Files
CydandClaude Fable 5 326d29b72a Extract all recoverable Division scenes; add Scene Archive gallery
Cracks the DIV-BIZ2 binary format (BGF/BMF) using Division's own
reader source (DPL3/BIZREAD.C) as reference: block stream, 14 vertex
layouts, pmesh/strip connectivity, LOD nesting, embedded materials.
Adds SVT raw-texture decoding, 1995-dialect VGF support (implicit
CONNECTION_LIST, header SCALE), and a whole-drive scene audit.

108 of 241 scenes on the Glaze drive are recoverable; 26 are curated
into restoration/vwe-archive.html, a self-contained WebGL gallery:
Star Trek, Hull Pressure, BattleTech (incl. the polar-map mech
lineup), Red Planet's Mars-canal raceway, and the Canyon demos.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-02 18:03:12 -05:00
..

Scene Restorations

Modern re-renderings of the Division dVS scenes recovered from the Glaze developer drive (see HISTORY.md) and this repo's CONTENT tree. The originals ran on Division Ltd.'s pixel-pipeline hardware in 19941997; these tools parse the original data files and re-render them in WebGL, in the browser.

Viewers (open in any browser, fully self-contained)

  • vwe-archive.html — the Scene Archive: 26 curated scenes across all projects — Star Trek (Enterprise-D, Klingon flyby), Hull Pressure (sea demos, fish schools, sunken temple), BattleTech (polar map with mech lineup, Ravine and desert maps, stadium), Red Planet (Blade arena, the Mars canal milestone demo), and the Canyon/Maya-temple Division demos. Fly camera: drag to look, WASD to fly, R resets.
  • trek-scn.html — the original standalone Star Trek restoration (TREK.SCN and KLNGVID.SCN).

Toolkit

  • divformats.py — parsers for every Division format found on the drive: text VGF/VMF (DIV-VIZ2 geometry/materials, both the 1995 VERSION 2:07 and 1996 02:05 dialects, with header SCALE support), binary BGF/BMF (DIV-BIZ2) — the binary block-stream layout was recovered from Division's own reader source (DPL3/BIZREAD.C, 1994), including all 14 vertex layouts, pmesh/tristrip/polygon connectivity, LOD blocks (newer writers nest patches inside LODs; the largest LOD is taken), and embedded materials/textures/ramps — plus TGA and raw SVT textures, SPL splines, and SCN scene scripts.
  • audit.py — scans every .SCN on the drive and reports what fraction of its geometry survives, and in which format.
  • extract_all.py — extracts every scene with ≥60 % of its geometry recoverable (108 of 241 on the drive; the rest reference lost models) into allscenes.json, resolving models/materials/textures across the drive and this repo's CONTENT dirs.
  • gallery_build.py — curates scenes from allscenes.json into the self-contained vwe-archive.html (via gallery_template.html).
  • convert.py / viewer_template.html — the original single-scene Star Trek pipeline.

Rebuild

python extract_all.py     # requires the sda4/ drive dump beside this repo
python gallery_build.py

Fidelity notes

Faithful: vertices, triangles, material colors and shading ramps, textures, fog and light parameters, spline motion, camera start positions. Approximated: Division's rasterizer behavior, point sizes, timing (originals ran at 30 Hz). Not simulated: event-driven SPECIALFX particles. A few dev scenes had camera start positions inside geometry; those get overridden or auto-framed cameras (see START_OVERRIDE in gallery_build.py). Scenes missing one or more models from the drive say so in their header.