Zeno Clash: UE to PC. Options

[KiddyCorky]

I was wondering to ask the developers themselves a question about their conversion process of their Source .mdl files to the Xbox 360.

I have been able to extract all the files of the Ultimate Edtion to the PC. I was just hoping to get the content of the Ultimate Edtion to Source. The problem is that opening the .mdl files that I extracted with the HEX Editor shows almost nothing but complete gibberish unlike a normal PC compiled .mdl file which shows the name and path of the .mdl file and ofcourse it's materials.

In conclusion I only wish to know what method did the developers used to make the models work on Xbox 360 and if perhaps there is a way to reverse it.

I have attached a screenshot of the Time Hammer's .mdl file opened in a HEX Editor. I'am sure alot of modellers know how an inside of a .mdl file looks.

[Carlos Bordeu]

Hi there. I'm not one of the programmers so I'm not sure about what changed between the .mdl files in a version to the other.

I'm afraid what you're trying to do is far more complicated than just getting the models to work. If that was all there is to porting the UE to PC, we would have done it years ago. Unfortunately there are many more things involved... the biggest being we completely moved the game from the Orange Box version of the code to the Left4Dead one. It was a big, big change and one of the reasons we've been unable to dedicate the time to to the port. The UE includes coop and split screen for the tower challenges - something that would need to be re-evaluated for the PC entirely.

Given the huge workload we have with ZC2, there's just no time to do the proper port.

I would guess that with some work you could eventually get a couple of the new enemies in the game... but not much more... the rest would require a dedicated team with access to the code.

[tschumann]

I believe that most (all?) Xbox 360 Source engine files are compressed using LZMA. I think the format is:
char header[4]; // "LZMA"
int32 uncompressedSize;
int32 compressedSize;
char properties[5]; // not sure/can't remember what this is - used by the LzmaDecode function
char data[]; // rest of the file
Decompress using the LzamDecode function in the LZMA library. I believe that the Xbox 360 is a different endianness to an Intel/AMD processor so you'll probably need to byte-swap every field. Check the headers in the Source SDK as there is stuff about the Xbox 360 formats in them.

[KiddyCorky]

Thanks for your assistance in this matter.

[tschumann]

No worries. Keep us posted with how you go.

[KiddyCorky]

No worries. Keep us posted with how you go.

Well after spending some time on the net. I couldn't figure out how to decode or decompress the lzma files. The only things I found were extractors. Which really don't have much use since they only extract the files and don't change anything in them.

[tschumann]

Yeah, you'd to write some code to convert them. I think the texture files are actually compressed .dds files too so you'd need to write an extractor and converter for them as well.