Modding Discussion

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Why is it locked? I have a few tings I'd like to talk about. I've been doing some research with the game files and I've got a few questions as well.

The cutscenes have no sound embedded in them, all sound for the entire game is inside a .pck file within the folder [root]/sound/wwise_material/GeneratedSoundBanks/xbox360/
I've been sifting through that file with Hex Workshop and it appears that all the files are in WAVEXMA2 format, with the header being a big-endian "RIFX". It would appear that the files are .wav files, but when I hex out one o the chunks it doesn't seem to want to play. I've looked all over on the internet about wavexma2 and rifx and haven't found much relevant information.

I also opened up the .era files, which I think are the environments, but it all looks like a jumbled mess, I can't make heads or tails of it.

What's interesting is the talking heads that appear in-game and during some cutscenes are separate pre-rendered .bik videos.

What's funny is that the cutscenes take up 3.89GB, more than half the total data on the disk.

So, any chance of being able to talk int he Modding Discussion?

[kornman00]

Yeah, the sound bank is for their third party sound library they use. The ERA files are just archives containing the necessary game data (ie, RAD's Granny models and animations, xml definitions, etc). I took a look into archive decoding a few weeks ago but didn't get to far (not that high of a priority right now). However, an interesting thing to note is the similarity in the "locale_es-es" and "locale_hu-hu" archives. Same size, with blocks of data which are the same, but also with blocks of data which differ. Should be a nice starting point for anyone wanting to figure out how to decode (decompress\decrypt) these archives. Since there is no obvious header in them, I doubt the implementation of the X360 lzx compression library. IIRC they load the archives directly into memory, they don't cache the archive's contents (or anything for that matter) on the HDD. One way to support 'core' consoles, don't depend on the HDD at all, heh.

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

So is there no way of extracting out the sounds? I wouldvery much like to have them, some of the dialog and whatnot. Models would be cool too, but they're not that high-quality, so it's not a big deal.

As a correction to what I said though, the cutscenes have sound, just no dialog.

[kornman00]

I've tried just cutting a sound file out of the sound bank and plopping it into a 'xma' and 'xm2' file but xmaencode didn't take it. I'm pretty sure xmaencode can handle little and bit endian formats too. I just may be using an older XDK tho...

I've been doing a little comparing and it I noticed that 'inGameUI', 'loadingUI', and 'miniloader' archives are the same size in the demo and in retail. Doing a file compare you'll notice the first 1C40 bytes of each one of those files doesn't match, but then there is a same matching block following those first 1C40 file bytes. Now this either suggest the header consumes that first 1C40 bytes and that there is a common file included in each archive...or something else... ;3. I've also noticed that they use Tiger Hash for some of their archive operations.

EDIT: It's also worth noting that I've come across some TEA related code...however I don't think its the generic out-of-the-box TEA code.

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Stupid idea, but I tried replacing the RIFX header with RIFF, but no go. I really want those sound files. I've got the .bik video files for the cutscenes, now I need the dialog that goes with them.

[grimdoomer]

I can dump the entire sound block file, but they are all encoded for the 360 so that is a no go. You might be able to find some info about its encoding in the SDK docs.

As for the era archives, why would they use TEA?

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

By dumping the sound block file do you mean the sounds.pck file or each individual sound file? And what SDK? I just started getting into this stuff and I was impressed at myself for just being able to dump the game to my computer.

What is TEA? And is there no way at all to re-encode them in a format that a computer understands? Or perhaps build a program that emulates the way the 360 handles 360-encoded wavs?

[grimdoomer]

By dumping the sound block file do you mean the sounds.pck file or each individual sound file? And what SDK? I just started getting into this stuff and I was impressed at myself for just being able to dump the game to my computer.

What is TEA? And is there no way at all to re-encode them in a format that a computer understands? Or perhaps build a program that emulates the way the 360 handles 360-encoded wavs?

I mean each induvidual file. Software Development Kit, it gives you librarys, tools, documentation, and samples on a sepcific Game, Application, or Operating System, the xbox and xbox 360 SDKs are high illegal. TEA stands for Tiny Encryption Algrithum, and it fits in under 512 bytes of code. It's a very small down to the point hash, which was proven it can't be used as a hash and is outdated. It would make sense its not a standered TEA algorithim, but why would they use such an old, method is beyond me. You can, if you can find the codec. Wav is a general format based on codecs. Each codec does something different to the sound data. If we had the 360 wav codec, we would be able to listen to them in windows media player, and convert files to that codec. But note that the 360 sound files are also in a different format.

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I know WHAT and SDK was, I was asking which SDK you were talking about.

And basically you're saying I'm screwed and there is no way possible to convert or listen to the WAV files contained in this.pck file?

I also know what a codec is. It might seem to the contrary, but I do know a lot about computers, the only thing in that post that I didn't know WHAT it was was TEA.

I've tried copying the sound files from the Xbox 360 harddrive mindex/media/0000/* and hexing them so I could listen to them, just to see if Icould, but Ican't find headers for any known file format. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough, but I thought Xbox and Xbox 360 put the ripped files in WMA format.

[kornman00]

As for the era archives, why would they use TEA?

Well, assuming they went with XXTEA which is said to be more efficient with larger data than it's predecessor and wouldn't need a mode of operation if they were just encrypting the ENTIRE archive and not just blocks of the archive. Plus it wouldn't be as weak as the first TEA. I guess I'll have to do some debugging later to get an answer with whats going on

[grimdoomer]

As for the era archives, why would they use TEA?

Well, assuming they went with XXTEA which is said to be more efficient with larger data than it's predecessor and wouldn't need a mode of operation if they were just encrypting the ENTIRE archive and not just blocks of the archive. Plus it wouldn't be as weak as the first TEA. I guess I'll have to do some debugging later to get an answer with whats going on

It would be appreciated.

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

So...turns out there is sound embedded in the cutscene files on the game disk. The files are in .bik format, for Rad Game Tools. If you open up Rad and look at the file info for one of the cutscene files there are 4 audio tracks.

Track 0 is a stereo version of the background sounds
Track 1 is a mono dialog track
Track 2 is various other background sounds like distant explosions and whatnot
Track 3 is another various sounds track

All I would have had to do was pull out all 4 sound tracks and mix them in with the original.

[ImpactPro]

What, Why are you researching that? Bink comes with (Bink) and Smacker which lets you convert/play them just fine.

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Open one of the cutscene files from the game disk and play it. It'll play with no dialog, just the background sound. I wasn't researching the cutscenes, I was researching how to get the dialog out of the sounds.pck file. Since that's impossible as of now, I went back to have a look at the .bik files and it turned out there was dialog in them, just on a different track. I could convert/play them just fine before, I just didn't know the dialog that I needed was on a different track.