Files
TeslaRel410/restoration
CydandClaude Fable 5 fac559bc31 BT410 5.3.54: skeleton-walk API inventory complete; staged plan with pixel-free checks
Confirmed every call the .SKL walk needs -- the NotationFile accessors and the
MakeEntryList/GetFirstEntry/GetNextEntry idiom (copy DPLReadINIPage's
objectpath loop), and the dPL side (NewDCS/SetDCSMatrix/AddDCSToDCS/
AddDCSToScene/SetDCSZone/FlushDCS, LoadObject/NewInstance/SetInstanceObject/
AddInstanceToDCS/FlushInstance).

On the matrix: a DCS flush body is [remote][type_check][node][64 bytes] = a
4x4 of float32.  Decoding a real BT capture shows a near-identity with a
single 10.0 term in the last row, suggesting row-major with translation in
row 3 -- but the rows print shifted by one word against a true identity, so
the decoder offset is suspect and the convention is recorded as NOT yet
proven.  Flagged rather than guessed.

Staged the work so each half is verifiable without looking at pixels: build
the tree with identity matrices first and prove the structure by wire counts
(26 DCS + 22 instance flushes, which MAD.SKL's JointCount=25/DZoneCount=22 and
the dpl3-revive reference capture agree on), then add real transforms and fix
the convention by watching which slot moves.

Also noted the one API still to check first: the skeleton reaches us as a
non-Object L4VideoObject::ResourceType, so branch on that enumerator rather
than re-deriving the filename.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 17:07:00 -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.