, with 24-byte and larger gaps accounting for the rest. So there is a 12-byte structure in the data.

But that contradicts the autocorrelation. If records were 12 bytes, stride 12 should be the peak. It is not:

stride	excess over shuffled
12	+0.237
20	+0.175
24	+0.237
40	+0.454
48	+0.239

40 is not a multiple of 12, so the two measurements disagree rather than one explaining the other. Recorded as an open discrepancy rather than resolved in favour of either: the marker spacing says 12, the period says 40, and 40 being twice as strong is the more surprising of the two.

Resolved: 40 is the record, the 12-byte markers are nested

A fine scan settles it in favour of 40.

stride	excess
40	+0.454
39	+0.266
41	+0.215
38	+0.214

The peak is sharp and isolated -- nearly twice its immediate neighbours. And the multiples confirm it: 80 scores +0.376, 120 +0.394, 160 +0.340, while the multiples of 12 (24, 48, 96, 144) all sit at 0.21-0.24.

So the record is 40 bytes, and the 0x7f/0x47f markers at 12-byte spacing are a nested structure inside those records rather than the record boundary. Their spacing is irregular -- 12, 24 and larger -- which is exactly what one would expect of a field that is present in some records and absent in others.

The earlier "they disagree" framing was wrong in one respect: the marker spacing never claimed to be the record size. Read as a claim about markers inside records rather than about the record itself, the two measurements were never in conflict.

SBlk record layout at 40 bytes

Range measured: level 0 SBlk, 24..19508, aligned at +0 — 487 whole records.

Method: for each of 40 candidate alignments, record the number of byte positions that are near-constant across records, and keep the best.

Result: alignment +0 is best, with 10 near-constant positions. Four are exactly constant and all zero: positions 7, 11, 31 and 35.

Distinct values per byte position across the 487 records runs from 1 to 155, with position 29 the most variable by a wide margin (155 against 21-48 elsewhere) and positions 2, 10, 27, 34 and 39 low (2 to 8).

The first record carries the SBlk magic and the DAW tag rather than descriptor data, so it is a header rather than an entry — which is worth accounting for before reading any field at a fixed offset.

Not decoded. The layout is established and the constant positions are known; the fields are not named, and which of the 40 bytes are an index, a length and an offset is still open.

SBlk: the field values do not read as record fields

Range measured: level 0 SBlk, 24..19508.

Method: read at 4-byte alignment and rank the most common u32 values.

Result: the common values are 0x0 (2261), 0x1 (369), 0x7f (168), 0x5a000000 (125), 0x1eff7f7f (125), 0x1dfcc (124), 0x19fc0 (93), 0x7c34240d (91), 0x7c3821c8 (91).

This does not look like a table of records with typed fields. A 40-byte record layout whose fields are an index, a length and an offset would not produce 0x1eff7f7f and 0x7c34240d a hundred times each, nor would those values survive a byte shift.

So either the 40-byte period is not a record boundary, or the region is an encoded stream -- something like varint or Huffman-coded data -- that happens to have a 40-byte statistical period.

The 0x7f values are suggestive: in a varint encoding a byte of 0x7f is the last value representable in seven bits, so it appears as a frequent saturated byte. That is consistent with a coded stream and inconsistent with a fixed-layout record.

Left open. The 40-byte period is solid (27/27 levels, sharply isolated, its multiples confirm it), and the alignment with four constant zero positions is solid. What sits in those bytes is not a record layout, and the two findings are in tension in a way this project has not otherwise seen: a confirmed period that is not a record boundary.

Correction: the 368 stride is real, but confined to one ~15 KB window

The claim earlier in this file that the post-shrub region has a 368-byte period throughout is wrong. Re-measured over the whole region, the autocorrelation curve is flat and near noise:

stride	excess over matched shuffled control
8	+0.027
12	+0.023
148	+0.009
340	+0.018
368	+0.018
632	+0.020

Nothing peaks at 368. The figure of 0.1110 recorded earlier does not reproduce under any sampling convention tried (step 1, 2 or 4 through the window; all give ~0.018).

Where the structure actually is. Scanning 8 KB windows at 1 KB steps for a 368-excess above 0.15 finds exactly one substantial region:

region+41984 .. region+57344   = 15,360 bytes   (abs 16089024..16104384)

plus a 4 KB patch at region+650240. Everything between and around is flat.

Within that window the 368 stride is unambiguous:

stride	excess
368	+0.315
736	+0.284
364	+0.024
372	+0.021
732	+0.027

The peak is sharp, 736 confirms it as a multiple, and the neighbours are at noise.

Record shape. 41 whole 368-byte records. Mean distinct values per position is 16 of 41, and nine positions are exactly constant and zero: 329 through 336, and 340. Twenty-five positions have 3 or fewer distinct values, clustered in 325-349 -- a tail region rather than scattered padding.

So the corrected statement is: a 15,360-byte window of the post-shrub region is a table of 41 records at stride 368, each with a roughly 43-byte tail whose fields are mostly zero. The surrounding 675 KB is not that table.

What went wrong before. The original measurement was taken over a window where 368 held and then reported as a property of the region. The 15 KB window holds 41/1841 of the region's records, and averaging that over the whole region flattens the peak to the noise floor. The re-verification pass checked the stride but not whether it applied uniformly, so it confirmed the number without testing the claim it was attached to.

The post-shrub region is a chunk container (explains the 368 stride)

Range measured: level 0 post-shrub, 16047040..16737344 (690,304 bytes).

Method: scan for the block shape 16-byte header ending 0xff followed by 10 zero bytes followed by a run of u32 whose top nibble is 0xF.

Result: 28 chunk headers on level 0, present on all 27 levels. Each chunk is:

+0x00  16 bytes, last byte 0xff     (opaque; differs per chunk)
+0x10  10 zero bytes
+0x1a  N tagged offsets, top nibble 0xF

and within a chunk the offsets step by a chunk-specific stride — 148, 340, 368, 288, 320, 236, 272, 384, 116, 160, 250, 580, 576 all occur on level 0. The stride is near-constant within a chunk (e.g. 148,148,148,148... then 340,340,336,340...) but differs between chunks.

This resolves two earlier results.

The "368-byte period" is one chunk's stride, not a property of the region. That is why the region-wide autocorrelation is flat: the region holds chunks with ~15 different strides averaging out to noise. The 15,360-byte window where 368 scored +0.315 is the third chunk, at region+30066, whose stride is 368.

The "ten-entry table" I earlier disconfirmed is real — chunks carry 5 to 30 tagged offsets, with 10 the most common on level 0. It was disconfirmed because I tested for a fixed stride of 148 across a whole region; the table exists, but 148 is one chunk's stride among many.

Two corrections this produces. Both earlier claims were half-right: real structure, wrong scope. I reported a local measurement as a regional one in both cases, which is the same mistake twice.

Not decoded. What the 16-byte header is, what the 0xF nibble tags, where the chunk data lives, and what the chunk means are all open. The container framing is established; its contents are not.

Chunk records resolve, and the layout is consistent across levels

Range measured: each level's post-shrub region, taken as the 900,000 bytes before the constant trailer.

Method: for each chunk, read the tagged offsets as 0xF0000000 | low24, take the stride as the first delta, load one record per offset at chunk_start + low, and count byte positions that are constant across that chunk's records.

Result: 1,096 chunks and roughly 13,000 records resolve on all 27 levels. Every level's chunks show 16.7-20.0% of byte positions constant across their own records — a consistent field layout rather than noise.

Level 0 in detail: 27 chunks resolve, 466 records, 20.8% constant. The stride-368 chunk (77 records) has 26 constant positions out of 368; the stride-340 chunk (77 records) has 25 out of 340. Constant positions cluster near the record end — 267-276 and following for stride 368, 258-268 for stride 340 — which is a footer or tail, not scattered padding.

The tag is uniform. Every tagged offset seen has top byte 0xF0, i.e. 0xF0000000 | low24, on all levels.

What this settles. The container framing from the previous entry is not a coincidence of byte patterns: the offsets genuinely address records, and those records share a field layout. The chunk-relative base is confirmed because resolving at chunk_start + low yields records with ~20% constant positions, which does not happen by chance.

Still not decoded. The 16-byte header (opaque, per-chunk), the meaning of the 0xF0 tag, which fields are index/length/offset, and whether a chunk is moby_anim or something else. A parser can extract chunks and records bounds-checked today; naming fields needs a domain argument this project has not yet found.

The chunk header: byte 14 is the record count

Range measured: all 27 levels, 1,123 chunks, over the 900,000 bytes before the constant trailer.

Method: compare header byte 14 against the number of offsets actually resolved for that chunk.

Result: byte 14 equals the record count on 1,123 of 1,123 chunks, zero mismatches. This is the first genuinely decoded field in this container rather than a measured correlation.

The parser now truncates the offset table to header byte 14, so a stray tagged word appearing in a chunk's record data cannot silently extend the table -- which would otherwise let the count disagree with its own header.

Two more header bytes are near-constant and look like ASCII:

• byte 13: only two values across 1,123 chunks -- 0x45 (1,076) and 0x46 (47).
• byte 9: three values -- 0x44 (26), 0x45 (1,084), 0x46 (13).

0x44, 0x45 and 0x46 are ASCII D, E and F. That three-letter tag appearing at two different byte positions with different distributions is suggestive of a type or class field, but it is not established: the remaining 14 header bytes are high-entropy and do not read as ASCII at any shift tried, so the ASCII in bytes 9 and 13 could be incidental.

Still open: the 14 opaque header bytes, whether bytes 9 and 13 are type tags, which record fields are index/length/offset, and whether a chunk is moby_anim. The D/E/F values are suggestive enough to be worth testing against a known type table, but that has not been done.

The header is a type ID, and the type determines the stride

Range measured: all 27 levels, 1,123 chunks.

Method: group chunks by their 16-byte header; for each distinct header, collect the set of strides observed across every level it appears on.

Result: only 64 distinct headers across 1,123 chunks. The header is a type identifier, not a per-chunk descriptor -- the same 16 bytes recur on every level.

63 of the 64 headers imply exactly one stride. So header to record layout is very nearly a function: the type determines the record size.

Resolved: the single exception is three types sharing a header.

Header 7542eff271b522a79e45348cca4509ff was reported with three strides, 76, 92 and 104. It is not one type with a variable stride, and not a misparse.

It appears three times per level, always with record count 9, always in the same order and always at the same offsets within the region. On level 0 and on every other level checked:

offset	stride	count	first offset	last offset
863842	92	9	928	1640
867554	76	9	912	1520
872866	104	9	1000	1832

The offsets are 3,712 apart each time and the strides differ, so these are three separate chunks that happen to share 16 header bytes.

Consequence for the type ID. 64 distinct headers for 66 distinct record layouts, not 64 for 64. The header is nearly a type ID but does not uniquely determine the layout: whatever distinguishes these three is not in the 16 bytes the header captures. Candidates not excluded: a distinguishing byte sits outside the 16 captured, or the layout varies within a type.

This does not change the earlier conclusion that 63 of 64 headers imply one stride -- that remains 63 of 64 -- but the mapping is not a bijection and should not be used as one.

The header does not encode the stride. All 90 two-byte windows of header[0..14] were tested: none maps to a unique stride across every group. So there is no simple two-byte field to read the record size from, and the stride must come from the offset table, as the parser already does, by differencing the first two tagged offsets.

That is the right implementation anyway, and this makes it more than a convenience: given three chunks sharing one header with three different strides, any dispatch that assumed "header implies size" would be wrong for 1,123 chunks' worth of type coverage on at least one layout. Reading the stride from the offsets is the only interpretation consistent with all the measurements.

The ASCII reading is confirmed as a type tag. Grouping by header bytes 9 and 13:

tag	chunks	distinct strides
DE	26	2 (184, 344)
EE	1050	46
EF	34	2 (268, 640)
FF	13	1 (520)

The rare tags are tightly coupled to their layouts -- FF is a single stride across all 13 of its chunks -- while EE is heterogeneous with 46. That pattern is what a type tag should look like, and it settles the earlier suggestion that the D/E/F bytes were incidental: they are not.

What this is good for. A chunk can now be dispatched on its header to a record layout, and 63 of 64 headers determine that layout's size without inspecting any record. That is a usable parse entry point, and it is the first point in this container where a field is doing real work rather than merely correlating.

Still open: what the 64 types mean, which record fields are index/length/offset, and whether any type is moby_anim.

RETRACTED: chunk records referencing moby class IDs at 38x chance

This section previously claimed that chunk records reference moby class IDs, with one body slot per chunk type, at 38x-289x enrichment over chance, and that >= 20 chunk types showed it.

That was a measurement of the parser, not of the disc.

resolve sliced every record at the chunk's first offset delta. On 1,252 of 1,509 chunks the later deltas are smaller -- word-aligned multiples of 4, most exactly +/-4 -- so those slices ran past the record's real end and carried 4 to 8 bytes of the following record. A record with the head of the next one glued to its tail scores as though it carried extra fields, and a slot scan across those bytes lifts apparent hit rates without anything being true.

With record boundaries measured against each record's successor, and ragged chunks skipped, what survives is:

chunk types with a varying class-ID-like slot   2   (was >= 20)
of those, ALSO spanning the ID space            0

So the general claim -- one class-ID slot per chunk type, across the container -- does not hold and is withdrawn.

And the flaw was there from the start

The discriminator the original version lacked is simple: a slot that really carries moby class IDs must span the ID space, so some of its values land above a level's moby count. The artifact does the opposite.

type         slot   enrichment   distinct   values ABOVE the moby count
0xd76cc453      6       305x           9        0
0xf2ef4275     34        64x           9      341
0xf2ef4275      7        46x          16      412
0xf2ef4275     14        34x          16      432
0xd76cc453      9        32x          28      702

The 305x slot's nine values are 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 -- all under a level's ~215 moby classes, so every one scores as a hit and 65536/215 = 305x. Every slot that actually spans the ID space scores 10x to 64x, which is chance.

So the original claim's own numbers gave it away and it was not read that way: "5 to 42 distinct values at 153x to 289x" is exactly the artifact's shape -- a handful of small values, none above the count. The record-boundary fix was never what made this claim wrong. It was wrong when written, and the retraction is complete rather than partial.

The test now separates the two: it counts slots clearing 100x (currently 1) and slots that clear 100x while also having values above the moby count (currently 0). The second must stay empty; the first is expected to be the artifact. The count above the moby count is tracked per slot, not per type, because a type with one artifact slot and several ordinary slots must not have the ordinary ones vouch for it.

The distinct >= 4 filter this section introduced is still load-bearing and is unaffected: without it the top slots are constants that read as 305x, because any value below the moby count counts as a hit.

Shrub body records on level 0: six varying bytes, two constant

Range measured: level 0, shrub class table 7 entries at core index offset 10176. Six classes are bounded by a successor; the seventh runs to the end of core_data and is excluded, because its span contains the whole post-shrub region and is not wholly records.

Method: bound each span by the next class's geometry offset, take the body from data_offset to the span end, and split into 8-byte records.

Result: 164 records across 6 bounded bodies, body lengths 192 (twice), 208 (twice), 224, 240.

Per-byte, over those 164 records:

byte	distinct	zero
0	74	60
1	58	65
2	76	43
3	62	48
4	72	35
5	59	38
6	1	164
7	1	164

Bytes 6 and 7 are zero in every record. Bytes 0 to 5 take 58 to 76 distinct values of a possible 164, with only 21-39% zero -- that is, uniformly varied rather than sparse.

Read as u32 the fields are not plausible: u32[0] ranges 0 to 4,294,871,316 and no field is monotone across the body. So the six bytes are not two packed 32-bit values.

What this settles. The six-varying-plus-two-constant shape holds on level 0 as a per-level partition rather than only in aggregate across the disc's 8,938 records, which is what rule 3a asks for. Two trailing zero bytes are padding or a flag pair, not data.

What it does not. Resolved by a follow-up measurement: the six bytes are not an f32 pair either, and not narrow u16s.

• f32 @0: 158 of 164 finite, but the range runs to about 1e35. Not positions or normals. The 6 non-finite values (3.7%) are far above the 0.05% that random bytes would produce, so the field is structured but is not an f32.
• f32 @4: all 164 finite, range 0 to 9.18e-5. This looks promising until you notice bytes 6 and 7 are always zero, which pins this value to a coarse grid and explains the tiny range. It is not independent evidence.
• u16 @0, @2, @4: distinct counts 85, 90 and 80, each spanning essentially the whole 0..65534 range. These are not small counts or indices.

So excluded are: two packed u32, an f32 pair, and narrow u16 fields. The six bytes remain uninterpreted.

Process note. The first attempt at this used ClassEntry and a hand-computed o_class offset instead of ShrubClassEntry, and every ShrubHeader::region call failed. The parser was not wrong; the caller was. The working call shape was already in the disc test.

tie: both indirections, and one reading disproved

The chain, which is two steps and easy to get wrong. The tie class table lives in the level's core_index.bin, not core_data.bin. On level 0 the three tables chain as moby at 192, 238 x 32 bytes later tie at 7808, 74 x 32 later shrub at 10176, which closes. Reading the same table out of core_data.bin produces plausible garbage rather than an error -- offset_in_asset_wad comes back as 1,217,208,842, which is outside every buffer, so the mistake announces itself if you look. Then ClassEntry::offset_in_asset_wad addresses core_data.bin, despite its name and despite core_data.wad sitting alongside it.

Verified: all 1,864 tie classes resolve, o_class agreeing on every one, and all 5,592 LOD block offsets land inside core_data.

Disproved: the word at +0 of a 16-byte unit inside an LOD block. On the first twelve units of level 0's class 0 it rises strictly -- 288, 1520, 2848, 3968, 5088, 6096, 7312, 8528, 9792, 10976, 12016, 13072 -- which reads exactly like a linked list, and the accompanying i16s looked quantised (two distinct values in i16[0], three in i16[1]).

Across the whole population it is strictly increasing on 0 of 1,864 blocks, and i16[0] takes 8,969 distinct values on level 0 alone rather than two. The sample was twelve units out of 1,724,334. Both the monotonic reading and the quantisation were artifacts of that sample, and the disproof is asserted in crates/gc-extract/tests/disc.rs so it cannot creep back.

Record size: RETRACTED. Block size is a multiple of 16; the records are not a uniform 16 bytes. The earlier "divisible by 16" figure was computed from the "next packets offset ends this block" rule, which is unsound because packets is strictly increasing on only 461 of 1,864 classes. On the other 1,403 the two offsets are unordered, so they cannot both be block starts into one ascending region.

Restricting to the 461 classes where the rule does hold: 922 of 922 consecutive block sizes are a multiple of 16. That was taken as evidence for a 16-byte record. It is not, and the record-size claim is withdrawn.

What actually survives, and what killed it:

• Every one of those 922 blocks opens with a u32 that is positive and a multiple of 4 (922/922), ranging 48 to 1,744 with 17 distinct values across level 0's LOD0 blocks. So the block opens with a count, not a size and not a pointer.
• Reading that u32 as a byte size and chaining to the next block lands exactly on the next block start on 0 of 1,383 blocks. It is not a size chain.
• Assuming [header][count][count uniform records] and solving for the record size: no record size tiles the block for any header size up to 512 bytes. Not 16, not 12, not 8.
• Reading the block as uniform 16-byte units gives fields spanning their entire legal range -- u32@0 from -2,139,029,504 to 2,139,029,587, u16@8 and u16@10 both 0..65,535, and 8,969 distinct values in i16@0 alone on level 0. Uniform units would not produce that.

So the 16 is a property of the block size, not of a record. The previous commit's "record size is 16 bytes" was an inference from a divisibility fact that does not carry it, and it is withdrawn rather than softened.

packets[0] is a constant, not an offset. It reads 256 on 1,864 of 1,864 classes, while packets[1] and packets[2] vary widely and land at different addresses in core_data on every class. Read as a block start, 256 points just past the 0x48-byte header -- which is exactly how it was being used, and exactly the kind of field that gets mistaken for a pointer. It is now TIE_PACKETS0 and nothing depends on it.

Still not decoded: what the 16 bytes hold. i16[0] at +4 takes 8,969 distinct values on level 0 and is not the two-valued field a 12-unit sample suggested; the word at +0 is not a run offset.

tie: the LOD block header, decoded

Over the 922 blocks where "the next packets offset ends this block" holds, the block's own 16-byte header is measured. gc_formats::tie::TieBlockHeader parses it and a real-disc test asserts every line below.

+0x00  u16 count        multiple of 16 on 922/922; range 16..2096;
                        72 distinct values disc-wide
+0x02  u16              zero on 922/922
+0x04  u16              ONE OF FOUR VALUES DISC-WIDE: 0x501, 0xa02, 0xf03,
                        0x1404 -- low byte 1..4, high byte 5/10/15/20
+0x06  u16              15 distinct, 0x0206..0x0512
+0x08  u16              135 distinct, 0x0b05..0x4ee4
+0x0a  u16              45 distinct
+0x0c  u16              94 distinct, 0x010e..0x0553
+0x0e  u16              zero on 914/922

+0x04 is packed, not a magnitude. Four values across the whole disc, with the two bytes moving independently (low 1-4, high 5/10/15/20 in lockstep), is two small fields sharing a word. That it is a texture index paired with a scale is a guess; that it is two fields is not.

The count is not a record count. block_size - header is divisible by it on 0 of 922 blocks, for any record size and any header up to 512 bytes. Combined with block sizes always being multiples of 16, that rules out a uniform stride without a header.

tie: the block is a table of 16-byte records (from RAM)

Range measured: every tie LOD block of level 1 whose leading word is a non-zero multiple of 16 -- 16 blocks -- plus the two read by hand in full.

Method: locate each block's record table in PCSX2's RAM by its twelve field bytes (the records are the only part of a block with a distinctive 12-byte run), then compare every record against its disc copy. Each block has several copies in RAM; the one that matches is the loaded copy.

Result: on 16 of 16 blocks, every record's leading word has become table_address + word, and the other twelve bytes are byte-identical to the disc. So:

• A block is [16-byte header][record table][vertex payload], and the records are 16 bytes: a leading u32 pointer and twelve bytes of fields.
• The header's word at +0x00 is the byte offset from the block start to the vertex payload -- that is, the length of the record table. This is what the "count" reading was groping at: it is a multiple of 16 on all 2,177 blocks because the table holds 16-byte records, it is never zero because there is always at least the header-sized first record, and its 42 distinct values are table lengths, not counts of anything in the payload.
• Every record's leading word is a pointer relative to the start of the record table, relocated at load to table + word. The twelve field bytes are copied verbatim.

This also explains the dead end that ran before it. The payload length divided by the word at +0x00 is a whole number on 0 of 922 blocks, at any record size and any header up to 512 bytes -- which is the correct measurement of the wrong hypothesis: the word never described the payload, it described where the payload starts. A count of what follows a pointer is not the pointer.

TieBlockHeader::data_offset and TieBlockHeader::records carry it, bound by the offset, and the disc test asserts the table is bounded on every block.

The records are R&C1's TiePacketHeader (2026-10-11)

With the record table located and the fields isolated, the reference settles what they are. The 16-byte record is R&C1's TiePacketHeader offset for offset -- a data pointer at +0, then R&C1's byte fields at +4 through +0x10 -- and the identification is not a resemblance but R&C1's own rule: bfc_distance == 5 * shader_count, on all 15,219 records of all 2,177 blocks on all 27 levels.

Measured over the same set:

relation	holds
bfc_distance == 5 * shader_count	15,219 / 15,219
vert_ofs <= vert_size	all
scissor_size <= scissor_ofs	all
control_size <= control_count	all
color_ofs == vert_size	12,640 / 15,219
color_ofs == vert_ofs + vert_size (R&C1's rule)	0 / 15,219
color_count, strip_count, strip_vertex_count zero	15,089 / 15,077 / 15,078

TieRecord parses all twelve fields; invariants_hold asserts only the universal four, and the disc test counts the rest. R&C1's rule for the colour offset failing on every record is the interesting one: the two games use that field differently, so it is named color_ofs for what this game's majority reads as, and the 2,579 exceptions are counted rather than averaged away.

A packet-length formula is retracted. (vert_ofs + vert_size + scissor_ofs + scissor_size) * 16 was measured at 61 of 61 pairs and is not reproduced on the correct blocks -- 0 of 13,042. The block set was the error, not the arithmetic: the script that produced the 61 was reading packets[2] where packets[1] was meant, so it measured 461 blocks instead of the 2,177 the class tables define, and the formula agreed perfectly with a population that was not the tie blocks. The formula is withdrawn rather than softened, and TieRecord::packet_bytes is gone with it.

It is now a command, and it verifies two levels

The check above was a script; it is now gc-trace verify-tie-records <unpacked-dir> <level> <class> <lod> <src>, which resolves the class, parses the block, searches the RAM image for the loaded record table and reports what it found. Exit status is 0 when every record relocated with verbatim fields.

Run over every (class, lod) slot of two levels, from PCSX2 savestates:

level	slots with a block	verified	mismatched	absent
0	87	87	0	61
1	104	104	0	78

So the relocation rule holds on every LOD block of two levels that the game had loaded. Two operational notes worth keeping:

• The live emulator is not a stable input. Verifying level 1 over PINE matched 104 of 104 while the user was on that planet; the same command minutes later, after they had returned to level 0, found the tables in RAM but no matching copy -- because the level was no longer loaded. A miss there is not a counterexample, and the report says "no copy matched" rather than "failed".
• A class index past the table count is an error, not a mismatch, so a sweep should stop at the level's class count rather than at a round number.

What the records' fields name and what the payload holds are still open.

The tie packet's length, from its record's fields (2026-10-11)

Range measured: every tie LOD block on the disc -- 2,177 blocks, 13,042 consecutive record pairs.

Method: a record's pointer is where its packet starts, so the distance between consecutive pointers is a packet's length, with no reference to any field. Comparing that against the record's own fields gives the length rule.

Result: packet_quadwords = vert_ofs + vert_size + scissor_size, on 12,927 of 12,927 record pairs whose strip_count is zero -- and on 0 of 115 whose it is not. The partition is exact: every record with a non-zero strip_count is an exception and no record with a zero one is. The fourth term is 0 quadwords whenever strip_count == 0, and something else (measured 0..19 quadwords, and not equal to strip_count) whenever it is not. R&C1's strip_count is a strip count and strips are variable-length data, so a non-zero count most likely adds per-strip bytes this cannot see -- a hypothesis, labelled as one.

TieRecord::packet_quadwords and TieRecord::packet_quadwords_are_known carry it; the latter is the honest gate, and the disc test asserts both sides of the partition.

This settles a dispute inside this file, and the retraction was the error. A formula of this shape was derived at 61 of 61 pairs, then "retracted" as not reproducing -- re-measured at 0 of 13,042. The retraction was wrong: the re-measurement had swapped strip_count for scissor_ofs in the fourth term, and the blame went on the block set. Re-measured with the term the first pass had, it matches on 12,927 of 13,042, and the 115 exceptions are precisely the non-zero strip_count records.

The lesson is worth keeping because it is the same shape as two others here: a retraction is not automatically more careful than the claim it retracts, and the re-measurement that "disproved" this one changed the thing it was measuring. The lesson on the other side is the one that saved it: the first measurement was over 61 pairs, which is not a population -- and had it stayed at 61 the formula would have looked universal. Both the small sample and the bad re-measurement were near-misses in opposite directions.

What this unblocks: the payload can now be sliced per packet, which was the prerequisite for decoding what it holds.

What the payload is, and what retired the coordinate reading

The payload is not random, and that took a control to establish. Reading each block as 3 x f32 triples, 53-64% of reads land within +/-5000 of origin; a uniform-random control of identical length gives 16%. So the content really is float-shaped.

But the rate is flat across every start offset and every stride tried (0x10..0x40 start, 8/12/16/20/24 stride: 53-65% throughout). A statistic that cannot distinguish the right stride from the wrong one cannot identify a stride, which is rule 4's exact case. The flatness is the informative part: combined with the count not tiling, it says the records are variable length.

A VIF1 command walk was implemented and tested against the blocks: it consumes 0 of 88 exactly. So the payload is variable-length and not a VIF1 CPU-format stream. Not WAD LZ77 either -- wad::decompress rejects the block at every start offset tried.

Scanning every (start, stride) pair from 0x10 to 0x7f for byte positions with a small distinct-value vocabulary -- the signature of integer index fields -- finds none: every byte position takes all 256 values at every alignment. For float payload that is expected, and it is why the field scan found nothing rather than confirming anything.

Still open: what the payload holds. Established is that it is variable-length, float-shaped, non-random, not LZ77, and not VIF1. Not established is any record boundary.

tie: the LOD block is self-delimiting, and packets == 0 means absent

The terminator. Every tie LOD block ends with the byte 0xf6 followed by zeros, on 2,177 of 2,177 real blocks across all 27 levels. That was worth a control, because 0xf6 could have been a coincidence of byte frequency: it occurs in payloads at 0.83x the uniform rate, i.e. slightly less often than chance, while the last non-zero byte is 0xf6 on 909 of 922 blocks in the first subset tested against 17 of 922 for the same blocks cut at a random point. So it is a terminator, not a common byte.

This is what makes the blocks parseable at all. packets[1] bounds a block on only 461 of 1,864 classes, so the terminator is the only general way to find one.

packets == 0 means no block at that LOD. Of the 3,728 (class, LOD) slots, 2,177 point at a block and 1,551 are exactly zero. The zero cases are not degenerate blocks -- they are absent ones.

A measurement I got wrong, twice, in opposite directions

The first pass over this header reported 3,728 blocks, all terminating and packed_texture taking 842 distinct values, contradicting an earlier four-value result. I retracted the four-value claim on that basis.

Both numbers were wrong, and they were wrong the same way. The scan did not skip packets == 0; it computed class_base + 0 and walked forward from the class body, finding a terminator there by accident. That contaminated 1,551 of the 3,728.

With the zeros excluded, the slot takes exactly four values on all 2,177 blocks -- 0x501 on 1,069, 0xa02 on 720, 0xf03 on 350, 0x1404 on 38 -- and all 2,177 terminate.

So: the four-value claim was right, my retraction of it was wrong, and the retraction was made on a number from the same contaminated set. A retraction is not automatically better than the claim it retracts; it needs its own bounds.

The located 0xf6 terminator is inside the last packet (2026-10-11)

Range measured: every tie LOD block on the disc, 2,177 blocks.

Method: the last packet's end is known two ways. Its length comes from its record's packet_quadwords, and every other record's length is confirmed by the next record's pointer -- so only the last packet of each table is unconfirmed. Comparing its computed end against where parse_tie_block stopped:

the last packet's computed end lands 2 to 16 bytes past the located 0xf6, on all 2,150 blocks measured. The error is not a multiple of 16, so it is not a length error: a packet ending exactly at the terminator would give a quadword-aligned difference. The 0xf6 00 pair therefore sits inside the last packet's data, 2 to 16 bytes before its end.

Two readings fit: either the terminator was located too early, or the last packet's length over-predicts by an amount that isn't a multiple of 16. The first is likelier, and the test asserts the measurement rather than the reading. What still holds either way: the lengths are right for every record but the last (12,927 of 12,927 record pairs), and the block starts are RAM-confirmed. The block extent is what is short.

Why the existing test missed it. 2,177 of 2,177 blocks end on 0xf6 is satisfied by a false terminator exactly as well as a true one -- it checks that the byte it walked to is a 0xf6, not that it is the block's end. A test that confirms the shape it walked to will pass on the wrong byte.

The cost: payload and padding under-report, so anything computed from them is correspondingly short.

Two candidate fixes, both measured and neither clean (2026-10-11)

Range measured: every tie LOD block, 2,169 blocks with a known last packet.

Candidate 1: the first 0xf6 00 at or after the last known packet's end. Fails. The offsets found are spread (1082, 1132, 1148, 1150, 1182, 1214 ...), not concentrated, because the 115 records with a non-zero strip_count carry packets whose length is unknown and therefore sit after the last known end. The scan lands inside those.

Candidate 2: the block's data ends at a long zero run. Fails. Walking forward from the last known packet's end to the first run of 8+ zero bytes, the byte preceding the run is not dominated by 0xf6 (2, 4, 1, 64, 3, 32, 19 ... across 2,169 blocks) and the runs themselves are mostly 8-31 bytes. The zero padding after a block is short and irregular, so run length does not discriminate the block's end.

Recorded as negative results because both are the obvious thing to try next and both are dead ends. What would unblock it: a survey of which offsets do bound blocks (the 461 that work may share a property), or the level loader's own block-walking code, which needs the overlay relocation from Phase 3.

Corrected header, over all 2,177 blocks

+0x00  count       multiple of 16 on all; 42 distinct; never zero
+0x02              zero on all
+0x04              exactly four values: 0x501, 0xa02, 0xf03, 0x1404
+0x06              16 distinct, never zero
+0x08              180 distinct, never zero
+0x0a              61 distinct, never zero
+0x0c              125 distinct, never zero, clustered 0x043f..0x0443
+0x0e              11 distinct, zero on 2,162 -- the only non-universal field

+0x0c clusters around 1,087 to 1,091, close enough to a block length to be worth stating, but it is not the length: the difference against the true payload length scatters from -12 to -172.

chunk records: the leading byte is a bucket index, not data

Characterised across all 77 chunk types, 1,509 chunks and 34,491 records on all 27 levels.

Byte 0 of every record is a small aligned index. It takes 16 discrete values per chunk type -- 0x00, 0x10, ... 0xf0 -- with near-uniform counts within each type. Uniform weighting is the tell: if it were a running byte offset the counts would be unevenly distributed across the buckets, because records differ in size.

type_id      recs  len  byte0
0x007d7ec438 2430  328  0x00:162 0x10:162 0x20:162 ... 0xf0:135
0x00d3d8c4a9 2430  308  0x00:162 0x10:162 0x20:162 ... 0xf0:135
0x00429ec43d 2079  368  0x00:162 0x10:135 0x20:135 ... 0xf0:108
0x00d76cc453  810  108  0x00:27  0x08:27  0x10:27  ... 0xe8:27   <- steps by 8

The alignment step is per type, not global. The leading byte is a multiple of 8 on 34,432 of 34,491 records, but a multiple of 16 on only 33,349 -- the 1,142-record difference falls in seven types, four of which step by 8.

59 records in three types break even the 8-byte rule. That is where the variable-length type lives: 0x00f2ef4275, whose records run 76 to 104 bytes and so have no single stride to be aligned to.

Not named. What the bucket indexes is not established. It is reported as CHUNK_RECORD_ALIGNMENT / record_is_aligned rather than as a parsed field, because giving it a name would be a guess while the invariant is solid.

A measurement I initially got wrong

The first version of the constant claimed a 16-byte multiple on 34,432 records. 34,432 is the multiple-of-8 count; the multiple-of-16 count is 33,349. The number was right and the label was wrong, and the test caught it -- the 16-byte assertion failed on 1,142 records, which is precisely the four types that step by 8. Those four types are how the per-type step was discovered, so the failure was the finding.

Worth stating plainly: this is the second time this session a correct number carried a wrong label, after the tie four-value retraction. Both times the test was the thing that caught it, which is the argument for asserting the number in a test at all rather than only in prose.

The chunk record's leading byte is a per-chunk phase counter

Follow-up to the alignment result, and it settles what the leading byte is.

Within one chunk the leading byte steps by a constant and wraps:

offsets: 1420 1748 2072 2392 2716 3044 3372 3700 4028 4352 ...
byte0:      0  16   32   48   64   80   96  112  128  144 ...

i.e. byte0 == step * ((index + phase) mod (256 / step)). Sweeping every (step, phase) over all 27 levels:

fully explained: 1,262 of 1,509 chunks
by step: 8 -> 51 chunks, 16 -> 554, 32 -> 520, 64 -> 137
unexplained:  247 chunks across 11 chunk types

So on 1,262 chunks the leading byte carries no per-record information. It is a deterministic function of the record's index and the chunk's phase. That makes it a position marker, not data -- which is why the earlier "16 discrete values with uniform counts" pattern showed up.

ResolvedChunk::bucket_rule returns the (step, phase) when the whole chunk fits and None otherwise, so the 247 unexplained chunks are distinguishable from the 1,262 explained ones and nothing skips a leading byte on the strength of a rule that does not apply.

RETRACTED: "every chunk has a uniform record length"

Claimed: 1,509 of 1,509 chunks. True: 257 of 1,509.

Length varies between chunks of the same type -- one type runs 76 to 104 bytes -- and on 1,252 chunks it varies within one as well.

Both halves of that old entry were wrong, and both were mine.

"Never within one chunk" was resolve slicing every record at the chunk's first offset delta. Every record then came out the same length by construction, so the predicate was confirming the parser back to itself.

And this section's withdrawal of "variable-length type" was wrong too. It read the pooled observation as a partitioning artifact -- minlen/maxlen taken across all of a type's records at once. Rule 3a is right about pooling in general, and it was applied to a real signal here: the type genuinely has variable-length records, and the per-chunk check that would have caught it was itself reporting the parser's own slicing.

Two errors stacked. The pooling rule fired correctly and was overruled by a measurement that had no independent content.

The first TWO bytes encode the record's own index

Continuing from the phase counter. Within a chunk:

i    :  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 ... 15 16 17 ...
byte0:  0 16 32 48 64 80 96 112 128 144 160 176 ... 240  0 16 32
byte1:  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0 ...   0  1  1  1

byte0 is step * (j mod g) and byte1 is (j / g), where g = 256/step and j = index + phase. So the pair is the record's index in mixed radix: byte0 carries the low digits scaled by step, byte1 the quotient.

Measured over all 27 levels: 1,235 of 1,509 chunks fit this on both bytes. Byte 0 alone fits 1,262, so the 27-chunk difference are chunks whose first byte follows the rule and whose second does not.

So on 1,235 chunks a record knows its own position, and the two leading bytes hold no per-record information. ResolvedChunk::index_rule returns the (step, phase) only when the whole chunk fits on both bytes, so the 274 that do not stay distinguishable.

A number that moved when the implementation changed

A first probe reported 1,181; the committed method reports 1,235. The method is right. The probe accumulated ok0/ok1 flags across candidate phases with an early-exit that could skip a phase which would have matched both bytes, and it also disagreed with bucket_rule on the byte-0 count (1,208 against 1,262), which is what gave it away.

Recorded because the two numbers came from the same run and only the discrepancy exposed the probe as wrong. The lesson is narrow and worth stating: when a one-off probe and a committed helper disagree, check the probe first.

Chunk record bodies: what was ruled out

With the framing settled (leading two bytes = record index), the body is bytes 2..len. Four probes on it, mostly negative.

No count field. For every chunk type, every u16 and u32 position in the first 64 body bytes, at element strides 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 16: does the stored value equal (record_len - offset) / stride on 90% or more of records? No type produced a hit. The record does not carry an element count near its head.

The body is dense, not float-dominated. For the largest type (2,430 records, 326-byte bodies):

f32 reads within +/-5000 of origin : 74%
uniform-random control              : 49%
zero-byte fraction                  : 13%

Above baseline but far short of what the tie blocks look like (53-64% against 16%, with 43% zero bytes). The chunk bodies are denser and less float-shaped than tie geometry.

There is an index-like region near the tail. In the largest type, 12 of 163 u16 slots have a maximum below 0x1000 -- too small for float or half-float data, so those slots look like indices or small counts. They cluster at slots 111-121 and 130-131.

A sample-size correction

Dumping six records of one chunk showed slots 112-119 zero on every record and a long run of other constant slots, which read as "the record is mostly a per-chunk template". Measured properly across the 1,171 chunks with at least 8 records:

u16 slots constant across every record in their chunk : 15,422 of 164,390 (9.4%)
chunks whose records are ENTIRELY constant             : 0 of 1,171

So 9.4%, and no chunk is a template. Six records looked like a majority because that chunk's tail happens to carry shared constants -- the per-type figures range from 9.4% overall to 55.6% on one type. A pooled figure over all types would have hidden that spread again, so it is reported per type as well.

What the loader does to a chunk (from RAM)

Verified against PCSX2 level-0 RAM; method and full dump in plan/pcsx2-verification.md.

The chunk payload is copied verbatim -- a probe from inside a record hits at chunk_base + record_offset with no rescaling. Two things change around it:

1. The offset table is rewritten to absolute EE addresses. Disc offsets 0xf000057c, 0xf00006b0, 0xf00007e4, 0xf0000914 become 0xf185387c, 0xf18539b0, 0xf1853ae4, 0xf1853c14 in RAM. The 0xf0000000 | low24 tag becomes 0xf1850000 | low24 -- tag replaced by the load base, low 24 bits untouched.

2. Every record gains a constant 2-byte prefix 02 00, and the rewritten table points at that rather than at the record data. Measured on all 90 of 90 records: prefix 02 00 on every one, and the disc's index bytes preserved unchanged at +2/+3 on every one.

The third result is the useful one: the byte at +2 takes exactly 0, 16, 32, ... 240 -- the 16 values index_rule predicts for step = 16, phase = 0. The mixed-radix record index, derived from the disc, is corroborated on the running game's own copy.

Correction: the 02 00 is on the disc, and a record starts two bytes earlier

What the loader does to the pointer is as described above. What it does to the data was overstated: the 02 00 read as an inserted prefix is already the record's own leading word, present at every record of every chunk on the disc. Three measurements, in order:

• The 2 bytes before the payload are on disc. For the chunk at level 0 0x100b302 (90 records), the word before each payload is 02 00 in core_data and 02 00 in RAM, byte for byte, record for record. The first chunk of the same level carries 08 00 instead. Nothing was inserted.
• So the RAM table's pointer is simply two bytes earlier. The disc table's low 24 bits point at the payload; the RAM table's point at the payload minus 2. The record is [leading u16][two index bytes][payload], and the loaded table addresses the leading word -- which is why the index bytes read as +2 from the pointer, the same +2 the result above quotes.
• The leading word is a field, not a prefix. It is the same at every record of a chunk on 1,439 of 1,509 chunks (None on the 70 whose records disagree, which the parser reports rather than averaging), it is fixed within every one of the 71 chunk types, and its values are only 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 -- 554 chunks carry 2, 520 carry 4. Chunk::prefix carries it.

What the value counts is not established, and two readings were measured and disproved rather than left as guesses:

• Not an entry count. The payload length divided by the word is a whole number on 1,344 chunks, but the other 162 leave an odd fraction and the whole set spans 57 distinct "sizes" (71, 66, 78, 24, 23, ...). A real entry size is a small clean number, not a set like that.
• Not the number of distinct leading bytes. That agrees on 0 of 1,506 chunks.

So the record has one more field than the loader note claimed, the disc's offset table is two bytes late relative to it, and what it counts is the next question -- with the entry-count reading now out of the way.

The tie vertex element is 16 bytes

With TieRecord identified as R&C1's TiePacketHeader, each record's leading word points at its packet in the block payload. Following it and stepping vert_size elements from vert_ofs reaches the vertices.

Range measured: 95,612 vertices on levels 0-2.

Element size, settled by comparison rather than assumed. Requiring the texcoord pair to be 12-bit fixed -- both words multiples of 4,096, which is how 0x1000 = 1.0 reads -- gives:

element 16 bytes : 78,919 / 95,612 = 82.5%
element  8 bytes : 45,661 / 95,612 = 47.8%
element 12 bytes : 44,834 / 95,612 = 44.8%

Sixteen wins by a factor of 1.7 over the nearest alternative, so it is the element size.

Observed layout, 8 x i16. Scoring each adjacent slot pair for 12-bit fixedness over 36,501 level-0 vertices locates the fields:

(i16[0], i16[1])    1.1%   not a texcoord
(i16[2], i16[3])    4.8%   not a texcoord
(i16[4], i16[5])   73.6%   <- SCORED as the texcoords; see the retraction below
(i16[6], i16[7])   76.6%   <- the near-constant 4096/0 pair

(6,7) scores higher and is not a texcoord. It is the near-constant 4096, 0 pair -- 4096 is 1.0 in 12-bit fixed and 0 is zero, so both are trivially multiples of 4,096. That is the constant artifact again: a fixed pair would score 100% anywhere. The field is (4,5) at 73.6%, with (0,1) and (2,3) ruled out at 1.1% and 4.8%.

The first four slots span the full i16 range with 10,803 to 13,421 distinct values each, so they are neither texcoords nor small fields.

The vertex base is vert_ofs alone. Adding the shader or control region to it makes things worse, so the 73.6% residual is not a mislocated base:

vert_ofs only                              73.6%
bfc + vert_ofs                             69.8%
bfc + control_count*control_size + vert_ofs 66.7%

Not established: what any of the eight fields means, and why the texcoord rate is 82.5% rather than 100%. The residual varies with record shape -- records with (shaders 2, control 7, control_size 2) hit 60%, (shaders 1, control 18, control_size 5) hit 89% -- so it is not one bad block but something that varies per packet, possibly a second texcoord encoding for records that need it.

Recorded because the 16-byte answer is the opposite of what the earlier commit concluded from the disc alone. Reading the header word at +0x00 as an element count gave 0 of 922 blocks dividing; it is the byte offset to the payload, so the table it bounds has 16-byte records. The number was right and the reading was wrong, which is the error the packet-header identification corrected.

Collision payload: what the verbatim mapping settles, and what it does not

With the payload confirmed verbatim in RAM, the disc bytes can be read directly. The grid dimensions are the first two u16 of the payload -- level 0 reads 11 x 33 = 363 cells, level 1 24 x 16 = 384, level 2 1 x 53 = 53. Level 2 being one cell wide is worth noting; the grids are not all similar in shape.

Disproved this round -- an ascending u32 offset table. A probe from payload +1024 reads f4ae0000 40af0000 c4b2000020b20000 ..., which is three ascending values before the fourth goes down (0xb2c4 to 0xb220). Read as a table that was a three-value impression. Scanning all three levels for maximal ascending u32 runs of 8 or more entries finds zero, on every level.

Disproved this round -- a global alternating-zero stride. The head of level 0 shows an obvious (value, 0) pattern from about i16[37] onward:

[32..] [1808, 1872, 2198, 0, 34, 86, 25848, 1, 25824, 1,
       -13028, 0, -12284, 0, -12228, 0, -12716, 0, ...]

Measured over the whole payload rather than the first 96 values, both alignments score far below what that sample suggests:

even-slot aligned: second half zero on 18% of pairs
odd-slot aligned : second half zero on 13% of pairs

The sample again. What the global numbers do say is that the payload is heavily zero-bearing -- 18% against a chance rate of about 0.0015% -- which is what a sparse or variable-length encoding looks like, and is consistent with the variable-length reading established earlier. The 18-against-13 split is a real alignment preference but a weak one.

Still not decoded. The cell layout. The useful position now is that the bytes can be read as they are, and that they are sparse and variable-length rather than fixed-stride -- so the next attempt should look for a terminator-delimited walk through the sparse region, not for a record size.

Collision: the segmentation is not recoverable from zero structure

Continuing on the verbatim payload, with the grid known.

Cells are not zero-separated. Counting maximal runs of non-zero u16 across the whole payload:

level 0   363 cells     15,115 runs     mean run 25.3 u16
level 1   384 cells     24,647 runs     mean run 51.5 u16
level 2    53 cells     31,512 runs     mean run 30.3 u16

Two to three orders of magnitude apart, so a zero run is not a cell boundary. Cells are not uniform blocks either: level 0 averages 2,488 bytes per cell and level 2 averages 43,684, which cannot both be one fixed-size record.

The run lengths are not records. Their histogram has a long tail of near-power-of-two values -- 2,140, 1,184, 840, 816, 628, 604, 562 -- which is what you get when a run is bounded by a single zero byte inside otherwise dense data, not by a delimiter. Combined with the 18%-zeros finding, the payload reads as dense data with sparse holes rather than as a delimited sequence.

So: not ascending u32 tables, not zero-run delimiters, not fixed stride. All three segmentation theories are now excluded on the full population rather than on a sample.

What would actually unblock this

overlay.bin is the game's own code -- it is the level's .lit section, loaded at 0x1A7C80 -- and the collision debug string Camera_CollPrimTest WARNING! - grid out of bounds! (RAR) is in its string pool. So the parser is reachable. What is not established is the reference to it: a $gp-relative search for the string returns zero instruction-aligned hits, so the code addresses that string by some other means. The format is therefore recoverable, but not by measuring bytes: it needs disassembly of that routine or a reference for R&C2's collision cell record.

Stating this plainly is worth more than another scan. The disc-side measurement space for collision is now genuinely exhausted -- the bytes are available, they are verbatim, the grid is known, and three independent segmentation theories have failed on the whole population. Further probing without the loader's own logic is not going to converge.

Tie class header: +0x0c is the three LOD record counts (2026-10-11)

Range measured: every tie class on the disc -- 1,864 classes, all 27 levels.

Method: read the word at class +0x0c as four bytes, and read the record counts independently from the blocks themselves: follow packets[lod] to the block, walk to the 0xf6 terminator, and count the 16-byte records the block header's data_offset names. Two paths to the same number, so the check is not circular.

Result: the byte at +0x0c is the LOD 0 record count, +0x0d is LOD 1's and +0x0e is LOD 2's, on 1,864 of 1,864 classes. On every level the three counts agree, including the classes where a LOD is absent -- a zero packets[lod] gives a zero count, matching the byte.

This closes the file's oldest lie about the tie header: the comment in TieClassHeader::parse said "0x0c: the 64 light-slot normals offset. Read past, not decoded", inherited from R&C1's layout where the word is an offset. Here it is not an offset at all -- it is three counts -- and R&C1 carries the same quadruple at +0x20. The earlier note was the right action on the wrong information: skipping an unknown field is correct, and the field was only unknown because R&C1's map was applied to R&C2's bytes.

TieClassHeader::packet_counts carries the three, and tie_class_header_counts_records_per_lod asserts the agreement.

The fourth byte, +0x0f, is unidentified. It ranges 1..15 across the disc. The obvious reading, following R&C1's packet_count[3] being texture_count, is a material count, and it is not the shader total: the sum of shader_count over a class's records disagrees on 1,827 of 1,864 classes. Left unnamed rather than guessed at -- a count that matches on 2% of the population is not a count.

Tie: i16[3] selects the texcoord encoding, which explains the residual

The texcoords are 12-bit fixed on 82.5% of vertices, not 100%. Grouped by the vertex's i16[3] slot across 95,612 vertices on levels 0-2, the buckets separate completely:

i16[3]          n        % / 4096      % / 256
negative        333        1.2%          1.2%
== 0          5,851       29.2%         60.7%
1..63        28,884       92.7%         94.3%
64..255      54,606       92.3%         93.8%
256..511          8        0.0%          0.0%
512..1023      5,391        0.0%          0.0%
>= 1024         539        0.2%          0.2%

The residual is fully accounted for. 87.3% of vertices sit in 1..255 at about 92.5% fixedness, which contributes 0.873 x 0.925 = 80.8 points; the 5,851 at i16[3] == 0 contribute 1.8 more. That is the 82.5% measured, to the point.

The remaining ~6% are not 12-bit fixed at all:

• i16[3] >= 256, and negatives, score 0% at both 4,096 and 256 -- 6,271 vertices using an encoding this reading does not see;
• i16[3] == 0 scores 29.2% at 4,096 but 60.7% at 256, which is a third distribution rather than a weaker version of the same one.

What this establishes: i16[3] is a per-vertex packed attribute whose value selects how the texcoord pair is stored, rather than being an independent field sitting beside the texcoords.

Refined: it is the HIGH BYTE that selects. Grouped by the high byte across the same 95,612 vertices on levels 0-2:

i16[3] high byte        n        % / 16      % / 256
0x00                89,341        92.0%        91.8%
0x03                 5,344         0.0%         0.0%
0x04                    71         0.0%         0.0%
0x40                    58         5.2%         0.0%
0x02                    47         2.1%         2.1%
0x19, 0x05, 0x20, ...  the remaining 73

A high byte of zero is the ordinary case -- 89,341 of 95,612, or 93.4% -- and it scores 92%. Every other high byte scores at or near zero. The split is on the byte, not on the value: i16[3] values 1 and 771 differ only in the high byte and behave completely differently.

Within the all-zero case there is a third distribution: i16[3] == 0 exactly (5,851 vertices) scores 62% at 16 and 61% at 256, against 92% for 1..255.

So three cases, selected by the high byte and then the low:

high 0x00, low 0x00    5,851    a third distribution, 62% at 1/16
high 0x00, low 1..255 83,490   the ordinary case, 92% at 1/4096
high non-zero         6,271    0%, an encoding this reading does not see

The element layout differs between those cases

Scoring all four slot pairs within the non-zero high-byte group, no pair stands out -- the best is (6,7) at 7.5% for a divisor of 4, against a 2-5% baseline:

i16[3] high byte NON-ZERO (n = 6,271)
    pair         /1      /4     /16    /256
    ( 0, 1)   100.0%   4.6%   3.5%   0.7%
    ( 2, 3)   100.0%   2.0%   0.6%   0.0%
    ( 4, 5)   100.0%   1.9%   0.3%   0.1%
    ( 6, 7)   100.0%   7.5%   5.7%   4.5%

So for those 6,271 vertices the 16 bytes are not laid out as position/texcoord/normal at all -- none of the four pairs carries fixed-point coordinates. Whatever they are, it is a different element shape, selected by the high byte of i16[3].

This also settles why the global score looked ambiguous: pooling the two layouts averages a 92% pair and a 7% pair into one number that describes neither.

Not established: what any of those three cases means. Whether i16[3] is a texture index, a normal index, a flag or a combination is still open -- but it is now a field whose role is known, which is more than "packed word".

Note the shape of the earlier claim this replaces: "the texcoords are 12-bit fixed at i16[4]/i16[5], 73.6% of the time, unexplained". The field position was right; the 73.6% was a population average over three encodings, which is exactly the pooled-number problem rule 3a describes -- partitioning by the one variable that separates them turns a mystery into a lookup.

Which of these findings are asserted

Not every claim here has a test behind it, and the recent ones are the ones most likely to be lost. Audit against crates/gc-extract/tests/disc.rs:

claim                                        asserted in
-------------------------------------------  -----------------------------------
tie vertex element is 16 bytes                tie_vertex_element_is_16_bytes_
                                              with_fixed_texcoords
layout selected by i16[3] HIGH byte          tie_vertex_layout_is_selected_by_
                                              i16_3_high_byte
blocks self-delimiting on 0xf6               tie_classes_resolve_through_both_
                                              indirections (per-block assert)
packets == 0 means no block at that LOD      same test
packets[0] == 256 on 1,864 of 1,864          same test
chunk record length uniform per chunk         tie-classes test + chunk_records_
                                              start_16_byte_aligned
moby class IDs in one body slot per type     RETRACTED -- see above; the test
                                              now asserts 2 types, 1 strong
collision payload essentially verbatim       collision_payload_is_verbatim_
                                              in_ram  (GC_SSTATE-gated)
tfrag pointers relocate, patches rewrite     tfrag_table_pointers_relocate_
                                              and_every_patch_is_rewritten
                                              (GC_SSTATE-gated)

The last two used to be marked "not assertable here -- needs a savestate". They are asserted now, in the same file, gated on GC_SSTATE so a checkout without PCSX2 skips them. Writing them as tests is what corrected two claims: the collision payload is 903,212 of 903,248 bytes identical rather than wholly verbatim, and the tfrag relocation base is the table address 0x848040, not the block base.

The split is deliberate: anything readable from the disc is asserted against the disc; anything that needs a running PCSX2 is asserted against a savestate when one is available, and documented in the plan file with its method when it is not. What is not acceptable is a claim living only in prose -- which is how the tie i16[3] finding spent two commits before it had a test, and how the collision "verbatim" claim survived long enough to be wrong.

An external decompilation project is the same disc, and names the overlay

OpenRAC/rac2-gc-decomp ("Going Commando USA v1.01: byte-exact reconstruction tools and native-port research. No game assets.") is byte-for-byte the disc this parser was built against:

ours     3,828,350,976 bytes
         9db2e33e276133cc283647fa3279b37911955e123d6199d10065547eaa9b1ce5
theirs   3,828,350,976 bytes
         9db2e33e276133cc283647fa3279b37911955e123d6199d10065547eaa9b1ce5

So its findings are usable directly rather than as an analogy. Two of them name things this file had measured but not explained:

what	value	source	status here
.lit load base	0x1A7C80, same on all 27 levels	docs/LEVELS.md	newly named
$gp	0x1AEFF0, same on all 27 levels	docs/LEVELS.md	newly available

The measured constant overlay.bin +0x00 = 1,735,808 is 0x1A7C80. The reason it is identical across all 27 levels is now known rather than merely observed: every level's literal section loads at the same address, because loading a level copies its program over the boot's memory from there. So the first header word is not a size and not a checksum — it is the load base of the section this file is.

That also settles what the file is. overlay.bin is the level's .lit section, which is why it holds both code and the debug string pool.

The program around it has seven sections, per docs/LEVELS.md:

.lit  .bss  .data  vtbl  camvtbl  sndvtbl  .text

which is exactly the "seven-section parser and relocation" already listed as a Phase 3 item for this format. It is now a known target rather than a guess.

+0x0c is not the .lit size

The obvious next guess -- now that +0x00 is known to be the .lit load base, +0x0c might be the .lit size -- is wrong, and measurably so:

level	file size	+0x0c	excess
level0	2,751,268	2,767,752	+16,484
level11	3,151,128	2,870,792	-280,336
level2	2,928,424	2,780,808	-147,616
level24	2,615,776	2,763,912	+148,136

+0x0c is smaller than the file on 16 of 27 levels, by up to 8.9%. It cannot be a size of the section it sits at the front of. It is still unnamed. The point here is only that the size hypothesis is excluded by sign, not by a near miss.

Collision: the code that asserts is now locatable

The collision blocker was "needs the game's own code". The decomp names the functions (Camera_CollPrimTest(void *prim, void *grid), MB_CheckCollPill) but does not decompile them, so the cell layout is still not handed over. What it does supply is $gp, and that is enough to start.

Camera_CollPrimTest WARNING! - grid out of bounds! (RAR) sits at overlay.bin+0xd18, the only copy in the file, so:

string        overlay+0xd18  ->  RAM 0x1a8998
$gp           0x1aeff0
delta         -0x6658        ($lo half 0x99a8)

MIPS materialises a GP-relative address as a %hi/%lo pair, and the $lo half is a 16-bit immediate in the instruction stream. So the anchor search is well defined -- and it returns nothing:

$lo half      0x99a8   (low byte 0xa8, high byte 0x99)
occurrences   0, instruction-aligned, in 2,751,268 bytes

An earlier version of this file claimed exactly one hit, at 0x354cc8, and called it an unambiguous anchor. That was wrong, and the mistake was worth recording. The search compared word bytes 1..3 against the immediate. The PS2's MIPS is little-endian, so an I-type immediate is in bits 15..0, which is word bytes 0 and 1 -- bytes 1..3 are the opcode, $rs and $rt fields. The match was on those, not on an address.

The instruction at the phantom hit is 0x24a89948:

addiu $t0, $a1, -0x66b8

whose real immediate is 0x9948, ten bytes away from the 0x99a8 being searched for, and whose -0x66b8 merely looks like a plausible $gp offset. With the byte order corrected, the count is zero.

So the collision anchor is not established, and the assertion that it was has been withdrawn. What survives is weaker and still useful:

• Camera_CollPrimTest and MB_CheckCollPill are named, with Camera_CollPrimTest(void *prim, void *grid).
• $gp = 0x1AEFF0, and .lit loads at 0x1A7C80.
• The assert string is at overlay+0xd18, a unique copy.

The likely reason the search comes back empty is that the code reaching that string does not go through $gp -- or reaches a copy in another section. The decomp's assert-message-names.tsv gives 0x002db350 for level 0, which is inside .lit but disassembles to a function epilogue (jr $ra / addiu $sp, $sp, 0x70), so those are code locations, not string addresses, and they are not yet traced to the assert either.

tools/overlay-anchors does the anchor search and is dependency-free. Its correctly-ordered result for the collision string is zero, and it now carries a comment explaining the byte order, since that is precisely the part that was wrong:

cargo run -q -p gc-overlay-anchors -- \
    /home/reaper/Documents/gc-extracted/level0/overlay.bin \
    "Camera_CollPrimTest WARNING!"

Next step, if collision is still worth it: find how the assert string is actually addressed -- a %hi/%lo split that does not straddle zero, a pointer table, or simply the right section -- before assuming a $gp relative load.

What this project did not give up

Surveyed against the open items: no volume structures, no TieTex/tie vertex layouts, no SBlk/DAW record fields, no wavelet tables. Collision has the API but not the data. It is a guide to the code, not a replacement for reading it.

The tie vertex's selector byte, and what slot 3 is not

i16[3] is called the layout selector because its high byte partitions the elements. Splitting the 95,612 elements of levels 0-2 by that byte:

high byte	elements	share
0x00	89,341	93.4%
0x03	5,344	5.6%
the other 144 values	927	1.0%

146 distinct selector values in all -- not a two-way switch but a long tail behind one dominant case, and the second case is not 0x01.

Inside the ordinary layout, i16[3] is not a coordinate:

distinct values    201
range              0 ..= 254

201 distinct values inside a byte's range, with 0 the most common, is an index. So the "selector" and the index are not two independent halves of a field that happens to share a slot -- it is one byte: the low byte is the index, the high byte is the layout tag, and the ordinary layout simply never sets the high byte. Asserted in tie_vertex_element_is_16_bytes_with_fixed_texcoords.

This was nearly measured wrong. A first pass gated the range on w >= 0 rather than on (w >> 8) == 0, which let in the other layouts' large positive values and produced "564 distinct values in 0..=32664" -- a number that looks like a coordinate and is really the union of two populations. The selector byte is the thing to gate on, which is the same lesson as the collision byte-order bug: the filter is part of the claim.

The remaining slots, all in the ordinary layout:

slot	distinct	range	reads as
i16[0..2]	10.7k-13.2k each	full i16	position, unproven
i16[3]	201	0..=254	index, asserted
i16[4], i16[5]	1,759 / 1,626	full i16	texcoords
i16[6]	1,181	4096 in 91.8%	unnamed
i16[7]	226	0 in 88.9%	unnamed

i16[6]/i16[7] are not a fixed-point pair, and the "both are multiples of 4096" score is an artifact worth naming: 86.5% of elements have both divisible by 4096, against 84.3% expected if the two residues were independent -- an enrichment of 1.0x, i.e. exactly chance. They look like a fixed-point pair only because their two dominant values, 4096 and 0, are both multiples of 4096. Strip the constants and the rest is not: of the 7,316 elements where i16[6] differs from 4096, only 36.7% are still multiples, and of the 9,905 where i16[7] differs from 0, one is. The disc test already refused to call it a texcoord for this reason; that caution is now quantified.

i16[0..2] are the vertex positions

The three slots ahead of the index were "unproven position" for want of a test that could fail. There is one available on the disc alone, with a built-in control.

LOD 1 and LOD 2 of a tie class are the same object at two levels of detail. Anything that locates a vertex in that object's own geometry is therefore shared between the two blocks, while a different class' LOD is an unrelated object. So: intersect the sets of i16[0..2] triples, same class versus different class, and if positions are what is in those slots the first number should be large and the second should be at zero.

Levels 0-5, ordinary-layout elements only:

same class, LOD1 vs LOD2      96.1%   over 107 classes, 107 of them nonzero
different class, control       0.4%   over 2,144 pairs

A factor of 240. Per level the same-class figure runs 94.4% (level 0), 97.9% (1), 98.1% (2), 96.7% (3), 96.8% (4), and the control never exceeds 1.0% except for one level-1 pair at 45.9% -- two classes in that level sharing most of their geometry, which is what duplicate or variant models should look like, and is reported rather than excluded.

Asserted in tie_vertex_slots_0_to_2_are_shared_positions, including the separation ratio (same > 20 * diff) so a change that collapsed both numbers would fail rather than pass twice.

What this rules out is the important part. An index, a handle, or any per-vertex counter would not be shared at 96% between two independently built LOD meshes, and would not sit at 0.4% between two objects. Combined with 10.7k-13.2k distinct values per slot across the full i16 range, i16[0..2] are a position in the object's own frame. The scale and the axis order remain unnamed -- nothing here says whether these are centimetres, and the axis order is unconstrained because nothing here assumes one.

The element now reads:

+0x00  i16[0]   position x        (unproven axis order and scale)
+0x02  i16[1]   position y
+0x04  i16[2]   position z
+0x06  u8       index, 0..=254
+0x07  u8       layout tag, 0 in 93.4% of elements
+0x08  i16[4]   texcoord u
+0x0a  i16[5]   texcoord v
+0x0c  i16[6]   unnamed
+0x0e  i16[7]   unnamed

One caveat worth keeping visible: a test that prints a fraction with {:.1}% and forgets the * 100 reports "1.0%" for 99.4%. That happened here, in the diagnostic line only -- the assertions compare fractions and were always right -- but it is the same family of error as everything else in this log: the readout disagreeing with the claim.

Tie slots 3, 6 and 7: what they are not

Having established that i16[0..2] are positions, the remaining slots were attacked with two more measurements rather than by inspection.

Does slot 3 index a skeleton?

i16[3] holds 201 distinct values in 0..=254, and 50 distinct values within a single draw packet (median, 1,804 records). A material or texture-set index would be constant per packet, so it is per vertex -- which invites the obvious reading: tie objects are skinned, and slot 3 is a joint index.

That reading is wrong. If it named a joint, vertices sharing it would sit together. They do not:

mean pairwise distance, same slot-3 value        14,481
mean pairwise distance, different slot-3 value  13,795
ratio different/same                              0.95x
control: same position-x bucket                   8,105

Vertices sharing a slot-3 value are if anything marginally farther apart than vertices differing in it -- 0.95x, the wrong side of neutral, though not far enough to claim much on its own. The control shows the measurement works: bucket by position-x and pairs collapse to 8,105, half the global distance.

So slot 3 is not a skin index. It is also not shared across LODs: 75.3% same-class against a 78.7% control, i.e. no signal at all. Per-vertex, in 0..=254, correlated with neither the geometry it sits in nor the detail level. It is not understood, and no reading is offered here. A per-vertex phase would fit the arithmetic, but that is a guess and is labelled as one.

Slots 6 and 7 are mostly not per-vertex

Distinct values per draw packet, median over 1,804 records:

slot	median	constant for the whole packet
i16[0..2]	13-17	0%
i16[4], i16[5]	6, 4	0%
i16[6]	2	43%
i16[7]	4	34%

i16[6] and i16[7] take a single value across the entire packet in well over a third of records, and two or three values in the median. Whatever they are, they are usually a property of the packet rather than of the vertex -- consistent with the 91.8%/88.9% dominance of 4096 and 0 respectively. They are left unnamed.

A note on why the per-slot LOD test does not generalise

Run across all eight slots, the LOD1/LOD2 overlap test discriminates only on i16[0..2]:

slot	same class	control	ratio
i16[0]	97.0%	3.0%	32x
i16[1]	96.7%	3.2%	30x
i16[2]	96.4%	6.0%	16x
i16[3]	75.3%	78.7%	1x
i16[4..7]	68-91%	52-79%	1x

The other slots come from small value sets -- 226 to 1,759 distinct values across a level -- so two arbitrary sets of that size overlap heavily whether or not the field means anything. The test's power came from i16[0..2] being the only slots with tens of thousands of distinct values. A passing result from a method that has run out of discriminative power is not a passing result, and the 1x rows are recorded so the table is not later mistaken for nine confirmations.

The SBlk head: four constants, one unidentified word

The sound extent's 24-byte head was parsed but not characterised. Across all 27 levels the SBlk region opens identically for its first twelve bytes:

+0x00  "SBlk"
+0x04  1
+0x08  4
+0x0c  "DAW\0"
+0x10  0
+0x14  varies

+0x14 is the only part that differs between levels, and it differs with its low sixteen bits zero on all 27, leaving 0x0092..=0x0103 -- 146 to 259.

That is the shape of a record count, and it tracks the SBlk body length at close to 100 bytes per unit. It is not one:

body / field_14      91.2 .. 110.8 across the 27 levels
any stride 0..80 making body = stride * word + constant exactly:  no

A near-miss at 100 bytes/record is exactly the kind of thing that hardens into a name the next time somebody glances at it, so the test asserts the negative alongside the positive: if a stride ever makes the relation exact on all 27, the test fails and asks for the record size to be revisited.

Asserted in sound_bank_sblk_head_is_constant_apart_from_one_word, which checks the four constants individually so a real deviation names which moved, the zero low half, the value range, and the absence of a fixed stride.

The DAW region begins with sixteen zero bytes and then block-structured data with 16-byte periodicity and slowly varying nibbles, consistent with block compressed audio. It is not decoded.

Two notes on how this was measured. Reading the level 0 head directly from a scratch script gave a field order that the parser disagreed with, because the constructor bound format_tag with a let before the two words that precede it in the file -- consuming bytes 4..8 and shifting everything after. The struct literal named the fields in the right order; the statements did not. It is fixed with a comment saying so, since "read the lets in file order" is the kind of thing that gets undone.

Volumes: a candidate table, and why it is not yet called one

Volumes were the only asset type never located at all, so this is a search report rather than a result.

Ruled out first: there is no engine-side name. No level file contains the string Volume outside UI text ("Music volume", "Volume de la musique") and Italian item descriptions. So the format cannot be identified by a label and must be found structurally.

gameplay.bin on disc is the already-decompressed level gameplay data. Its head is a count (336 on level 0) and then 16-byte records from byte 416. Those records carry (type, pad, offset, id); the id field groups them, each id having exactly two records pointing into two parallel offset arrays. The offsets they point at resolve into a text pool -- the first ones land mid-string in dialogue ("it Megacorp Lab"), so this is the dialogue and class-dispatch side of the file, not geometry.

The structural hit is a table of 144-byte float records. Level 0 has one at 799204:

20 records of 144 bytes, 19 populated and one all-zero terminator
34-35 of every record's 36 float slots are world-plausible
+0x0c holds a world position, varying per record:

  [0] (206.5, 284.1, 116.0)     [6] (244.0, 407.2, 128.0)
  [1] (219.3, 247.0, 107.5)     [7] (265.3, 443.7,  13548.6)
  [2] (248.2, 198.4,  51.8)     [8] (185.1, 282.6, 104.9)
  [3] (247.2, 203.6,  82.4)     [9] (185.8, 282.7, 102.6)
  [4] (155.7, 372.7, 121.1)    [10] (260.8, 423.6, 130.9)
  [5] (265.0, 445.3, 131.7)    [11] (247.0, 211.5, 100.6)

A 144-byte record with world-space positions and float radii is exactly the shape a volume trigger region should have, and a matching table exists in every level examined (levels 0-9), each preceded by an all-zero record, with counts from 23 to 612.

It is not called volumes here. Nothing yet ties this table to volumes specifically. It could equally be camera bounds, spawn points, or path nodes -- all of which would present 144-byte float records with world positions and no label. The distinguishing evidence has not been gathered, and the honest state is candidate.

Two detector bugs worth recording

Both were mine, and both produced confident nonsense before being caught.

1. The first validity test accepted zero as a world-plausible float. Every zero-filled region then scores perfectly, and the cross-level check returned runs of 225 to 1,514 records -- obviously padding. Requiring non-zero floats (>=20 of 36) immediately separated real tables from memory.
2. The stride claim rested on four eyeballed offsets 144 apart. Gap 144 was not in the top eight gaps of the detector that found them; it survived because three consecutive observations agreed, not because the measurement supported it. The corrected detector then found longer runs, which is the opposite of what the eyeball version claimed.

The same shape as every other correction in this log: a clean, small, plausible number read as conclusive because it was not checked against a control that could have disagreed.

The reference that did not generalise

Level 0's data.bin -- the level's file descriptor -- contains the value 799204 exactly once, at 0xab6360, and 799204 is byte-for-byte the offset of the 20-record candidate table above. A single 4-byte match in 13.3 MB has a chance expectation of about 0.003, which is suggestive enough to be worth checking properly rather than assuming.

It does not hold up. Taking each level's own best 144-byte table and searching that level's own data.bin:

level   candidate offset   records   references found (chance ~0.0035)
  0        1,810,724          32      0
  1        1,884,884         386      0
  2        2,066,804         224      0
  3        2,438,228         365      0
  4        2,677,780         114      0
  5        1,255,780          14      0
  6        2,496,020         115      0
  7        2,062,072         311      0

Not one of the eight is referenced. The level 0 match at 0xab6360 sits in a neighbourhood of high-entropy bytes, and level 0's own best table -- a different offset, 32 records, not the 20-record one -- is not referenced either. So the single hit does not generalise and is most likely coincidence.

The consequence is worth stating plainly because it retracts what the previous section implied: nothing links a 144-byte float table to volumes. The table is reached by walking structure rather than by an explicit pointer, so the approach that would have settled it does not work, and the candidate stands exactly where it did.

What would settle it, and none of these are cheap:

• The game's own volume code, which has the same byte-order problem as the collision anchor did -- a GP-relative string search returning nothing.
• Ground truth: a count of level 0's trigger volumes from a map or a guide, to match against a table's population.
• A correlation with a named class, since gameplay.bin resolves ids through its dispatch records. If an id in the candidate resolved to a class whose name is a volume trigger, that would be decisive. No class name containing "volume" exists on the disc, which is why this is not available.

The overlay's load base, from its own profiler table (2026-10-11)

Range measured: all 27 levels' overlays.

Method: the overlay carries the game's profiler menu definition -- a run of 8-byte-padded names (normal, camera, cam+chr, volume, bars, render, mobys, ties, shrubs, cpu/gpu, occl, ...) followed by runs of absolute RAM addresses that point back at those same names. On every level the four addresses after normal/camera/cam+chr/volume, each minus its target name's overlay offset, give the same number: 1,735,792.

That number is field_00 - 16, where field_00 is the header word that previously read 1,735,808 on all 27 levels with no meaning attached. So the overlay is loaded with its 16-byte header stripped: overlay offset X sits at RAM X + 1,735,792. OverlayHeader::ram_address carries it.

Confirmed, not only derived. The same bases were checked in PCSX2's RAM: level 0's 0x1acf80 holds "normal\0camera\0cam+chr\0volume\0", byte-identical to overlay 0x5310, and 0x5310 + 1735792 == 0x1acf80. All four names land where the overlay's own table says. gc-trace verify-overlay-base runs the check.

The overlay is relocated, not copied. Only 37.67% of level 0's overlay is byte-identical at the predicted base, and the 256-entry sine table -- at overlay 0xb650c -- is not at 0xb650c + base. So the base locates the overlay's image, but individual tables inside it move. That is the shape of a loader applying relocations, and it means the base is necessary but not sufficient for reading the game's tables.

The value of the base is that any overlay offset can now be carried to a RAM address, which is the prerequisite for reading the game's live level state -- the thing the tie relocation and the tfrag lighting checks had to work around.

Note the profiler table's own vocabulary, since it is the first named structure in the overlay: volume is one of the game's profiling categories, so volumes are a real subsystem. It does not locate the data.

Chunk records: what the stride table settles, and one signature it does not

Walked every chunk on all 27 levels and grouped by its six-byte header signature:

1,506 chunks, 34,415 records, 74 distinct signatures
55 distinct strides, from 52 to 640
every one of those 55 strides is a multiple of 4
73 of 74 signatures use exactly ONE stride

The single exception, asserted rather than skipped so that "every type is uniform" cannot quietly stop being true:

signature [75, 42, ef, f2, 71, b5]   strides {76, 92, 104}

This is the variable-length type the module documentation already referred to indirectly. It is now named by its signature and pinned to those three strides exactly. Everything else is a fixed-stride array, which is the structural fact that makes per-type field decoding tractable at all: a record's field offsets are the same for every record of its type.

The 4-byte alignment is a real result rather than an artefact of how the stride was inferred. A stride recovered from one chunk's first-to-second record delta could inherit alignment from where that chunk happened to sit; collecting all 55 distinct strides across every type and requiring all of them to be divisible by 4 rules that out, because an off-by-one in one signature would show up.

A record layout that did not generalise

One type looked like a clean find. Signature [53, c4, 6c, d7, 9a, 43], stride 108, 810 records, 63 of 108 byte positions constant:

+0x00 .. +0x30   48 bytes varying per record
+0x30 .. +0x6c   60 bytes that are ZERO in every record
+0x68            0x00010000, constant

A fixed data block followed by a permanently empty region reads like an inline buffer that this type never uses, and that would have been a tidy field story.

It does not generalise. Requiring a contiguous always-zero run and checking stride == live span + zero run across every type with 50+ records per chunk gave 0 of 9. The zero tail belongs to that one type and means nothing general. Recorded because "48 bytes then 60 dead bytes" is specific enough to look like a layout and would otherwise be rediscovered and over-read.

Neither of these decodes any record's fields. What is now settled is the shape the decoder has to handle: uniform stride per type, 4-byte aligned, with one named exception carrying three strides.

Tie: the "vertex positions" claim does not survive a stride test (2026-10-11)

Range measured: level 0, one class, one 58-quadword packet region.

The claim from earlier reads, i16[0..2] of a 16-byte element are the vertex positions, and 95,612 vertices were "measured" on that reading. A raw dump of one packet kills it:

0000df20  00900000  075006c0  094000c0
1f736c63  00544848  00281506  0d40001b
0d400a90  ffff00ff  00010ef0  80004253
4846a9e3  48a44001  47f40000  46d0b0de
0000ee50  00c00000  08a007e0  099000f0   <- group repeats at +64
0f807e72  01484848  00321208  0cf00017
0cf00ab0  ffff00ff  00020e60  80002e46
4858389a  48a44001  47f40000  46d7bbe3

The first 16 bytes are not a vertex at all -- they are the packet's own header material: 0x0000df20 is not a coordinate and the following words are the vif/material words. The 16-byte group at +0 recurs at +64 and +128 with identical structure (a small i16, then 0, 0, then an index) and its three instances carry the values -8416, -4528, -784. So the stride is not 16 throughout: some elements are 4 bytes, some 16, and the run length varies.

The period-4 marker does not generalise either. Grouping every fourth 16-byte element by the high byte of i16[3] gives marker 0 (n 9,204), 0x48 (n 4,140), 0xff (n 4,912) and 0x01 (n 1,137), and only 0x48 shows a plausible position signature -- i16[1] extent 425 against i16[0] and i16[2] at 65,535, which is the height axis of a flat object. But the same marker 0 bucket has all three slots spanning the full i16 range, so the bucket does not select a layout.

Two candidate vertex bases were measured and neither clusters. With packet + vert_ofs the per-class extents run median 64,976 and p90 65,517; with class + vert_ofs they run median 55,213 and p90 64,352. Both span the whole i16 range, whereas a real position triple in a level-class local frame must span a fraction of it. vert_ofs + vert_size + scissor_size is the region length, so the region bounds are right -- what is wrong is the element layout inside it.

Consequence for earlier claims, stated plainly. The 95,612-vertex measurement and the 82.5% texcoord fixedness figure were both computed on the 16-byte reading and are not superseded by this -- they are untested against the correct stride, which is not yet known. The LOD1/LOD2-sharing test (96.1% same class against 0.4% different) remains the strongest evidence that the first slots are positional, and it is insensitive to stride.

Most of the chunk container is level-independent

Comparing every chunk record against the same record index in the other 26 levels, across all 74 signatures:

65 of 74 signatures: every record byte-identical in all 27 levels
 9 of 74 signatures: level-specific
 0 ragged -- no signature appeared with different record counts per level

The nine that vary:

[5d 44 13]  [75 42 ef]  [7f 44 ee]  [82 c4 2f]  [96 c3 37]
[a2 44 a5]  [c6 c3 ef]  [df c3 ea]  [f3 c4 b9]

This reframes the whole container. 65 of 74 chunk types are static tables the game ships unchanged in every level -- constants and lookups, not level content. The largest by record count are all in that group: [38 c4 7e] at stride 328 with 90 records per level, [a9 c4 d8] at 308 with 90, [3d c4 9e] at 368 with 77. Each contributes the same bytes to all 27 levels.

The practical consequence is about method. For a level-specific type, comparing levels is a powerful lever: a field that changes with the level is identifiable by correlating it with something known. For the other 65 there is nothing to compare -- there is one copy of the data, repeated 27 times -- so they have to be decoded structurally, from what the bytes are, not from how they vary. Any future decoder that reaches for per-level comparison as its first tool will find it useless on the majority of the container.

[75 42 ef] appears in the level-specific list, and it is also the one signature with three strides. A type that is both variable-length and level-varying is the most informative one in the container, and is where per-type field decoding should start.

How this was found, and the near-miss before it

The first look at one signature ([53 c4 6c d7 9a 43], stride 108) showed 45 of 108 byte positions varying within a chunk, and 810 records all distinct -- which reads like per-record data. Counting distinct values per u32 slot across all 810 records contradicted that immediately: 29 to 30 distinct values across 27 levels, i.e. roughly one per level.

Both readings were wrong, and the resolution is that they measure different things. The 45 positions vary between records within a level. The u32 distinct counts were low because the same 30 values recur in every level. Comparing record i across levels settled it: all 30 records are byte-identical in all 27 levels, and zero byte positions vary across levels.

Had the u32 distinct counts been the only measurement taken, the conclusion would have been "one value per level" -- which is the opposite of the truth, and would have described a per-level parameter table that does not exist.

A parser defect: one chunk type is not fixed-stride

[75 42 ef f2 71 b5] -- the signature that is both level-specific and variable-length -- produces three chunks per level, 81 in total. Their record offsets step like this:

stride 76    deltas [76, 76, 76, 76, 76, 76, 76, 76]     uniform
stride 92    deltas [92, 88, 84, 92, 92, 92, 84, 88]     NOT uniform
stride 104   deltas [104, 104, 104, 104, 104, 104, ...] uniform

Identical on all 27 levels -- 27 chunks of each shape, three shapes, no others.

So the description "this signature has strides {76, 92, 104}" is a misdescription. It has three chunk shapes, one of which is not fixed-stride at all. The parser derives one stride per chunk and resolve slices every record at that length.

What that costs, precisely:

• Records are read at the offset table's positions, so every record starts correctly. There is no misalignment.
• But each is sliced at 92 bytes. Two of the eight are 88 bytes and two are 84, so four records over-read by 4 and 8 bytes and carry the head of the next record inside them.

Bounds checking holds -- the slices are inside the region -- so this is a correctness bug in the data, not a safety one. It is exactly the kind that produces plausible-looking fields that are offset by four bytes, which is how it would have gone unnoticed had the stride table not been collected per signature.

It also explains why this signature was flagged earlier as breaking the 8-byte alignment rule: its records genuinely are not a uniform multiple.

This is a defect in the parser, not in the data, and the right fix is for resolve to use the offset deltas rather than a single stride for a chunk whose deltas are not uniform. Recorded here first, because the assertion in chunk_type_75_ef_has_one_variable_length_chunk_per_level pins the delta sequences -- if the data ever does become uniform, the test fails and asks for the model to be revisited rather than the other way round.

A near-miss that nearly hid this

The leading u16 of these records appeared to step by exactly 0x50 (80) for all nine records of the 76-byte chunk -- a tidy, meaningful-looking pattern that would have been easy to report as "records are indexed by 80". Reading the records at their real offsets shows the lead values are b1a5, a529, 047e, a529, 04f0, a529, 0562, a529, 05d4 -- no arithmetic progression at all. The apparent 80-byte step came from comparing the wrong bytes.

1,252 chunks have non-uniform record offsets, and the cause is genuinely ambiguous

The previous section fixed on one signature. Measuring every chunk instead shows the pattern is the norm, not the exception. Taking delta = offset[i+1] - offset[i] and comparing it to the chunk's own first delta:

delta - first delta, levels 0-2, 2,953 deltas

    0  1,723        -4    549        +4    426
   -8    146        +8     32
  -12     71        +12    21
  -16     34        +16     4
  -20     27        +20     1
  -24     13

Every deviation is a multiple of 4, and most are exactly +/-4. Worst observed deviation is 24 bytes, in a 7-record chunk. 1,252 of 1,509 chunks have at least one such deviation, across 66 of the 74 signatures.

Why this does not become a fix

There are two models that produce this offset table, and they are observationally identical:

1. Records are genuinely variable-length, padded to a 4-byte boundary, with stride recording the largest.
2. Records are fixed-length at stride, and the offset table carries inter-record padding -- so the gap to the next record is the record plus some padding.

Nothing in the offset table distinguishes them. Both say where records start and both produce 92, 88, 84, 92, 92, 92, 84, 88 for the case above.

A change to resolve to slice each record against its successor implements model 1. It was written, and it broke three tests -- which is worth noting, because those three tests asserted "1,509 chunks have uniform record length" and passed because the parser forced uniformity by slicing at a single stride. They were asserting the parser's behaviour back at itself.

It was reverted. Slicing to the successor is only correct under model 1, and the evidence does not establish model 1. Shipping it would have replaced one unverified model with another, and would have silently changed 1,252 chunks' record boundaries on the strength of a guess.

What would settle it: a field inside the record whose end is independently observable -- a terminator, a count that implies a length, or a field whose value is known and whose position therefore pins the end. Under model 2 those bytes are padding and will be uniform or zero; under model 1 they are data and will not be. For [75 42 ef] the 8 bytes at issue begin a0 00 27 20 in both the tail of one slice and the head of the next -- which is arithmetic, not evidence, since the two views are of the same bytes.

The uniform model stays in place, the ambiguity is recorded here and in [resolve]'s docs, and the existing 1,509-of-1,509 assertion stands as a statement about what the parser does, not about what the disc contains.

Audit: which claims were contaminated by the over-read?

The record-boundary fix changed the length of records in 1,252 of 1,509 chunks, so every committed claim computed over record bytes had to be re-checked. All of them:

claim	reads	verdict
1,509 chunks, 34,491 records	offsets, not records	unaffected
1,262 chunks with a leading-byte bucket rule	record byte 0	unaffected
1,235 chunks with an index rule	record bytes 1-2	unaffected
34,432 of 34,491 records 8-byte aligned	record byte 0	unaffected
55 distinct strides, all multiples of 4	offsets	unaffected
moby class IDs in one slot per chunk type	record bytes	retracted
17-21% of byte positions constant	record bytes	survives

Only the claims that scanned across a record's body were at risk, and of those one was retracted (the class-ID slot) and one survived (the constant-byte statistic). The rest read the first three bytes of a record, which the over-read never touched -- an over-read appends to the end, so a claim about a record's start was never in danger. That asymmetry is why the damage was contained, and it is the reason to prefer claims anchored at record starts.

The surviving one is worth stating precisely because it was the obvious candidate for contamination. Re-measured with each record bounded by its successor, and comparing only the span every record in the chunk has:

per level, % of byte positions constant within a chunk
  lowest  level 8   16.7%
  highest           20.0%

Still inside the documented band, now asserted rather than only described, in chunk_records_share_a_layout_measured_by_constant_byte_positions.

The over-read bug was unique to one format, and why

Searched for the pattern that caused it -- a record length derived from the first difference between two offsets:

grep -rn "\[1\] - \[0\]" crates/gc-formats/src/*.rs
  crates/gc-formats/src/chunks.rs:357   (offsets[1] - offsets[0])

One hit, in the one parser that walks an explicit offset table.

The other parsers slice contiguous regions with chunks_exact -- shrub's 8-byte palette records, tie's 16-byte packet headers, tfrag's 4-byte tables. There, a length cannot run past the next element, because chunks_exact derives each boundary from the region's own length rather than from a sample of the spacing. Shrub's mesh packets are named by an explicit offset and size table, so they carry their length rather than inferring it.

So the damage was bounded by a structural property: only a format with an offset table and a derived stride can over-read, and exactly one format had both.

The general guard is now positive rather than a comment. chunk_records_neither_overlap_nor_leave_gaps asserts, across all 27 levels, that every record except the last is exactly its own offset delta long, and that 1,509 chunks contain 1,252 with ragged deltas. A regression to a single sampled stride fails immediately and says which chunk and which record.

CORRECTED: the tie vertex region splits in two, but not into "VIF and flat"

This section previously read bit 31 of the region's first word as "this is a VIF code word", and told a two-encoding story on it -- half VIF packets, half flat. The split is real. The identification is not.

The stride retraction found the vertex region is not a uniform array -- some runs 4 bytes, some 16, run length varying. The split that accounts for it is visible in the region's first word: a VIF code word has bit 31 set.

first word has bit 31 set      2,007
first word has bit 31 clear    2,102
(levels 0-5, every record with vert_size > 0)

The two kinds look like this:

flat, class 0 rec 0, 1024 bytes          VIF, class 1 rec 0
  +0   0x27667942  0x0062fbf1              +0   0xf5c1a3c5  CODE cmd 0x75 num 193
  +8   0x0000f000  0x00001000              +4   0x00aef9c2
  +16  0x67264af1  0x005f0585              +8   0x10001000
  +24  0x1000e000  0x00001000              +12  0x00001000
  ...  16-byte units repeating, third word
       walking down f000, e000, f000,
       d000, d000, c000, c000; last
       word constant at 0x00001000

So roughly half of all tie records begin with a word that has bit 31 set and half do not. The split is overwhelmingly not a function of vert_size -- 62 of the 72 values carry both kinds -- so "short objects are one thing, long ones another" is false, which is the rule a decoder would otherwise reach for.

They are not VIF streams

Bit 31 set is exactly what a VIF code word has, and that was the whole basis for calling them VIF. Walking them as VIF packets says otherwise. Levels 0-2, 914 records:

walk reaches the region end              17
walk dies after exactly ONE packet     1,571
packets before dying: min 0, median 1, max 4

tfrag walks VIF the same way -- VifCode::decode, then num * 4 payload words -- and reaches the end of its lists every time. The walk is not the problem. These regions are not VIF packet streams, so bit 31 is set on whatever this word actually is, which remains unknown.

The original example quoted 0xf5c1a3c5 as a code word with cmd 0x75 num 193. Decoding one word as a packet header says nothing about whether the next 193 words are its payload, and here they are not.

Both findings are now asserted in the same test, the split and the walk failure, so that if these ever do turn out to be VIF the test fails and says so rather than the two quietly drifting apart.

This does not settle the stride. It says the region needs to be dispatched on the encoding before anything inside it can be read, and it explains why the flat reading fit some records well -- i16[6] being 0x1000 and i16[7] 0x0000 at the end of each 16-byte unit is the (-1, 0) / (1, 0) corner pair that a texture coordinate produces in 12.4 fixed point, which is where the earlier texcoord reading came from and why it looked convincing on the records that are flat.

Asserted in tie_vertex_regions_split_between_vif_and_flat.

RETRACTED: the tie texcoord field is at i16[4]/i16[5]

The 73.6% figure above, and the claim that slot pair is the texcoord, do not survive. Two separate problems.

It was measured on a reading that has since been retracted. The 73.6% was computed across all records at a 16-byte element stride. e5cd3df established that the stride is not 16 -- half the records are VIF packets and half are flat -- so the numbers describe neither population cleanly.

And on the flat records, the fixed-point reading fails. The question that separates a 12.4 fixed-point texcoord from anything else is how many of a slot's distinct values are multiples of 4096 at all. For a texcoord it is all of them. Measured on the flat records only, levels 0-2, 930 records and 47,909 vertices:

slot        distinct   of which are multiples of 4096
i16[4]         1,488      16
i16[5]         1,261      16
i16[6]           966       4
i16[7]           489       5

One percent. The dominant pairs do look like UV corners -- (0,0) 5,773, (0,4096) 5,500, (4096,4096) 5,059, (4096,0) 4,521 -- and that is exactly why the claim was persuasive. But it is a statement about the most frequent values, not about the field, and 1,472 of the 1,488 values in i16[4] are not multiples of 4096 at all.

This is the same failure shape as the moby class-ID artifact, one level down: a small set of dominant values that happen to satisfy the test, scored as though the whole population did. The 73.6% is the arithmetic being right about the popular values and the conclusion being wrong about the field.

So: on a flat record, i16[4]/i16[5] are not identified, and the texcoord slot of a tie vertex is unknown. What survives from the original section is the boundary work -- vert_ofs + vert_size + scissor_size is the region length -- and the LOD1/LOD2 sharing result, which is stride-insensitive.

The SBlk body head: the DAW size, twice

The body after the 24-byte head opens with twelve words, and six of them are settled across all 27 levels:

word   value                 note
0      varies per level      not identified; 27 distinct
1      60                    constant
2      varies per level      not identified; 23 distinct
3      0                     constant
4      daw_size              == the header's daw_size, exactly
5      daw_size              the same value again
6      0                     constant
7      0                     constant
8      0                     constant
9      127                   constant
10     1                     constant
11     0                     constant

Level 0's words 4 and 5 are both 1,482,000, and daw_size is 1,482,000.

The pointer that was not one

Words 4 and 5 were briefly recorded as pointers into the DAW region. They are not. The test that promoted them was "does this value fall inside [daw_offset, daw_offset + daw_size)", and the DAW region is ~1.5 MB starting near the front of a ~1.5 MB extent -- so almost any plausible 32-bit word lands in it, and 1,482,000 is just under the top of exactly that range.

A range test is not an identification. The claim that survives is equality with daw_size, which is exact on all 27 levels and is asserted. That is the fourth time in this session that a plausible reading of one number has had to be withdrawn in favour of a claim that can fail.

Word 0 is worth one note: levels 1 and 4 hold 13,042,052 and 13,042,054, two apart, while their daw_sizes differ by 63,504. Whatever it is, it is not a size.

Asserted in sound_bank_sblk_body_head_carries_the_daw_size_twice. The remainder of the body -- a per-sound record table -- is still undecoded.

The decomp names the collision functions, but their addresses are not ours

OpenRAC/rac2-gc-decomp names both collision entry points:

Camera_CollPrimTest   0x001E7A50   camera-to-world boundary check
MB_CheckCollPill      0x001E8890   pill/capsule check for moby instances

These looked like the collision unblock: a named function at a known address is exactly what the $gp string search failed to produce. They are not usable. Checked against four levels -- 0, 5, 13, 26 -- with parse_overlay_sections:

Camera_CollPrimTest @ 0x1e7a50  ->  section 1, kind 8 (NOBITS)
MB_CheckCollPill    @ 0x1e8890  ->  section 1, kind 8 (NOBITS)

Both land inside the level program's zero-filled section. Every byte there is zero, and the following 256 bytes contain no non-zero byte at all. Code cannot be there, and both addresses are in the same place on all four levels.

So those addresses belong to a different address space than a parsed level overlay -- most likely the boot executable's own layout, or the v2.00 build, both of which that repository also covers. SCUS_972.68 is USA v1.01 and our disc matches it exactly, but that fixes the disc, not which program's address space a symbol address is quoted in.

This closes the shortest route to the collision cell layout that the decomp appeared to offer, and it closes it for a checkable reason rather than a vague one. The route that remains is the one already recorded: find how the code addresses the Camera_CollPrimTest assert string, which is not by a $gp-relative load.

A route into .text, and one thing the decomp's assert table does not mean

The decomp gained 13 commits (12,375 lines, almost all src/). Nothing in it names a collision data structure, so the format is not handed over. Two things are usable.

assert-message-names.tsv addresses are code, in .text

The table maps each assert's name to an address, 25 overlays each. For level 0, CameraCollPrimTestGridOutOfBounds is 0x002db350.

That address is not the assert call and not the string. It is:

0x002db350: jr              $ra
0x002db354: addiu           $sp, $sp, 0x70
0x002db358: nop

an epilogue -- the address lands on the last instruction group of the function before it. The 0x70 is the frame being torn down; 0x002db35c immediately after is a new prologue (addiu $sp, $sp, -0x80).

So the table's addresses are function-ish locations in .text (level 0's 0x002db350 is well past .lit, which ends at 0x001b165c, and inside 0x002a3b80..0x00447900). They are not string references, which is why the earlier "$gp-relative search returns zero" result is now explained from the other side: the string is in .lit at 0x001a8998 and the code is in .text five megabytes away.

What is actually in that function

Immediately before the epilogue:

0x002db2dc: lwc1   $f20, 0xc($s0)
0x002db2ec: add.s   $f20, $f20, $f21
0x002db2f0: c.olt.s $f0, $f20
0x002db304: jal     0x2db4b8          <- the assert call
0x002db308: mov.s   $f12, $f21
0x002db30c: bnez    $v0, 0x2db32c
0x002db314: lw      $v0, ($s1)       <- a count
0x002db318: addiu   $s2, $s2, 1
0x002db31c: slt     $v0, $s2, $v0
0x002db320: bnez    $v0, 0x2db2cc     <- loop back
0x002db324: addiu   $s0, $s0, 0x30    <- stride 48 bytes

A loop over records of 48 bytes, reading a float at +12 and accumulating, guarded by a count at ($s1). lui $at, 0x3f80 / mtc1 $at, $f22 sets f22 to 1.0f, which is a minimum-height clamp.

It is not the collision grid, and the signature says so

This is checked rather than assumed. Camera_CollPrimTest is declared Camera_CollPrimTest(void *prim, void *grid) -- two pointer arguments, which in MIPS arrive in $a0 and $a1.

The function's prologue is 0x002db078: addiu $sp, $sp, -0x70, matching the +0x70 teardown at 0x002db354. The two instructions after it are:

0x002db078: addiu $sp, $sp, -0x70
0x002db07c: lw    $v1, -0x3f4c($v0)    <- $v0, not an incoming argument
0x002db080: addiu $a0, $zero, 0x6f     <- $a0 set to a constant

$v0 is caller-saved scratch, not an argument register, and $a0 is immediately overwritten with the constant 111. No void * reaches this function, so it is not Camera_CollPrimTest whatever the assert table labels.

It reads four consecutive words from boot memory instead -- 0x1a7348, 0x1a734c, 0x1a7350, 0x1a7354 -- all below the level program base at 0x001A7C80, which is the boot's resident region and identical in every program. That is a different data source from the collision payload, and the 48-byte stride loop belongs to whatever that structure is.

So this lead is dead, and it is dead on evidence rather than on doubt. Both routes the decomp appeared to offer are now closed:

route	status
Camera_CollPrimTest at 0x001E7A50	lands in NOBITS, all zero
CameraCollPrimTestGridOutOfBounds at 0x002db350	a function with no pointer arguments

Neither address reaches the collision parser.

And the last route is closed too: the string is never referenced

The route that remained was to find how the code addresses the assert string at 0x001a8998 in .lit. It does not address it. Level 0's program is 2,751,268 bytes; searching it for both ways an address can be materialised:

address low half            0x8998    0 occurrences, word-aligned or not
$gp-relative offset         0x99a8    0 occurrences, word-aligned or not
exact 32-bit 0x001a8998               0 occurrences

The method is validated by a positive control in the same run: the .lit load base's own low half, 0x7c80, occurs exactly once, word-aligned. A search that finds that will find any real reference.

So no instruction and no data word in the retail level program references the collision assert string's address. Not by lui/addiu, not by a literal pointer, not by a table entry. The string text is present in .lit at overlay+0xd18, and the same text also appears in the boot binary at file offset 0xA9558, but nothing points at either.

The reading that fits: the assert is compiled out in retail and the string is dead data. Debug string pools routinely keep messages whose only user was a #if-ed-out assertion. The decomp's own table lists this name because it recovered it from the string, not because it found code calling it.

That is the last route recorded in this file, and it is closed. Reaching the collision cell layout from the disc would require a different kind of evidence -- a build with assertions enabled, a debug listing, or an independent description of R&C2's collision cell -- none of which is on this disc.

Which is the honest summary of collision after all of it: the payload is verbatim in RAM, it does not walk as fixed-stride cells, the disc-side segmentation is exhausted, the string that would have led to the routine is unreferenced, and both of the decomp's addresses are dead ends.

The disassembler needed fixing first

tools/overlay-anchors called disasm_all over the whole window, which stops at the first word capstone will not decode. In code regions that is almost immediately, so every window came back five instructions long -- which is why earlier attempts at this produced nothing. It now walks four bytes at a time, prints .word for anything undecodable, and reports the failure count.

The undecodable words here are VU1 microcode (0x0260202d and friends are COP2 opcodes), which is expected and is itself informative: this function interleaves VIF-fed VU1 work with FPU arithmetic, like tfrag's.

lvl.vtbl gives the real class ids, and the old bound was wrong

lvl.vtbl is section 3 of the level program -- one of the seven sections the Phase 3 port made visible. Its records are three words:

[0]  oClass       the moby class identifier
[1]  handler      address of UpdateMoby_<oClass> in this level's .text
[2]  auxiliary    the same value for every record of a level, 26 of 27
     (level 1 has exactly one record pointing elsewhere, 0x2a5d94)

Walking all 27 levels:

5,878 records
1,163 distinct class ids
range 0 .. 0x13BA (5,050)
median 38 new ids contributed per level

The decomp's docs/MOBY-DISPATCH-TABLES.md describes exactly this layout, and independently notes that 5,598 of 5,788 handlers are preceded by a jr ra within three words -- so the addresses are function entries, not arbitrary words.

Why this retires the earlier bound

LevelCoreHeader::moby_classes.count is 238 on level 0. 1,135 of the 1,163 class ids -- 97.6% -- are at or above that number.

So "value < moby_classes.count" was never a test for "this is a class id". It was a test for "this is a small number". That is the mechanism behind the chunk class-ID artifact:

slot values 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15
every one is below 238
so every one scored as a hit
65536 / 238 = 275x ... and the largest such score was 305x

The bound was wrong before the artifact was noticed, and the artifact was a consequence of it. Retracting the claim for "small dominant values" was correct but incomplete -- the reason those values looked significant is that the test selected for smallness.

Re-scored against the real id set

With the game's own 1,163 ids as the validity test, no chunk slot separates:

best slot          0.375   (type f2ef4275 slot 34)
chance rate        0.018   (1,163 ids in 65,536 values)
a dozen slots      0.25 .. 0.38, with no gap between them

Twenty times chance is not nothing, but a dozen slots packed into the same band with nothing above them is what a broad property looks like, not a field. The positive finding stands and is now usable: the class-id space is known, and it is not the class count. Asserted in moby_class_ids_come_from_lvl_vtbl_not_from_the_class_count.

oClass is a global identifier, and not an index into the class table

Two axes that are easy to conflate, and are not the same thing:

lvl.vtbl oClass        1,163 distinct across 27 levels, largest 5,050
core_index moby_classes.count   136 .. 259 per level

1,133 of the 1,163 identifiers are at or above the largest per-level class table. So oClass cannot index that table -- nearly every identifier would fall off the end. They are different axes: the vtbl names a type of moby, the class table lists the models a level instantiates.

The identifier space is shared rather than renumbered per level: 1,163 distinct values come out of 5,878 records, and level 0 contributes 234 while levels 1-8 contribute 72, 69, 77, 54, 41, 68 and 28 -- each level roughly its own share, not one level dominating. An earlier note here said "most of the game's classes appear in the first level"; the data says 20%, and the assertion is written to fail if that ever changes.

The per-level counts are close but not equal -- level 0 has 238 class-table entries and 234 vtbl identifiers -- and the decomp reports the positional correspondence as refuted. Nothing here depends on that.

The useful consequence is for moby_anim, which has been blocked on class records: a class can now be recognised across levels by its identifier, and the set of identifiers the game actually uses is known rather than guessed. Asserted in vtbl_class_ids_are_global_and_do_not_index_the_class_table.

All three dispatch tables now decode

The level program carries three dispatch tables in its own sections. With the Phase 3 section parser they are all readable, and each divides exactly by its record width:

section  file     width  record
vtbl     lvl.vtbl     3  oClass, UpdateMoby_<oClass>, auxiliary
camvtbl  lvl.camvtbl  5  camera id, InitCamera, ActivateCamera,
                       UpdateCamera, ExitCamera
sndvtbl  lvl.sndvtbl  2  sound id, UpdateSound_<id>

camvtbl   217 records,  14 distinct ids, max 0x1B
sndvtbl    32 records,   6 distinct ids, max 0x07

The load-bearing check is the zero remainder: a wrong record width would leave a partial record on most levels rather than none, and it leaves none on any of the 27 for either table. Section sizes across the levels are 40..52 words for the camera tables and 0..8 for the sound tables.

Level 0's camera records, so the shape is visible rather than inferred:

[0] 0x0   0x4263b0 0x4233f8 0x4263b8 0x426478
[1] 0x4   0x426c78 0x427008 0x4266e8 0x4270c0
[2] 0x5   0x427ad8 0x427628 0x427ae0 0x427b38

and its sound records:

[0] 0x0   0x42ac18
[1] 0x1   0x42ad98
[2] 0x3   0x42b038

Both identifier spaces are global and shared: 217 camera records carry only 14 distinct ids and 32 sound records only 6, so levels re-use ids rather than renumbering -- the same sharing as the moby table's 1,163 distinct out of 5,822.

This is what makes the tables usable rather than merely present. A per-level dispatch entry is now addressable by a game-wide id, and the handler addresses are function entries in that level's .text -- the decomp independently checks that 5,598 of 5,788 moby handlers are preceded by a jr ra within three words.

The camera and sound handler addresses fall inside section 6 of the same overlay, which the working disassembler can read directly.

Asserted in camera_and_sound_dispatch_tables_decode_at_their_documented_widths.

The handler chain works, with two caveats and one discrepancy

With the dispatch tables decoded and the disassembler fixed, a moby handler can actually be read. Level 0's class 2, handler 0x00380a88:

0x00380a84: jal   0x2ee0d0
0x00380a88: .word 0x0240202d          <- VU1 microcode, not a decoding failure
0x00380a8c: lwc1  $f12, 0x40($s1)
0x00380a98: addiu $a0, $s0, 0x20
0x00380aa0: swc1  $f0, 0x18($s4)
0x00380ab0: swc1  $f0, 0x14($s4)

Floats read out of one structure and written back into another, with VU1 work alongside -- which is what a transform update should look like.

Two caveats before reading one

VU1 microcode is interleaved with CPU code. 0x0240202d is a COP2 opcode, not an undecodable word. A disassembly window will run .word lines that are instructions in a different processor, and a tool that counts them as failures is counting the wrong thing.

Handlers are not all independent functions. Level 0's class 2 is at 0x380a88 and class 0x0E at 0x380a90 -- eight bytes apart -- and 72 of the 5,788 records sit within 16 bytes of the one before them. So consecutive classes share one routine with per-class entry points inside it, and reading "a handler" gives a fragment, not a whole function.

And a discrepancy with the reference

docs/MOBY-DISPATCH-TABLES.md reports 5,598 of 5,788 moby handlers (96.7%) preceded by a jr ra within three words. Measured here, the same way, over the same 5,788 records: 5,488 (94.8%).

Same population, same test, 110 handlers different. Both figures confirm the premise, so nothing turns on it, and the residual is recorded rather than explained away. The reference measured on 2026-10-02 against its own pinned overlay set, so a difference in method or version is as plausible as a difference in the data, and there is no basis here for saying which. The test asserts the premise (>90%) and deliberately not either exact figure.

Asserted in moby_handlers_are_overwhelmingly_function_entries.

How many behaviours the dispatch tables actually contain

Records and behaviours are not the same number, and the difference is where one routine serves several classes. Over all 27 levels:

table     records  distinct classes  distinct handlers  handlers serving >1
vtbl        5,822             1,162               4,737                  400
camvtbl       217                14                 216                    1
sndvtbl        32                 6                  32                    0

So sharing is real but modest, and it is almost entirely in the moby table: 5,822 records collapse to 4,737 addresses, the median handler serves one class and the most-shared serves 34. The sound table is exactly one handler per record, and the camera table is one short of that.

That matches the earlier observation that 72 moby records sit within 16 bytes of their predecessor: 5,822 - 4,737 is 1,085 records sharing an address with another, and the tightest of those are adjacent in the table.

The practical figure is 4,737. A class's behaviour is not one of 5,822 routines, and looking for "the animator's function" by assuming one class means one function would search the wrong number of places.

Asserted in dispatch_tables_contain_far_fewer_behaviours_than_records, which also fails if a table ever reports more behaviours than records -- an impossibility worth pinning because it is the shape the counts would take if the record widths were wrong.

The moby instance, 256 bytes, named

The decomp carries an authentic MobyInstance layout of 0x100 bytes with every field named, and it is now transcribed into gc_formats::moby::MobyInstance with a 67-entry offset map. Two fields matter for the open items:

0x40  animSeq       animation sequence pointer
0x44  animSeqT      animation time parameter
0x48  animSpeed     playback speed
0x50  animLayers    animation layer list
0x57  jointCnt      joint count -- non-zero means the moby is skinned
0x58  jointCache    joint matrix cache
0xBC  oClass        object class id -- the dispatch key

oClass closes a loop that was open for several commits. It is the field the runtime uses to reach the lvl.vtbl handler tables, so an instance and its routine are now linked by a named offset rather than by an assumption about which axis the two tables share.

jointCnt and jointCache also settle something from earlier in this log by contradiction rather than confirmation. A tie vertex's i16[3] was tested as a skin/joint index and disproved -- vertices sharing it were 0.95x farther apart than vertices differing in it. That result stands and is unaffected: this is the moby struct, and a moby is a different object from a tie.

What this does not do is find moby_anim. It names the instance-side state -- a sequence pointer, a layer list, a joint cache -- which means the asset to locate is whatever those point at, and we still do not know where that is. The item's unblock condition is now sharper: it needs the data those pointers reference, not the struct.

Provenance and what the test can check

The layout is transcribed, not derived here, and it is not verified against disc data because it cannot be: moby instances are runtime objects and nothing of that shape is in the container. What the test asserts is what can be asserted without the bytes -- that the offsets ascend, do not overlap, and land the last field exactly on 0x100, and that o_class sits at 0xBC immediately before triggers.

Worth keeping distinct from the collision finding: that project's function addresses did not transfer, landing in NOBITS memory. A struct's field order is a different kind of claim from an address in a program's layout, so the failure of one does not impeach the other -- but the distinction is real, and PROVENANCE.md now says which is which.