https://opengoal.dev/blogOpenGOAL Blog2026-03-31T10:00:00.000Zhttps://github.com/jpmonette/feedOpenGOAL Bloghttps://opengoal.dev/img/favicon.png<![CDATA[Progress Report - Q1 2026]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-q1-20262026-03-31T10:00:00.000ZThe right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.
MFO came out swinging with their first mod - a recreation of Half-Life physics/movement built natively in OpenGOAL! You can read more about the technicals of how this mod works here.
Whether you're a veteran bhopper or you've never touched a Source Engine game before, this one is definitely worth checking out. Speedrun.com actually held an official Challenge for this mod earlier this month.
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If you want to play these mods (and others), follow the instructions here to set up the mod list for the OpenGOAL launcher.
Sometimes mods have a README or other website with additional info that doesn't fit in the launcher description. This change makes the mod name a clickable link whenever there's a related website.
Split progress bars for mod download vs extraction
Previously there was a single "Extraction" progress bar that also included the time spent downloading the mod. This caused confusion for users downloading large mods or with slower internet speeds, thinking something had gone wrong during extraction. Now there is a separate progress bar just for the mod download process.
Improve error handling, user notifications, and debugging information
Various changes to improve the launcher’s ability to handle errors and to surface useful information when something goes wrong, either to the user directly or in the support package for developer debugging.
All translations from Crowdin should now be updated and added to the games. This includes changes for French, Spanish, Catalan, Czech, German, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Danish, Hungarian, Croatian, Arabic, Greek, Serbian, and Portuguese (Brazilian)!
If you're interested in contributing translations, check out these guides.
Improves the timing of the autosplitter reset to better match leaderboard timing (first non-blackout frame). Previously it would reset as soon as the menu option was chosen, and timing could vary depending on what levels needed to be loaded/unloaded.
Fixes a bug where the checkbox for splitting on collecting Light Eco was being ignored and always splitting.
Adds an option for splitting only once after collecting Light Eco (the existing option will split repeatedly until all splits are completed). This is useful for routes where you have more to do after collecting Light Eco.
Oh yeah and Jak 3 is released in the launcher. Happy April Fools' Day 😎
]]>barg034https://github.com/dallmeyer<![CDATA[Progress Report - Q4 2025]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-q4-20252025-12-31T10:00:00.000ZHappy Holidays! Lots of fixes across all 3 games the past few months.
EvelynTSMG came up with this Jak 1 challenge mod, where Jak is forced to keep jumping at all times! Be sure to check out the mod settings where you can adjust various difficulty settings.
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If you want to play these mods (and others), follow the instructions here to set up the mod list for the OpenGOAL launcher.
Restores a feature to track playtime per game, which was inadvertently removed during code cleanup.
Support window resizing & allow Linux users to change install directory
Now that the CSS is responsive, we can allow for the launcher window to be resized (e.g. fullscreen on Steamdeck). Also fixed an issue where Linux users couldn't change their installation directory.
Adds back the page detailing what has changed when new updates are available. This also fixes responsive issues with the "Update Available" header positioning.
Fixes an issue where already-installed mods could not be played while offline. The launcher will now cache metadata about mods during installation, and will fall back to this if the information cannot be fetched from the mod list source (i.e. while offline).
All translations from Crowdin should now be updated and added to the games. This includes changes for Spanish, Czech, Portuguese (Brazilian), French, Dutch, German, Polish, Finnish, and Norwegian!
If you're interested in contributing translations, check out these guides.
Fixes an issue where all stereo VAG commands would write to an out-of-bounds array element and corrupt the whole VAG queue list. This was the cause of various sound-related crashes, such as when using Light Jak Freeze.
Add support for brightness and contrast modifiers
Adds renderer support for modifying brightness and contrast, a new feature added to the graphics options in Jak 3.
Fixes copy/paste from Jak 2 for the text color of speakers in subtitles.
Decouple wasteland storm particles and wind pushback effect from framerate
Fixes an issue where the sandstorm in the wasteland had overly-aggressive particle effects and pushback effects on Jak. Players may have noticed this issue in the PS3 port, as it occurs because the newer console could maintain a better framerate than the PS2.
Fixes an edge case where cutscenes with a non-zero artist-base would start with an awkward amount of blackout frames, depending on framerate. This is another issue that can be seen on PS3 but not PS2 because of the framerate the consoles can maintain - for example during the Metal Head Tower tower-destroy-res scene.
Fixes the scissoring in the pause menu on the Mission Select and Scene Select screens.
Add OpenGOAL-exclusive cheats city-peace and desert-peace
Adds support for the city-peace cheat similar to what we added in Jak 2, which disables all enemies throughout Haven City. Also adds a new desert-peace cheat which disables the sandstorm effects and all maruaders in the Wasteland.
Fix generic2/prim zbuffer issue and progress menu crash
Fixes an issue in how the zbuffer is handled for the generic2 renderer. This was quite noticeable in the Dark Strike and Arc Wielder effects.
Support directional pad controls for Eco Grid (Pac-Man) minigame
Adds a toggle under controller options to allow use of the directional pad for the Eco Grid minigame. Normally this minigame only respects inputs from the left analog stick.
Fixes a issue where the physics logic for rigid-body systems (e.g. zoomer vehicles) depended on framerate. This was another difference that could be observed between PS3 and PS2.
For example, the "Superfasthoverbikeglitch" on OpenGOAL (pre-fix) vs PCSX2:
Fix War Factory hemi-gradient-flames texture and ocean culling
Fixes a small typo relating to the hemi-gradient-flames texture used in the Hellcat bomb during the War Factory mission. Also fixes an issue with ocean culling during this mission, caused by the rotating background effect.
Fixes an original game bug that could lead to increasingly long cooldowns between taking damage from the same source, such as a flaming torch. This is also fixed for Jak 2.
The game tracks when the player last took damage using one clock, but compares this to a different clock when deciding if the player should take damage if it's from the same source. Only one of these clocks is affected by slow-down effects, such as during mission fails, Dark Jak special attacks, or Light Jak freeze. After one or more of these slow-down effects, these two clocks can end up drifting significantly apart, and throw off the intended cooldown logic.
Fixes an original game bug, where extreme h-vehicle coordinates could lead to a crash by accessing out-of-bounds data in the *traffic-height-map*. This is also fixed for Jak 2.
Fixes an issue where StreamListThread should have been deadlocked waiting for the uninitialized LfoList semaphore, but instead it would get woken up by WakeupThread erroneously.
Various fixes to support framerates higher than 60 FPS:
Water ripple effect
balance-plat speeds
Speed of slider options in pause menu
Fix opening logo letterboxing for widescreen aspect ratios
Fixes letterboxing/blackout during the opening "Jak and Daxter" logo for widescreen aspect ratios. Previously you would start to see Sandover Village on the sides of the screen early, before the logo burst animation happened.
Fixes an issue where aspect ratio was not properly updated from the progress menu upon selection.
]]>barg034https://github.com/dallmeyer<![CDATA[Progress Report - Q3 2025]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-q3-20252025-09-30T10:00:00.000ZAs promised, the Q3 report, albeit likely not containing the progress you had hoped for.
Cuttlefish (custom level creator behind Glacier, Overgrown, and Rockpool) recently dropped not just a new custom level, but an entire custom hub with 4 new levels! Collect all 24 Power Cells and restore power to Brume Village, home of the Yellow Sage!
Sandpit is another custom level from a new mod creator, Slak. Miners have vanished from a nearby excavation site, leaving behind their tools and Power Cells!
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If you want to play these mods (and others), follow the instructions here to set up the mod list for the OpenGOAL launcher.
Replace PCRTC framebuffer blit with screen quad draw
Taking the suggestion from @Calinou, this replaces the resolve/render framebuffer -> window framebuffer blit with an actual drawn tri-strip which covers the entire viewport, which the PCRTC blackout already does.
It appears we have no guarantee what state the internal window framebuffer will be in, so drawing an actual primitive and letting the fragment shader do all the work seems to be the more compatible/functional solution here.
Thanks for the suggestion!
We hope that this resolves some issues for some select users (such as the black screen issue)
The spider-manager process was invalid for one frame, causing the score to be set to the value of #f, winning the game instantly.
Also doubled the PC port texture count, which should hopefully fix the crash that happens when playing the game all the way through to the end of the Destroy Dark Eco Tanks mission in one sitting.
There was a somewhat common crash that would happen in Lost Precursor City, while passing through the central room with the whirlpool in the middle. After you've completed the puzzle room challenge, if you leave the area and come back, when the qbert-plat-master spawns it tries to open up the room where the cell would be. It sends 'trigger events to the processes for the door and the wall-plat under the door. In some scenarios, the qbert-plat-master will have a bad reference to one of these processes, and the send-event-function will crash trying to invoke the process's event-hook.
The fix is simply to add an extra check in send-event-function that we have a valid process before we try to send it the event. Making the fix here in send-event-function (in Jak 2 and 3 as well) means this could potentially address other crashes throughout the games too.
Rename WATER_AN.CGO to WATER-AN.CGO during Jak 1 Installation
If you dump your ISO with a very outdated tool, it is possible that it will rename this one file incorrectly on you, and you will fail to install.
Since this is the only file in the entire quadrilogy that uses an invalid ISO-9660 character, we will attempt to correct it for you.
However, we will be updating the ISO extraction advice on the site soon to avoid people making bad dumps. As truly that is the solution -- you gotta dump your ISO properly.
Another impressive full game translation, thanks a ton for all the effort on this contribution!
]]>barg034https://github.com/dallmeyerVaserhttps://github.com/xTVaser<![CDATA[Progress Report - Q2 2025]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-q2-20252025-06-01T10:00:00.000ZAs many of you noticed, it's been awhile since the last Progress Report 😅. Worry not, the project is still alive and well, but development on OpenGOAL Jak 3 has been a bit slower as of late.
While we of course appreciate the enthusiasm and interest in the project, please keep in mind that this project only exists thanks to a small number of people working on it in their free time. Jak 3 development is quite far along, most missions are playable, but the known issues and missing features will take some dedicated time to complete. There is no ETA for a launcher release at this time, given the unknowns in the remaining work and uncertainty of developer availability.
You may also have noticed the title of this Progress Report says "Q2 2025" instead of "May 2025". Going forward, we are planning to release these Progress Reports on a quarterly basis, as we feel this should better match the pace of development (and less developer time spent putting together reports = Jak 3 sooner, right?)
Kuitar and HatKid return with another update for The Forgotten Lands! If you've been living under a rock, The Forgotten Lands is an incredible Jak 1 mod with fully-fledged custom levels, music, voicelines, and more! We won't spoil too much here, but check out the trailer below.
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If you want to play this mod (and others), follow the instructions here to set up the mod list for the OpenGOAL launcher.
Kuitar also recently blessed us with an amazing Blender plugin that lets you create a custom skin for the Jak model in Jak 1! This tool lets you change the color of Jak's clothes/skin/hair/etc, toggle accessories like a nosering, sword, or his backpack, and much more. See the video below for more info.
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If you want to use this plugin, download the latest release here.
Certain versions of the Launcher (2.7.x) have a bug where you won't be automatically prompted to update to the latest Launcher version. If this affects you, you'll need to manually install the latest version (and then going forward it should auto-update again).
Certain versions of the Launcher are broken on Linux due to an issue in how the AppImage is bundled. There also appear to be some issues running the Launcher with certain SteamOS versions (e.g. on SteamDeck).
You can confirm if this issue is affecting you by running the AppImage in a terminal - if you see an error in the logs involving EGL_BAD_PARAMETER, you are indeed affected.
As a workaround, you can download a jak-project release directly and install manually, see the guide here. Or on SteamDeck you also have the option to use the Decky plugin.
All translations from Crowdin should now be updated and added to the games. The previous update was back in February, so this includes changes for Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Galician, French, Hungarian, Spanish, Catalan, Czech, German, English (UK), and Croatian!
If you're interested in contributing translations, check out these guides.
Because merc effects for custom models would always have the envmap-usage flag set, this would also set the ignore-alpha flag, making transparency effects not work. Now the envmap-usage flag is only set when the effect actually has an envmap, allowing for proper transparency support in custom models.
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a library used by OpenGOAL which provides low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware. This PR upgraded from SDL2 to SDL3, which brought with it a handful of new features!
Blender has some special logic to display unique names for textures even if their underlying filenames are identical, but it doesn't use these unique names when exporting to a GLB file.
Previously the custom level tooling would de-dupe textures simply based on their filename, meaning one texture could be ignored and replaced by another texture that shares the same filename. This PR fixes the de-duplication logic to actually compare the file contents before discarding potential duplicates.
Previously, textures and audio extracted from the games would end up in a decompiler_out folder, extracted levels would land in glb_out, and extracted collision in debug_out. With this change, all of these extractions now end up in the decompiler_out folder (and the newest launcher has a button to take you right there, see below)
Previously the ImGUI menu would flash between being hidden and shown repeatedly while holding Alt. With this PR, visibility is only toggled on the initial "key down" event, and holding the key down is ignored.
This introduces a simple multiplier to the gamepad axis input value received from SDL events. Normally the values it provides cannot satisfy the square range of the stick input. This is usually fine but it might play differently with different controllers and compared to on-console, especially considering the DualShock 1/2 have automatic calibration which works in mysterious ways.
This PR sets 133% as the default, and exposes the setting in the Jak 1 and 2 menus so the user can adjust it for their controllers from 50% all the way to 200%.
The timing for characters blinking was previously tied to frame rate, and so at high frame rates they would blink both too often and too quickly. This PR fixes that across all 3 games.
Users were reporting that some controller buttons were incorrectly considered held down upon booting the game, and wouldn't reset until the user actually pressed that button. For example, Square would be considered held and would cause players to brake constantly in the zoomer.
MSAA will now default to off instead of 2X (if you don't already have saved graphics settings, such as after a fresh install). We hope this will help with some black screen and performance issues some users have been facing.
One common enhancement needed in these PC ports is to handle different screen resolutions and aspect ratios. The progress code for the pause menus throughout the games are notoriously fragile when it comes to supporting this. The settings code also needs to be extended to handle all the new options supported in the PC Port (MSAA, V-Sync, etc). This PR addresses a big chunk of this work for Jak 3.
When these pillars get very close to the screen, they fade it out, to avoid blocking the camera. But, for unknown reasons, they move this to an alpha bucket as well (normally not required for fade), but rely on merc disabling alpha blend.
OpenGOAL's detection of alpha blending just checks the bucket, but there's more logic than this in the shader. Rather than figuring this out, this PR just fixes this specific case for now.
This fixes a crash which could be reproduced by firing the Super Nova in Dark Ship. When the dp-bipedals get blown up, their bones go to NaNs on the last frame. The shadow renderer doesn't handle this well and draws all possible triangles as single tris. This overflows the vif unpack field and triggered an assert when sizes inside the shadow renderer weren't consistent. As a workaround, if the bones are NaN, the shadow renderer treats them as 0, meaning there is no shadow drawn.
On Windows, a couple of enemy types were acting very strange when it came to following their intended paths (the 4 Marauders you chase through the desert, and the desert Metalheads you shoot from the vehicle turret). This appears to be an original Naughty Dog bug, where the ai-ignore-nav-mesh event is missing a parameter to control whether the behavior is enabled or disabled.
By complete chance, this just happens to work out fine on some machines (e.g. Linux and PS2) - so long as the uninitialized value on the stack (-> arg3 param 0) is anything but #f.
While adding support for subtitles in new languages (such as Polish), a bug was introduced where the selected subtitle language wasn't saved properly, causing crashes and incorrect subtitle languages to be used.
Due to a bug that is not fully understood yet, sometimes an actor's bones will have NaN coordinates (garbage data). One manifestation of this bug is some weird behavior/softlock in the atoll-sig mission, and to add to the mystery: it seems to only happens on SteamDeck with certain SteamOS versions!
The sniper Metalheads will jump to 0,0,0 every other frame (far away from the mission), which causes Sig to stop charging his gun, and thus prevents you from progressing further in the mission. This PR adds a workaround to handle this scenario and prevent the mission from softlocking.
Tauri is the framework used by the OpenGOAL Launcher, and this PR upgraded the launcher to use the newer v2 version. The major benefit of this is flatpak support.
Check DGO/CGOs exist within the ObjectDB when building levels
Adds some simple safe-guarding code that will improve the error messaging when an expected DGO/CGO does not exist in the ObjectDB, instead of just a vague invalid map error.
The launcher checks the user's VCC version to ensure they'll be able to run the game properly. This PR reduces the number of times/places we do that check, and avoids flooding the logs with redundant info.
Previously the extractor would assume you were trying to run in Jak1 game mode if the optional --game argument wasn't provided. Since the user must provide the ISO to extractor, we can just determine the game mode dynamically from the ISO hash/contents. This PR fixes the extractor to make use of that information when the --game argument isn't specified.
libidn2 which is a potential part of libcurl seemingly slipped into the latest release (0.2.25) and it was dynamically linked for MacOS, causing issues. The theory for why is that the underlying MacOS image changed (now includes this library) and so the cmake detected that and started building with it. This PR just disables it, as we don't need it.
Fixed bug where only 1 mod could be installed per launcher boot
Fixed settings navigation to automatically open specific tabs (general, versions, mods)
Fixed bug preventing texture pack installation
Add confirmation dialog before auto-updating launcher
Disabled navigation to other pages while updating/installing
Fixed hard-to-read text in custom light/dark modes
]]>barg034https://github.com/dallmeyer<![CDATA[Progress Report - February 2025]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-feb-20252025-03-02T10:00:00.000ZA big translation update, and a couple Jak 3 fixes.
All translations have been updated and added to the menus of the games. The Italian translations are one that got a major bump, and the changes may not have made it into this month's release due a mistake on my part, they should sort themselves out by next month however.
The game's translations havn't been updated since October so, apologies for that.
Vector operation related outputs is now a lot less verbose!
]]>Vaserhttps://github.com/xTVaser<![CDATA[Progress Report - January 2025]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-jan-20252025-02-04T10:00:00.000ZDecompiler improvements, custom actor support for Jak 2 and 3 and more.
The PS2's Vector Units had a lot of instructions for vector operations that let you define a mask to only operate on specific parts of a vector. Our macros for this were a bit lackluster and required you to manually define the mask as a bitfield. This adds extra convenience macros for every mask combination, cleaning up the code a bit.
In Jak 2 and 3, the vector*! function was inlined, which the decompiler now detects. Along with this, some other common operations are now also detected:
Another very common operation in Jak 2 and 3 is to check if an object is of a specific type and then cast it to that type, similar to dynamic_cast in C++.
Jak 2 and 3 have received support for custom actors! Previously only available for Jak 1, this allows you to create a model in Blender with animations and import it into the game to create your own game objects with custom behavior.
You can find a guide on how to make your own custom actors here if interested.
Along with wind, there was another regression in Jak 2/3 that broke levels like the Palace Throne, which uses the camera-other effect to rotate parts of the level.
The code for enemy types has been cleaned up to make it a lot more readable.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-Kid<![CDATA[Progress Report - December 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-dec-20242025-01-05T10:00:00.000ZDespite the holiday season, some work was still accomplished.
To coincide with the changes in last month's upgrade, the launcher is now natively built for Apple Silicon and the application will actually let you install the tooling and games appropriately.
Caron diacritics have been added to the games font, as well as some additional diacritics to fully support the Czech alphabet. A reminder once again that if you would like to translate the games into a language but your font is not fully supported, please still reach out. As long as the alphabet only requires some simple modifications with the game's existing glyphs (such as adding diacritics to the latin alphabet) it's relatively simple to accomodate.
Support Drawing Custom Models for Foreground HUD Elements
Add a version of draw-bones-hud that uses merc to support drawing foreground HUD elements that use custom models.
Fix Animations Involving a full 180 degree Rotation
Fixes the issue with animations doing a full 180 degree rotation and disappearing. The quaternions in the GLB export "flip", and when interpolating animation frames in between a flip, we got bogus quaternions.
Also fix a crash in goalc when using merc models without any materials.
Convert Inverse-Multiplication into Division in Decompiled Output
More readable output
Improved Color Palette Generation for Custom Levels
A few improvements to color palette selection. These were made by tracing some particularly bad colors through and seeing where it made obviously bad decisions for splitting. I tested on crystal cave, and a test GLBs from Kuitar that previously had issues with alpha.
The previous approach to splitting was based on trying to keep a tree of deduplicated colors balanced (same count in each leaf). This is not really a good idea for generating color palettes. A better approach is to try to minimize the volume of the child node, limiting how inaccurate a color can be. Splitting is now chosen based on the average of the deduplicated channel values, which in practice seems to work pretty well for Kuitar's levels. Other approaches could work here too.
The previous approach of alternating through dimensions to split on was kept.
The depth of the KD tree during the initial split was increased, allowing it to use up to 8192 colors, instead of just 1024.
In most cases, not all child nodes of the tree have colors in them, meaning that a tree of depth 13 would have less than 8192 colors. If this happens, child nodes are split until the color count reaches 8192. The selection of which nodes to split is somewhat arbitrary, but is breadth-first. The axis for splitting is the one with the largest range. (which might be a better idea in general?)
On crystal-cave, the worst case color error was reduced from 221 to 9.
Option to copy mod/eye draws from Original Model
Two new flags were added to the Blender plugin to allow reusing the mod and/or eye draws of the original model that is being replaced. Works pretty well for eyes, but the blerc draws can cause some Z-fighting with the non-moving parts of the model.
Fix a missing scale factor when using the large mode in the animation compressor. This would make some joints have a translation of near 0 if the original animation had stuff moving a large distance
I finally went through and worked out the math for the camera matrix, and improved how it works for PC rendering. I was able to finally avoid the double perspective divide issue, which I always thought would cause accuracy issues.
This will help tfrag, tie (no envmap), shrub, and hfrag have less z-fighting in cases where the camera and the thing you're looking at are pretty close, but the entire level is far from the origin - like jak 3 temple. I was able to modify the camera matrix so we don't have to do all the weird scaling/addition in the shader.
Here's a screenshot from the temple oracle checkpoint, cropped from 4k. This used to have a lot of fighting issues.
It doesn't help issues where the thing you're looking at is very far away (jak 1 mountains, some jak 2 city stuff). It also doesn't help with jak's skirt/scarf, since those use a different renderer.
There's definitely more to do here, but this is a good starting point and proof that I can at least figure out the math.
This should fix the crash when entering the freedom HQ elevator. It was caused by a large number of prints, one for each process in the city being killed by check-for-rougue-process, which would overflow the print buffer. So I increased the print buffer.
Detecting buffer overflow here is hard because lots of things are allowed to write to it, including the user's GOAL print methods. I added a basic check that will assert when there's 1k or less space in the buffer. It won't catch every overflow, but it would have caught this one.
After collecting 600 orbs, cloth systems that didn't have any alt-tex-names defined would vanish because the static-cloth-params macro doesn't default them to #f.
Change jak 3 SPU DMA to run the interrupt handler "immediately" (or at least before DMA_SendToSPUAndSync returns).
This fixes an issue where audio can hang during fast cutscene playback. I'm hoping it fixes more issues with looping/stuck audio as well, but this needs more testing.
I originally wanted to do it this way, but thought that it didn't work - from Jak 2 it seemed like things broke if the DMA was too fast. But, at least for Jak 3, everything seems to work like this. This will remove a huge source of non-deterministic timing in audio stuff and hopefully make things easier to debug. It also means that a large portion of streaming audio code will never have to run - from the game's point of view there's always the next SPU buffer available.
Accidentally incrementing s twice in the loop, so queued streams in slot 1, and 3 were skipped by the overlord.
This would usually cause the audio to never start playing because the game would wait for the audio to successfully get queued.
In Jak 3, the default PC settings file would have a language of 255 because it runs before the first settings update. This would cause the game to crash the second time it is started.
Jak 2 and 3 use this annoying trick where they store multiple images in the same texture by just changing the CLUT. This breaks some PC code because those two textures will have the same TBP address. so there's a table of remaps to fix this, generated by the decompiler. Unfortunately, I generated that table before the decompiler loaded the .STR file with these textures, so it was missing the remaps. This is automatically generated in the texture folder when you run the decompiler - I just copied it to the C++ file.
The cloth update function sometimes runs before the "setup" is done (need-setup is set), which divides by zero in a bunch of places. This fix prevents NaNs from spreading during this time.
]]>Vaserhttps://github.com/xTVaser<![CDATA[Progress Report - November 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-nov-20242024-11-30T10:00:00.000ZWouldn't you know it, more Jak 3 fixes!
Jak the Chicken, a mod that brings the gameplay mechanics and levels from the PS1 game "Mort the Chicken" to Jak, is not a new mod, but it has recently taken the Jak speedrunning community by storm after a couple of big updates by author Zed, which included tons of bug fixes and a facelift for all the levels. The short length and replayability make for a highly movement focused run with little room for mistakes or to catch your breath. Since the end of October, the Any% time has been lowered from ~11m all the way to 9m28s and counting.
There is also an open tournament going on that was recently announced and even has a small cash prize pool for the top 3 finalists. If you are interested, you can check out the latest announcement in the Jak Racing Discord for more information on how to register. Ricky also has a good tutorial video for the Any% route if you want to learn:
If the game was installed in a really long file path (128+ characters) and tried to access files in that path (e.g. from reading/writing to the settings file), the game could crash due to a buffer overflow as there was only space for 128 characters in the character buffer.
Apple's compatibility layer for running x86 applications, Rosetta 2, has received AVX2 support in macOS Sequoia, meaning that after some updates to our CPU checking code, it is now possible to run OpenGOAL on Apple silicon devices via Rosetta 2.
The get-texture macro added during the decompilation of Jak 3 has been backported to Jak 1 and 2's codebase. A database of every texture and texture page in the game is built during asset extraction, which is then used to turn code like this:
A bug in the background geometry data for precd, the Dark Ship hangar area, was causing the level extraction to fail. With this, every level in the game is now accessible!
Rarely, when a level was being loaded, the game would crash somewhere in the graphics code for the ocean renderer. This was very consistent when using the warp gate after getting Light Jak Heal. This turned out to be a four year old bug that has miraculously never caused issues until now, where DMA transfer sizes would be considered to be 12 bits in size instead of 16 bits.
The improved subtitle system that we added in Jak 2, with support for non-cutscene subtitles, color-coded speaker names, etc. was brought over to Jak 3. Even excluding cutscenes, Jak 3 has a LOT of text (and tons and tons of unused voice lines as well), so transcribing all of that is going to take a while.
Fixed an issue with unloading soundbanks, which was the cause of a couple of issues, like the blue gun variants using the wrong sounds from each other.
Some background elements in levels had missing textures, on OpenGOAL, this would manifest by using the texture in texture slot 0, which happens to be the default eye texture, resulting in this:
Music now pauses correctly when entering the progress menu or select pausing.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-Kid<![CDATA[Progress Report - October 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-oct-20242024-11-01T10:00:00.000ZYet more fixes for Jak 3 and custom levels.
Grateful Forest's first mod, Platformia, was released earlier this month. It's a challenge mod featuring lots and lots of platforms moving in mesmerizing paths and your goal is to get to the top!
Barg's Orb Hunt mod has been updated to include the two levels that were added in the second chapter of Kuitar's Forgotten Lands, Crescent Top and Energy Bay.
Just in time for Halloween, Clanque has released their Halloween themed overhaul of Jak 1, featuring plenty of spooky model and texture replacements for the entire game. Check out the trailer!
We're getting close to fixing all of the (known) remaining graphics issues. This month, most of the bug fixes revolved around fixing or implementing missing/broken graphics features.
Due to a bad rotation value, whenever a projectile from one of the Dark Makers during the Defend Spargus mission was visible, a nauseating effect would be drawn over the screen.
The last of the remaining bugs with texture animations have been squashed, these include:
Missing glider ring texture animation.
Missing War Factory conveyor texture animation.
Some special eye texture animations would not show up, like the Dark Jak eye effect in cutscenes.
Texture animations that were using a size override would show up as black while not being animated.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-Kid<![CDATA[Progress Report - September 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-sept-20242024-09-30T10:00:00.000ZPlenty of small Jak 3 bugfixes and some custom level improvements.
Cuttlefish (author of Rockpool and River to Water) has just released their newest custom level project, "Overgrown". You can play it via the official launcher if you have the mod list set up (instructions here).
TeamRuns, the Jak 1 online multiplayer mod, just got a substantial update.
Up until now, it was based on an extremely old version of OpenGOAL, but has now been rebased on the most recent vanilla release, meaning it can now enjoy over a year of progress that has been made since, which should help a bit with things like performance.
Alongside that, a bunch of TeamRuns exclusive bugs were fixed and a couple of new features were added, such as a taunt menu, which allows you to play a small selection of voice lines to other players, and the ability to downpatch to older versions of both the game and the TeamRuns client.
Use Normals From Custom Model in Model Replacement
Custom model replacements will now use the normals from the custom model instead of the model they were replacing, which should make the replacements look much better.
Custom levels got support for a bunch of new features for the background geometry.
It is now possible to use transparent textures and alpha for vertex colors. You can also use environment maps on models by using a specific Blender material setup to give them a shiny look.
Support for Vanilla Level Skies and Textures on generic Objects
It is now possible to add vanilla skies to custom levels and to get proper textures for objects that are rendered with generic, like dark eco pools or dying enemies.
The progress/pause menu no longer crashes when selecting any of the options, which means you can now restart mission, save and load, etc. It still needs some work on the graphics side and the "PC port treatment" to make it easier to modify in the future.
Along with this, bigmap has been decompiled, which was the last big remaining critical file, used for the world map in the progress menu.
There is some collision code that will end up dividing by zero on the first frame that an object is spawned as its bones are still uninitialized. On PS2, this would just give you 0 and send the object to the origin for a frame until it's fully initialized. On PC, however, dividing by zero is not handled the same way, and it results in the propagation of NaNs everywhere.
This fixes:
Bombbot bombs not spawning
mh-wasps not spawning in the Sewer levels
Some cutscenes being started too early
The Temple Watchers' position would become NaN after firing their laser at Jak.
Due to a small decompilation mistake, the Daxter voice lines in the artifact race missions would fail to play and the game would crash when attempting to play some specific ones.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-Kid<![CDATA[Progress Report - August 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-aug-20242024-08-31T10:00:00.000ZA slower month, but modders are having fun with some new animation tooling.
Despite the overwhelmingly positive reaction and interest in the idea, we won't be going forward with it at this time for the foreseeable future. Once again, thanks to anyone who took the time to give feedback.
A quick bug fix from last's month black screen fix. That fix only worked for users that already had a pc-settings.gc file created. This month the fix is extended to users who have not yet created that file (first time launching).
Additionally, previously, the settings file would only get created once you interacted with the pause menu, now it will get created on first launch. This should help reduce confusion and help us see what the game is initializing the settings to.
It is now possible to install and manage mods for OpenGOAL from within the official launcher.
The way this works is you can add a "mod source" URL to the launcher which is a way to look up what mods are available and how to download them.
We provide and maintain none of this ourselves, so be on the lookout for an announcement from the modding community on how to take advantage of this new feature.
danger
NOTE - Mods are provided by third-parties and are not vetted, endorsed or supported by the official team.
They can run arbitrary unverified code on your system, so only install mods from sources that you trust!
If you run into a problem with a mod, you will likely have to reach out to its author and not the OpenGOAL team.
When we make changes to the OpenGOAL compiler, of course a potential worry is that the output has changed in a way we did not expect. This new workflow should flag the situation where a change to goalc results in file(s) being compiled differently than on master's goalc.
Instead of extracting every model into one giant file for the foreground and one for the background, these models are now separated and organized. This compliments the recent model swapping features nicely.
This adds a feature to the build_actor tool to support importing skeletons and animations from .glb files.
Multiple animations are handled and will use the name in the GLB. The default viewer process will end up playing back the first animation.
There are a few limitations:
You can only have around 100 bones. It is technically possibly to have slightly more, but certain animations may fail to compress when there are more than ~100 bones.
Currently, all animations have 60 keyframes per second. This is a higher quality than what is normally used. If animation size becomes problematic, we could make this customizable somehow.
There is no support for the align bone.
]]>Vaserhttps://github.com/xTVaser<![CDATA[Progress Report - July 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-july-20242024-07-31T10:00:00.000ZJak 3 finally gets music and cutscene support and plenty of bugfixes.
Thanks to everyone that took the time to fill out the survey in last month's progress report. There were over 340 responses, with 93.8% of you saying you were interested in some capacity.
Stay tuned for future updates in this regard (in the usual places, discord announcements / progress report updates).
It is now possible to replace any in-game foreground/character model with a model of your choosing. This works for all three games.
The process is similar to texture replacements. The game will check custom_assets/<GAME>/merc_replacements for any models to replace. The file name has to match a merc model name, such as eichar-lod0 for Jak's model in Jak 1 (so you'd have a path like custom_assets/jak1/merc_replacements/eichar-lod0.glb). Unlike texture replacements, the model files just go in the root merc_replacements folder without any subfolders (this will probably change in the future to allow you to replace models on a per level basis).
Once you have your replacements set up, the decompiler/extractor, just like with texture replacements, has to be run again in order to apply the changes.
warning
Things to keep in mind:
The replacement has to be a GLTF model (file extension .glb). Blender 4.0 is recommended for this. Blender 4.2 should also work, but you may have to change it to use byte color or the vertex coloring can look messed up. Blender 4.1 will NOT work due to a quirk in the GLTF exporter.
This change is purely visual and quite rudimentary, it does not actually replace the model's skeleton/bones. It will try to match the replacement models' bone weights to the original skeleton, so don't expect the replacement to look very good unless it matches the original skeleton well.
Hopefully this is the final nail in the coffin for this bug. It would seem that for some environments, having an invalid/mismatched game-size resolution would cause the game to only display a black screen.
The characteristic log that you are affected by this is:
OpenGL error 0x502 S8246 T824C: GL_INVALID_OPERATION error generated. Source and destination dimensions must be identical with the current filtering modes.
The game will now check if the set game-size is a supported resolution on your display, if it's not, it will default to the one currently set instead.
Additionally a lot of the related code was simplified and centralized so future debugging should be easier related to display bugs. Please reach out if you are still affected by this issue or if it unfortunately caused a new one.
In the original game, all settings had to be stored to the memory card due to having no other choice. But we aren't limited by that and it can be inconvenient to have to load your save-file to initialize your preferred settings such as volume levels, vibration, play-hints, etc. Some players do not even realize this is how it works and it just causes confusion that OpenGOAL isn't properly saving their settings.
This fixes that, the following settings are now saved and restored from the pc-settings.gc file, instead of your save-slot:
Volume (SFX / Music / Dialog)
Controller Vibration
Play Hints (Only relevant in Jak 1)
Subtitles (Not relevant in Jak 1, it already had a custom one)
Fix Progress Menu Exit Sound Not Respecting SFX Volume
A longstanding vanilla bug, the sound that plays when exiting the progress menu would not respect the SFX volume setting and always play at max volume even when it should be muted.
This feature was already present in Jak 2 and has now been ported to Jak 1 and 3.
By default, at 60 FPS, the game has an input buffer that stores the last 3 frames of input and uses that when checking for button presses. At higher frame rates, this buffer would remain the same, leading to more easily mistimed inputs.
The buffer has been increased to a maximum of 15 frames at the highest framerate setting.
Fix Sprite Positioning on Non-Standard Aspect Ratios
On non-standard aspect ratios, HUD sprites would quickly become misaligned. A lot of these issues have been mitigated with a mix of a bunch of manual adjustments for the most common aspect ratios, approximations for anything in-between and hiding offending elements in certain cases.
The prim renderer has now been implemented. It's used for a variety of effects, most notably:
Cloth physics simulation, e.g. Jak's skirt and scarf.
"New" lightning effects (in addition to the old lightning renderer from Jak 2), e.g. Arc Wielder, Dark Jak projectile attack.
"Light trails", e.g. Beam Reflexor, Plasmite RPG trail, Dune Hopper grenade trail, vehicle tire tracks, etc.
With the implementation of prim, there are now only a couple of graphical effects missing, namely some new full screen effects like the screen blur + whiteout that occurs in some cutscenes or when firing the Super Nova.
In the Arena and Marauder Stronghold missions, some Marauders would spawn out of bounds.
When catching a second leaper in the Leaper Corral mission and watching the cutscene, Jak and the Sand Shark would be moved to an invalid position, instantly failing the mission by drowning.
The hovering KG robots' hand cannons were missing, making them unable to shoot Jak.
Rings would not spawn for side missions.
A crash during final boss.
A lot of cutscene models would be aggressively culled, making them invisible. The cause for this was a wrong skeleton setup, leading to the game use the wrong joint when doing culling checks.
Sometimes, models would skip updating their textures, which caused Skull Gems to occasionally not have their animated texture in certain spots.
After getting cloth physics working, NPCs that use them would fail to spawn because their process heap was not big enough.
During cutscenes, eye textures would not be assigned properly to models, leading to some very goofy results.
Initial texture animation support was added a while back, and now most of the missing texture animations have been added as well. A couple of issues still remain, but the majority of the effects work.
The biggest missing puzzle piece, Overlord 2, has been decompiled and implemented.
This means we now finally have music, cutscene and voice line playback! While this means that there's now a number of new bugs to fix, it goes a long way towards making the game feel more complete.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-KidVaserhttps://github.com/xTVaser<![CDATA[Progress Report - June 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-june-20242024-06-30T10:00:00.000ZWork on Jak 3 continues to make slow, yet steady progress. Plus an exciting announcement.
This is the aforementioned exciting announcement. It's taken a few months to get most of the designs ready to present but atleast I'm
fairly excited about it.
I thought it would be nice to have some physical merchandise to go along with the project, not only because I thought we could make something cool and there isn't a ton of quality stuff out there, but also because it kinda serves as a reward/reminder for all the work we've put into the project.
Additionally, for a long time people have consistently brought up the desire to donate or contribute financially. This is still off the table for several reasons, but purchasing merchandise is different than a donation. It's not just gifting money away and it doesn't create a sense of obligation -- you are getting something out of the deal.
So, if you are interested and you want to see the design previews, their potential prices, and give feedback (please be respectful) check out the google form.
info
I will close form submissions when next month's progress report goes live, and if there's sufficient interest, we'll move forward with making it a real thing.
Due to recent changes surrounding how the OpenGOAL binaries are built, if you are on Windows, you are probably
going to want to update to the latest version of the VCC Runtime or the games will no longer launch.
The launcher (if you update it) should detect if you are running an old version, and if so, give you the link to
go and update it.
People have wanted a simple way to use the launcher to extract textures, audio, etc for a while. This has required them to either:
manually edit the .jsonc config files and run the decompile option
be unable to, as the extractor binary could not do things like extract audio.
Well no more, not only does the extractor binary now support anything the normal decompiler binary does -- but the launcher now has settings to do all of this for you. Just enable what you want, and run the decompiler through Advanced on the respective game:
There is also a new button to open the folder that the game's data is located in, this is useful to quickly find the folder where your textures/audio/etc are extracted to. For example textures get extracted to .../decompiler_out/<GAME>/textures
While technically coming from an unofficial source, Milkfat32 has taken it upon themselves to go through the process of getting the launcher into a flatpak and added to flathub.
At this point I don't think it's released yet, but if that is of interest to you, be on the lookout.
The hope is that it can be made an official thing in the future as flatpak support with the launcher's framework improves (it seems to be part of their V2 plan, which is due sometime this year).
Jak 3 Airlock Speedups and Temporary Cutscene Fixes
Just like in Jak 2, code has been added to make airlocks open faster if you so choose.
Additionally, as Overlord2 is still being worked on, cutscenes have to be hacked around. This change improves the way the cutscenes temporarily skipped.
One of the coolest parts about using OpenGOAL is the REPL and making changes while the game is live. Well atleast it is, until you change
something that the compiler doesn't like. Such as a function definition, or a type definition.
This would require you to completely restart your REPL, re-compile the project, and then you can continue your work. goalc is noble for
trying to prevent these types of redefinitions, but during development and experimentation it's the opposite of what you want.
There is a new permissiveRedefinitions boolean option you can put in your repl-config.json file to enable this behaviour. It's early days so it
may still not allow redefining everything, make an issue when/if you encounter such situations.
Additionally, there's a cooler welcome screen that provides more information in a more condensed format. This is something that hasn't been changed in years!
If you have a problem related to frame-pacing or performance, you'll often be told to record a profile dump via the ImGUI topbar.
However this tool had it's limitations. For one thing, the maximum number of events were quite low, only amounting to a handful of seconds that could be recorded. Additionally the size of the profile dump would be quite large given the amount of time it would take. Lastly the UI wouldn't really tell you anything to suggest how quickly you were hitting the limit.
All of these things have been fixed:
You can change the maximum number of events that are recorded
You can enable compression on the output (approximately a 10x reduction)
The UI shows how quickly it's recording, letting you know if you need to bump up your max or not.
]]>Vaserhttps://github.com/xTVaser<![CDATA[Progress Report - May 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-may-20242024-05-31T10:00:00.000ZJak 3 decompilation is nearing completion.
The custom_levels folder was renamed to custom_assets and will, as the name suggests, house any form of custom asset the game needs (e.g. custom levels, textures, models, audio, etc.).
If you use any texture replacements, the game now looks for the texture_replacements folder in custom_assets/<GAME>/texture_replacements and it now works on a per-game basis instead of having a single folder for all three games.
Still in early stages, preliminary work on generating a dependency graph for Jak 1's codebase has begun.
The current dependency tracking situation for our compiler is quite a mess. You can only use things that were defined in files that were compiled earlier in the build order and if you make a change to a file that is very early in the build order, incremental builds require you to build almost every file again, even though a majority of those files are false dependencies.
Once we have a proper dependency graph, these problems should go away and we get even more benefits:
A proper build order with compiler warnings that tell you when something you try to use is not available at build time.
A very exciting new feature for custom level authors: You can now import models from Blender into the game to use for creating your own actors!
To clarify: This does not allow you to replace existing models, only add new ones to custom levels.
This is still in very early stages and may be improved upon in the future, but it works well enough for making some very basic custom actors, like your own collectables for example.
There are some limitations:
You cannot import any animations, the model only has a single default idle animation that does nothing. The game's animation system is extremely complex and the format for animation data is very complicated and not well understood, so this will not be happening for a while.
The model only has a single bone, located at its root.
If the actor is using a collision mesh, collision is limited to 255 vertices per collide-mesh, although an actor can have multiple collide-meshes as needed. Every object in Blender that has custom collision properties set will get its own collide-mesh.
An example actor was added to the test-zone level (accessible from the debug menu under Game -> Continue -> test-zone-start) that can be used as a starting point. The GOAL code for it is located in test-zone-obs.gc. Thanks to Kuitar for providing the model!
I wrote a small guide on how to use the tool here.
For people that want to quickly give themselves a 124% save file, orbs/gems or just want to mess around with the cheats we added without unlocking them first, a couple of new debug menu options were added. The debug menu can be opened in Jak 2 by rebooting the game in debug mode (press Alt to bring up the top bar -> "Debugging" -> "Reboot in Debug Mode") and pressing L3 + Start.
As of May 16th, all of the game's mission/gameplay code has been decompiled. The only things remaining that are actually needed are a couple of small files for setting up texture animations and a single large file (bigmap, used for the world map in the progress menu), the rest that were skipped are files that we don't need on PC for the game to function, like files used only for debugging PS2 hardware features, debugging graphics code or renderer code that was completely rewritten in C++ and is not required anymore.
info
Please keep in mind that this does not mean that the game is almost finished!
The decompilation is only part of the effort, as we now need to squash all of the bugs that we find (and there are quite a few that we discovered so far, here is the list where we keep track in case you are curious), work on the remaining graphics stuff (prim, blit-displays and more) and, most importantly, finish Overlord 2 which will probably take up most of the time.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-Kid<![CDATA[Progress Report - April 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-apr-20242024-04-30T10:00:00.000ZJak 3 progress is skyrocketing.
Reimplementation of GOAL capture System for Jak 2/3
Jak 2 and 3 had a capture system for taking high resolution screenshots. It would max out LODs and hide any HUD elements/text on-screen before capturing a raw image of the next frame. This feature was mainly used to aid with taking high quality screenshots used in promotional material.
This system has now been reimplemented to work with OpenGOAL and the already existing screenshot feature in the ImGUI top bar which can be accessed by pressing Alt. There are presets for 1080p, 2K, 4K and even 16K in case somebody needs that...
Previously, when the game crashed and the GOAL debugger printed the stack trace, you would need to scroll all the way up to see the spot where the game actually crashed, which could be quite a lot of scrolling depending on how big the stack trace was.
The icons on the minimap were slightly misaligned, leading to small black bars showing up next to them. This bug was also present in Jak 3 and was fixed there as well.
A LOT of files were decompiled, way too many to list here, so here's some statistics for the month of April instead:
Roughly ~400 files were decompiled, going from around 400 files done at the start of April to ~800 out of 1008 files total
Total decompiled code line count went from ~200k to ~750k
In the span of a single week, the game went from looking like this around the end of March:
To this:
Thankfully, a lot (but not all) of the existing renderers from previous games remained untouched for the most part, which allowed us to quickly get the game looking very close to how it should be. Jak 3 does have a few new renderers though, the main ones are hfrag and prim.
hfrag is the renderer for the desert sand. It's currently being worked on and it appears to be quite complicated.
Not too much is known about prim yet, but it appears to be used for all kinds of things, most prominently light trails (e.g. the grenades fired from the Plasmite RPG or the Dune Hopper, Beam Reflexor shots, Needle Lazer, etc.), cloth simulation and some lightning effects (Arc Wielder).
As of right now, with the exception of the Wastelander rescue mission, the entirety of Act 1 is playable as well as the following missions from Act 2 and 3:
All Sewer missions
All Haven Forest missions
All War Factory missions
Destroy Dark Eco Tanks
Race for More Artifacts
Destroy Metal-pedes in Nest
Rescue Seem at Temple
Defend Spargus From Attack
Destroy Metal Head Tower
Reach Catacombs via Palace Ruins
Reach Precursor Core
Destroy Final Boss
Aside from the rest of the missing game and graphics code, there are still two other big missing pieces which we will very likely not get until quite a bit later: Music and cutscenes.
Jak 3 completely changes the way music playback works, as it is now streamed instead of sequenced like before. On top of that, Jak 3 uses "Overlord 2", a new version of Naughty Dog's IOP driver "Overlord" which was used for streaming data off the DVD, such as files for cutscene animations, "spooled" animations like the Terraformer walking animation (which, fun fact, is around six minutes long!) or Jak's idle animations and audio for cutscenes and voice lines.
Currently, we're just reusing Jak 2's version of Overlord which allows for the basics like the (very buggy) playback of most sound effects and level loading, but we will eventually need to decompile Overlord 2 in order to get proper music and cutscene playback.
Here's a bunch of videos showing off more progress (roughly in chronological order):
It might have been April Fools' Day, but this was definitely real: target (Jak) was successfully spawned for the first time on April 1st.
Since we didn't have the foreground model renderer ("MERC") implemented yet, we needed to draw Jak's bones using debug tools to see anything.
Implementation of MERC a few hours later. It might look bad, but it was actually implemented correctly from the start, there were just some other missing components like the time of day and mood lighting which meant that foreground models would not receive any color information. Jak's model is missing because it turned out that it was stored in a completely different set of files compared to the previous games, so we needed to add extra code for extracting the model data from those files.
The debug menu was added.
Mood and time of day are used for the background/foreground lighting. Mood is used to apply special effects to the background, like weather (rain, lightning) or torch/lamp/electric gate lights. The time of day system uses 8 color palettes that are interpolated between. The colors are all baked into the level geometry.
Regions use the game's built in script system in order to load levels, play cutscenes if certain conditions are met, define water volumes, etc. when either Jak or the camera passes through them. They can be spheres, planes or boxes.
The ragdoll editor was used to test out and modify ragdoll animations for specific skeletons. You could select each joint separately, modify some parameters and print the current setup to the listener to copy it into your ragdoll setup code. It crashes right before the interesting part in the video because some things weren't implemented yet.
BLERC was added, used for facial animations.
The lightning renderer was added, used by Dark Jak and in many other places.
Fun fact: Did you know that Jak has a special animation for switching ladder sides? You probably didn't, because this ladder from the test level "halfpipe" is the only one in the game that actually allows you to do this, so this animation goes completely unused in the base game.
First attempt at spawning enemies that use nav meshes to move around. I thought there was a bug in the code causing the enemies to not move around, but it turned out I simply forgot to turn on the enemy navigation logic...
After implementing the game's mission and task system, I decompiled the code for a single mission to test it out. This led to the first fully completable mission in OpenGOAL, "Escort Bomb Train"!
Right after that, I went to work on more of the code for the Eco Mine missions, next up was the boss battle against the Precursor Robot.
Work on the code for the desert vehicles began a bit after that because a lot of missions require them. The desert vehicle code ended up being around 30 files and, just like Jak 2's vehicle code, was extremely awful to sift through, but luckily, everything mostly worked on the first try. It may be a bit hard to notice, but if you look closely, you can see that Jak is not actually sitting in the vehicle until the vehicle takes an impact and forces him to play an animation. The cause for this was eventually tracked down to be a single function using the wrong return value.
The pckernel used in the previous games was reimplemented for Jak 3. It contains basically all of our custom code that provides extra PC-specific functionality, such as the Discord Rich Presence integration or the controller LED effect. For Jak 3, the controller LED feature was expanded to change color when you're Light Jak.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-Kid<![CDATA[Progress Report - March 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-mar-20242024-04-04T10:00:00.000ZJak 3 decompilation progress continues, there will be a lot to share next month.
See the linked PR for examples and demos on what was added. To sum it up, if you write OpenGOAL code you may notice a lot more functionality via the LSP (which is automatically grabbed for you by the VSCode extension).
Jak 1's graphics menu would be different if your monitor was only 60hz. That isn't necessarily a problem...but the alternate version was missing the option to change the monitor the game was displayed on.
Fixed by consolidating things into a single menu varient.
There were issues where unlocked cheats would seemingly not be unlocked when the user would normally expect them to be. This was solved by periodically saving the cheat progress.
However, in the meantime a hack was added to stop the game from out-right crashing. The cutscene will not function properly if you get the game into the bad state, but it won't crash.
If this causes other issues, let us know and it can be reverted but it seems to do the job.
ja macro detection was fixed and there is a now part-tracker-spawn macro detection. More changes to make the decompiler produce a much nicer end-result.
Support for self-referential virtual state inheritance
In Jak 3, they seemingly added support for virtual states inheriting from it's own type's fellow virtual states. Fun.
]]>Vaserhttps://github.com/xTVaser<![CDATA[Progress Report - February 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-feb-20242024-03-05T10:00:00.000ZJak 3 decompilation progress is in full swing, as well as a few notable additions to the other games.
We seem to have narrowed this down to a problem not in our code, but in third-party software that causes similar issues in a whole host of other games and applications. The culprit appears to be Nahimic which is an audio thing pushed by various manufacturers (ASUS, Steelseries, etc).
If it does resolve the issue, let us know in the Discord so we can wrap this one up as "not our fault" and add relevant documentation to the installation guides.
Keyboard controls are now disabled by default in order to resolve unexpected behaviour caused by Steam Input that several users have ran into from time to time.
tip
It is important to note that if no controllers are detected, the keyboard controls will be temporarily enabled.
So why was this done?
Steam Input is something that tries to, among several things, improve controller support for games. One of the ways it accomplishes this is by mapping controller inputs to keyboard inputs, so when you press a button on your controller it simultaneously hits a respective key on your keyboard.
Users were complaining that when they pressed for example X on their controller, the game would pause, or in other words it would simultaneously hit Start. The "solution" for a while was to suggest closing Steam which is obviously less than ideal. You can probably already guess what the problem is from the above, X is bound to Enter on the keyboard via Steam Input and the game is simultaneously processing both inputs.
The game's input system has been explicitly designed to take in input from multiple sources simultaneously so TLDR -- you can't just temporarily ignore one source (and how would you know which is the right thing to ignore as well!). The straight-forward and consistent solution is to disable the keyboard by default as it is not the way most people play the games.
There is also a new way to enable or disable the keyboard setting via the "topbar" incase you have no way to navigate to the in-game pause menu to enable it for the first time. However in most situations this should not be required, as mentioned above, if no controllers are detected the keyboard inputs are automatically enabled for you.
Mouse settings are now properly wired up in Jak 2, additionally some bugs with the mouse support have been addressed. Most notably before it was not properly detecting when you stopped moving the mouse since it is entirely based on relative motion, now the game will detect when the mouse has stopped moving and reset the sticks to a neutral state.
C++ 20 is the latest version of C++ that has widespread compiler support, so it's nice to have that updated. More standard library features to take advantage to cleanup some of our code.
There is a potential crash when a level was loaded due to the sprite-distort tables not being initialized yet. This would result in a race, and the backend rendering code would sometimes crash. This is a long-standing bug that was "recently" (read months ago) made more likely once the sprite limit was raised -- the larger the table, the more likely it would hit an invalid uninitialized index.
This finally fixes that by ensuring the tables are initialized and we no longer have random startup crashes!
If you ever have a crash going forward with the log weird sprite_distort startup crash happened again! scream and let us know!
It is possible to create a JSON file with custom category settings, for example starting with certain cheats enabled, or with a game task pre-completed.
These custom categories can be made via the speedrunner menu and they live in (on windows for example) AppData/OpenGOAL/jak2/features/speedrun-categories.json.
tip
See the PR for the example file used in the demonstration video below, editing the file manually is required for removing, renaming and changing the starting continue point if it doesn't start from Fortress Escape
The input buffer has been given a larger size depending on your framerate. Often times the frame buffer for inputs would be too small in practice on higher framerates, leading to inputs being dropped. For example the time between pressing X after jumping to double jump.
Additionally, the clouds should move at a more correct pace now.
Many files have been decompiled in Jak 3 so far, many of which are simple ones or ones that were mostly unchanged from Jak 2.
One new feature that had to be detected and handled was inherited non-virtual states.
The ability to persist process stack-size overrides via a json file has already been added. This is nice because previously we would manually change these values in the files meaning we could accidentally revert that adjustment. When the stack size is too small, the game crashes, so this is one less thing to have to worry about causing a regression.
]]>Vaserhttps://github.com/xTVaser<![CDATA[Progress Report - January 2024]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-jan-20242024-01-29T10:00:00.000ZNew year, new game.
Modding Community Event: No OoJ ("No Off of Jetboard")
Are you interested in learning more about the programming language that powers Jak and Daxter or just want to experiment?
The modding community is currently hosting an event where they collaboratively work on a Jak 2 mod that permanently forces Jak to be on the jetboard. The idea is to help more people get into modding. There's a bunch of issues that can be worked on and are assigned difficulties, ranging from very easy to hard. Anybody interested is welcome to join, learn and help out.
Fix Custom Screenshots and Move Screenshot Directory
A bug with taking custom resolution screenshots using the ImGui menu (accessed by pressing Alt) was fixed. The screenshots directory was also moved. It can now be found under ~/.config/OpenGOAL/game_name/screenshots on Linux and AppData\Roaming\OpenGOAL\game_name\screenshots on Windows.
Support .glb Files Exported with glTF 2.0/Blender 4.0
Previously, only .glb files that were exported using versions of Blender older than 4.0 would be supported for custom levels due to the way the GLB exporter for Blender 4.0 would store vertex colors.
Some actor properties use numeric values, be it as a bitfield to toggle certain flags or a number to specify e.g. what type of collectable it is.
In the code, we have enums (such as pickup-type) for this that map to a specific number to make it easier to identify what the value means. When defining actors in custom levels, you had to use the corresponding numeric value for this, so instead of e.g. (pickup-type fuel-cell), it would be 6.
This change allows you to use enums inside of the custom level JSON and adds more lump types for special cases that use enums.
You can manually specify actor IDs when creating actors, but when giving actors IDs out of order, entity lookups would fail because the underlying code does a binary search that expects the entity list to be sorted.
Now, you can specify IDs in whatever order you like and the actor list will automatically be sorted and checked for duplicate IDs before the level is built.
In addition to the enum-int32, enum-uint32, water-height, eco-info and vector3m lump types that were added with enum support, a good chunk of other new types were added:
cell-info: Like eco-info, but automatically fills in the pickup type and amount, so you only need to define the game-task.
buzzer-info: Like eco-info, but automatically calculates the required amount value for the scout fly based on the scout fly ID (starting from 0) and the game-task given.
symbol: Allows you to define a list of symbols.
type: Like symbol, but defines a list of types instead.
string: Like symbol and type, but defines a list of strings instead.
Examples for all of these and more can be found in test-zone.jsonc.
The new cheats that were teased back in the August 2023 report have now been fully integrated into the game's menu! You can find them at the bottom of the secrets menu. Some of them will just require a specific number of orbs, others will require you to complete certain challenges, just like Ratchet and Clank's skill point system.
Another miscellaneous feature that we're adding is a tracker for a bunch of statistics like total kills with all weapons and types of attacks like spins, punches, uppercuts, etc.
There is no menu for it yet, but a lot of the groundwork is in place.
Earlier this month, we started cleaning up the last remaining loose ends preventing us from fully getting started on decompiling Jak 3, most crucial of which was the decompilation of the C kernel, required for setting up the game's runtime and bootstrapping the GOAL kernel in order to build and load GOAL code.
With all the loose ends tied up, we wasted no time getting back into decomp:
(As a comparison, reaching 20k lines of code in Jak 1 took about 167 days and Jak 2 took a few weeks.)
Jak 3 has just about 1000 files we need to go through, compared to Jak 2's 811 files. In less than 10 days, we already finished over 100 of the early engine files. This, however, doesn't mean the rest of the files will be done as quickly because the majority of these files were extremely similar, if not identical to Jak 2 thus far. Once we're done with the engine files (which is ~440 files), most of the mission and gameplay code will be completely new.
It will be a while before the game can actually "boot", as we still need to go through a bunch more files to get the main game loop up and running. Once we get there, though, there is some hope that we will be able to reimplement the main foreground and background renderers much more quickly than we did for Jak 2, as a lot of the code appears to be basically unchanged, with the exception of one new renderer added in Jak 3 (hfrag) used to draw the desert dunes.
The website has not yet been set up to track Jak 3 decompilation progress, but we should hopefully have that in place soon so you can follow along.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-Kid<![CDATA[Progress Report - November 2023]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-nov-20232023-12-17T10:00:00.000ZSlightly belated this time around.
After 10 months since the release of Crystal Cave, Kuitar is back at it again with the second chapter of his mod "The Forgotten Lands", a new adventure with a new storyline and levels to explore! Featuring numerous additions and improvements to Crystal Cave as well as a bunch of completely new content, you can check it out in the unofficial mod launcher.
Kuitar and I have also written a small release blog with some behind the scenes info on the level creation process and the code for the custom actors and music/hint systems you can check out here (it is recommended you play the mod first before reading it as it spoils some of the new content).
Custom text we added in Jak 2 can now be translated via Crowdin. This does not include the original game's cutscene subtitles yet, but does include the new hint subtitles that were transcribed from the voice lines that play outside of cutscenes.
Allow Replacing All Instances of a Texture with One Texture
Previously, if you wanted to e.g. replace the textures for the Babak Lurker, this would have required replacing every instance of the texture for each level it appears in.
With this change, you can just put your replacement texture in an _all folder and it will automatically replace the texture wherever it appears. The normal path takes priority over the _all folder, so you can still replace textures on a per-level basis if you so choose.
When using a language other than English that does not have a particular string localized, instead of using an UNKNOWN ID placeholder, the game will now fall back to the English version of the string.
On launch day, we got many reports of users getting terrible performance upon entering an outdoors area. It turns out this was an issue with Intel GPU drivers, where putting a lot of static data inside of shaders related to texture animations for the slime in the Weapons Lab would cause massive performance drops in the Sky renderer.
People who used a PAL ISO to decompile the game would have unlocalized menu options for any custom text because the game language would be forced to UK English.
At higher frame rates (144+), the Palace rotation effect when you're in the Throne Room would be broken because the rotation angle would become so small that some trigonometry functions would end up returning 0.
First person camera turning speed.
Speed of the texture scroll effect.
Speed of the minimap wanted flash.
Speed of flashing icons on the minimap (such as the kid during the escort kid mission).
Previously, the newly added board trick display just used the actual enum values for the trick names, now the names have been localized properly and it was changed to use the large font.
On launch, we were missing a lot of options in the menus that we still had to hook up, such as MSAA, resolution, PS2 Options and the ability to quit the game from the title screen menu.
This also implemented the previously non-functional camera options, though they are still ineffective when entering a turret as of right now.
Fix Missing Discord RPC Mission Images When Not in Debug Mode
When playing the game in retail mode, the level icons would not show up on Discord's Rich Presence when a mission was active.
Jak 2 has a lot of unused voice lines that still remain in the game files. One example of this are Jak and civilian voice lines that would have played when stealing a zoomer, similar to GTA.
A while back, I uploaded a video on my channel, showing off what the feature would have looked like (with a very high chance to play for demonstration purposes):
Due to popular demand, I decided to add this feature to OpenGOAL as one of the new PC cheats. When enabled, it has a random chance to play one of the Jak lines and a subsequent civilian line when stealing a zoomer (or only a Jak line when stealing a KG Bike/Hellcat).
The PC cheats are currently not yet fully done and can only be used via the REPL for now, but once they are complete and a menu for them is added, you will be able to adjust this random chance if you feel it happens too frequently.
The Dark Jak punch sound and some Young Samos sounds should now play.
Increase Level Graphics Loading Speed And Fix Stuttering During Unloading
There have been some reports of people entering a level before the game had time to load in the level graphics, so the loading speed has been increased.
Similarly, during level graphics unloading, some people would encounter stutters, so fewer things are being unloaded per frame now.
This only affects the graphics and not any actual level loads.
There have been many (too many...) reports of people thinking that the Strip Mine Eco Wells mission was not completable because of a missing rail section. The confusion only compounded because it looked like part of the rails were visible in OpenGOAL.
In reality, these rails are not needed at all to complete the mission and are, in fact, completely hidden on PS2, only showing up on the next Strip Mine visit where you have to drop the crate onto the Metal Head eggs.
OpenGOAL simply failed to hide the part of the rails that is made up of "shrubs". This bug has been fixed, which should hopefully clear up the confusion.
This bug was the cause of some random crashes in the city and even though we knew about it for many months, it took us a very long time to finally figure it out. We even had a consistent setup for reproducing it, but had no clue what was causing it because the error we got was quite mysterious.
In the end, we found that it always happened when the current level was unloaded while a civilian was cowering on the ground due to Jak using the jetboard near them. This eventually lead to us finally realizing the cause was that during level unloading, the level's navigation mesh is unloaded, invalidating the nav-control for any process using that nav mesh, but the code for the civilian's cower-ground state is still trying to use it, crashing the game.
You can now select the territory the game should use. Useful if you want to e.g. play the game with civilians as they would behave in the Japanese version of the game.
A 90 FPS option was added to the frame rate setting for Steam Deck OLED users.
]]>Hat Kidhttps://github.com/Hat-Kid<![CDATA[Progress Report - October 2023]]>https://opengoal.dev/blog/progress-report-oct-20232023-10-30T10:00:00.000ZThe wait is finally over.
With this month, the long wait is finally over! We feel that Jak 2 is now in a good enough state to release as an open beta on the launcher. It is still not perfect and we are aware of some remaining bugs that we still need to iron out, but the game is 100% completable!
tip
You will require the latest version of the launcher 2.3.0 to install and play Jak 2 with it!
Coinciding with this release, we have put together an updated tutorial for newcomers on how to install the game, some common troubleshooting steps and how to report any issues you may experience:
Create an issue on GitHub using the Jak 2 bug report template, filling out as much information as you can.
Join our Discord server and report your problem in the help-and-questions channel by creating a new thread (ensuring that your problem is not already reported). If you're using the launcher, make sure to also upload the support package, that will make it much easier for us to help.
danger
Some of the bigger gameplay issues we are aware of:
Camera Options and a few other menu options are not implmented yet.
Occasionally, some sound effects can cut off abruptly. This is particularly an issue in the gun course and when playing at higher frame rates.
This is an original game bug, but there are some sounds (such as Sig's Peace Maker charging sound) that always play at max volume regardless of audio settings and also play even if the game is paused.
The texture for the ocean is still a bit wrong.
Some HUD Elements might not line up correctly.
For common problems relating to the launcher and the installation process, refer to the video linked above.
The OpenGOAL formatter has gotten a rewrite, refactor and some documentation that gives insight into the problem of trying to write a new formatter for a custom language. It turns out it's not super easy, even if your language is a Lisp!
A new decompiler feature similar to texture replacements, but the non-transparent part of the replacement image is merged into the original texture instead of replacing it completely.
Some of the game's textures are not part of any art group or the common level files, which previously meant that the only way to use them in a custom level would be to have another level loaded that has them. One particular example of this is the HUD for the Zoomer. Now, you can specify which textures to separately pack into a custom level.
Better Detection of Art Groups and joint-node-index Macro
The decompiler now goes through all of the game's art groups to extract information about the joints of a model in order to turn code like this:
Which gives us a much better understanding of what is going on. eichar is the name of Jak's model in Jak 1 (lod0 is the highest level of detail and jg is "joint geometry"), so this code is creating water splash particles at the position of Jak's mouth.
Additionally, the art group detection has been vastly improved to detect 99% of occurences and turns code like this:
A regression was introduced in a big refactor that would cause the eco pickup timer to become desynced when e.g. watching a cutscene, resulting in one blue eco blob giving you a full meter.
A major refactor and cleanup of the level building code was performed in order to split things up into common code shared by all games and game specific code. Along with this, early support for creating custom levels in Jak 2 has been added. The process is relatively similar to Jak 1, with some small differences.
Some sections are slightly outdated at this point and it only covers Jak 1, but you can refer to Kuitar's guide if you want to get started with making levels.
caution
Custom level support is still in very early stages for both games and the tooling is still quite primitive.
In the original game, the Construction Site and Underport icons are green, which is actually not intended. The real colors for the icons have been restored.
The race timer has also been fixed to use a hundredths timer instead of a 60ths timer.
Last month, we added experimental support for higher frame rates to Jak 2.
To make sure people are aware that this option is experimental and bugs are to be expected, we added a disclaimer when trying to go past 60 FPS for the first time in a session.
Allow Decompiler To Run on Jak 3 Code and Improve all-types Generation
This PR has been around since April, but has only been merged recently.
It includes most of the necessary changes to set up Jak 3 for use with the decompiler.
Along with this, it also vastly improves the all-types generation (a big file used by the decompiler that we have to change a lot during decomp, containing information about every single type, method and function in the game), which will save us a lot of time over the course of the decompilation process.
It is now possible to extract textures and models from Jak 3 assets. The results are not quite perfect yet and some things are not handled as of now (such as the new desert renderer), but it's a good start and hopefully means that the main foreground and background renderers have not changed a whole lot between Jak 2 and 3.
