Did you know that Raven Software included information on the Ghoul 2 model and animation file format in the Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast SDK? I didn't until yesterday or so.

I was looking for information on the format because I'd like to write im- and exporters for Blender. As you may or may not know I'm a Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy  modder and I've been one since it first came out. That's how I came to be a programmer actually, because they released their multiplayer sourcecode.

Anyway, once I had the information on Ghoul 2 GLM & GLA I was pretty happy. "What file formats do I not know about yet?", I asked myself. The .efx effect files are pretty straight-forward since they're plain text. The same applies for the botroute .wnt files. Compiled scripts, .ibi files, are a little harder since they're binary, but I can just write a lot of scripts and analyze the compiler's output. But I didn't know what to do with the .rof files.

ROFF, or Raven Object File Format, contains complex animations for level geometry. A couple of older Raven Software games, including Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy and Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, use it e.g. for rolling rocks, flying spaceships and camera paths.

There's an exporter for 3D Studio Max 4 & 5 which exports ROFF animations, Raven released that. But I don't have 3D Studio Max, and if I had it, I wouldn't have such an old version. I prefer Blender though, it's free and open source.

So I looked at the .rof files using a hexeditor, the hex editor plugin for Notepad++ to be precise. The beginning, "ROFF", was obviously the identifier. Guessing that the following integer 2 was the version wasn't that hard, either. I wasn't sure, but I supposed the next integer would be the total number of frames since it was bigger when the file was bigger. Using some basic math I could prove my theory and calculate a size of 20 bytes for the header and 32 bytes per frame.

So what are the remaining 8 bytes in the header? The first 4 are the time per frame in milliseconds as an integer, e.g. 50 (ms) for 20 fps. I still don't know what the other 4 bytes in the header are, but I didn't worry about them since they're always the same. Instead I looked at the remaining 32 bytes. Since they were supposed to represent movement I suspected them to be floats. Thus I wrote a little python script to read them as floats and save them in a csv. I could then look at them in OpenOffice.org Calc. The last two rows were always nan and 0. They're probably actually ints, at least -1 makes more sense to me than nan. I still can't tell what they are, but I don't really care.

Instead I looked at the remaining 6 floats. They should be position and rotation, and they were. Once I saw these values in the 6th row of one file I was pretty sure it was a rotation:

30.1187744141
-329.881225586
30.1187744141

I thought they were absolute positions and 360° = 0°. It later turned out that they were actually relative movements since the last frame, but I had to write the exporter and do a test export to notice that. And that's what I did next, writing the im- and exporter. The order of the rows turned out to be deltaLocationX, deltaLocationY, deltaLocationZ, deltaRotationY, deltaRotationZ and deltaRotationX.

So eventually I was done and the result can be downloaded on this very website. There's an example on youtube.

And I'm happy.

Willi

Appendix

I just found out that the Elite Force SP Mod Code contains the source to the ROFF format. ROFF is actually an abbreviation for "Rotation, Origin File Format" and the number of frames was a float in version 1, but that is apparently no longer the case. The header used to be only 12 bytes long so I still don't know about the last 8 bytes, and there's no information on the last 8 bytes of the frames either.

Appendix 2

Since Jedi Academy's source code has since been released, I urge anybody looking for information on the file format to consult that instead.

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