New Dinosaur Planet finds

Hi everyone,

Some years ago a kiosk version of Star Fox Adventures was discovered and people (including myself) dug through the data to find remnants of Dinosaur Planet.
Some data formats were reverse-engineered, but not much of DP was found in the models.

I recently noticed this one folder that wasn't referenced anywhere in the game's executables, and the data didn't match with any of the tools people made back then - and since I'm working on my own engine I figured this would be a good opportunity to combine some things.

Update #1 - Skeletal models! (Krystal POV hands, N64-GC Fox, Swapstones, more)

So, to my surprise I found more than 100 models from DP, including their textures! Here's a few:

This turtle can be seen here:





This was Sabre's sword... as seen here:





(I'm starting some work on skeletons as well)





And aside from static models, there's also many creatures (but their mesh parts are in local space, so atm it's slightly hard to see)



Both swapstones are in the data, but when I render all the mesh parts it becomes a mess due to it all being in local space.
Here's a screenshot of one:


Another very interesting find is what seems to be an extremely early version of Fox, which seems to be Sabre with a more high-poly Fox head pasted on it (since it's also in local space, this was a N64 model as well in some capacity):



There's actually 2 different versions, but really hard to see with this being a mess like this.

Another thing is a complete environment from DP which we haven't seen before, and all textures still exist!




I need to get vertex lighting / texture blending working before it will start looking ... good ... haha - also transparency is not properly implemented at the moment, so things look a bit weird (no water for instance).

So, this has definitely been a great find so far, but there's a ton more to come

PS. Since this is early for now, please refrain from reposting any of this until further notice, or send me a PM. Thank you!

 

Good stuff my dude

 

Commendable effort!

 

Quite remarkable!!

Why would so much stuff be left behind? (I'm no techie... just curious)

 

It happens quite a bit actually

Very nice find! Thanks for sharing!

 

In this case they were porting the game from N64 to GameCube, and didn't do a "proper" clean up until final release (in which the folder is empty), for this 'kiosk' version they simply didn't bother tracking down which files the game would actually use

 

this is just amazing

 

Wow this is amazing, great job! Now we need to set up a tech demo

 

Holy crap! I never thought I'd see models from Dinosaur Planet Excellent find!

 

Bingo. This is also why - in general, although Review discs are "same as final" there is the chance of there being a ton of cool stuff on those discs. Some might even be accessible in-game if a debug menu is found.

 

Brilliant findings, I was sure we've seen all that there was left to see of DP, but again I was proven otherwise. Thank you for sharing with all of us!

 

same day this thread was made I was looking at some dinosaur planet articles.

 

alot of times, review carts and discs are unclean, hence why their tends ot be so much left over data

 

Thanks for the responses guys!

I've added support for basic bone transformations... and the models that use a skeleton now show up fine!

NOTE: Apologies for the watermarks. We all know how far some people go in faking prototypes or using screenshots without crediting the author.. so for now I put these in as precaution. It's probably unnecessary, but who knows. (if many of you think it's bullshit I'll remove them, heh)

You might remember the "first person view"-hands that can be seen in the 1 hour DP video:


I'm pretty sure I found them!

(Unfortunately, the textures aren't there it seems..)

Check out this super early, kind of "in between N64-GC"-style Fox model:

And the back:

It appears twice, with tiny differences between them. I can't help but think one is mapped to Sabre, and the other to Krystal.
Once I get to the animations I guess we'll see

This appears to be Kyte (the dropped sidekick of Krystal), although many things are still wrong about it:


The turtle enemy from earlier... quite amazing how much detail they managed to put in the textures



A type of mushroom that would've been used as food resource:


And here are the swapstones, in all their glory!



That one enemy that was impossible to see now looks pretty cute


And this is one of the Lightfoot-Village inhabitants (there's many more but their textures don't load up correctly atm):

(Star Fox version for comparison

And these were a bit overkill to put a watermark on.. haha..
This seems to be an energy-source plant like SFA had:

And this:

As seen here:


I'm still quite surprised with what I found in this folder up until now... there's quite some more to come though!
Again, apologies for the watermarks...

 

this just keeps getting better and better

 

Spoiler

What rolls down stairs
Alone or in pairs,
rolls over your neighbor's dog?
What's great for a snack
and fits on your back?

Spoiler

it's log, log, log!
it's log, log!
It's big, it's heavy, it's wood.
it's log, log!
it's better than bad, it's good!

 

there must be a hidden build in those files!! for sure

 

This is absolutely mind blowing. Thank you so much for digging up these fossils!

 

As others have said, kudos. This is excellent. Thank you for sharing with us.

 

Is that turtle okay?
It looks unwell.