Asset manifests (AssetManifest.xml)

An AssetManifest.xml lists, for each shader and material, the name it is stored under and the source it was built from, and in some manifests the textures and models too. The track’s bin.zip holds the shaders and materials under hashed names (_0xNNNNNNNN), and the manifest is what maps those names back to source paths; the loose manifest beside the track’s chunks lists the textures, models and instances that the hand-placed instance file refers to by number. Proven

This page describes Steam build 25588841. Each statement marked Proven held on every instance of the install: the four manifests below, and every entry of the three bin.zip archives that carry one. Proven

The four manifests

Manifest	Shaders	Materials	Textures	Models	Instances
Tracks\Brio\bin.zip	46	419	0	0	0
Tracks\homespace02\bin.zip	1	2	6	1	1
Stripped\gs\bin.zip	31	68	0	0	0
Tracks\Brio\AssetManifest.xml, loose beside the GeoChunks	48	0	48,733	134,330	593,706

All four read whole with a reader that refuses any element, attribute or text this page does not describe. Proven

The files are UTF-8 with a byte-order mark and the declaration <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>. Proven The root element is AssetManifest. Its children are one container element per kind, in this order: Shaders, then Materials (both present in every manifest), then Textures and Models in the manifests that have them. Proven

Shaders and materials

A Shader or Material element has exactly two attributes, Name and Source. Proven Name is the name the shader or material is stored under (below); Source is its source path, relative to the media folder, and a material’s ends in .material and a shader’s in .shader. Observed

In the loose manifest the Source of a shader is an absolute path on the build machine instead. Proven

Names are the zip entry names

In a bin.zip manifest, each Name is the name of a zip entry with backslashes for the slashes, except for ASCII case: the homespace02 archive writes its folder Materials/ where its manifest writes materials\. Every materials/*.materialbin entry and every shaders/<folder>/*.shaderbin entry of the archive is named by a manifest Name, in all three bin.zip archives. Proven

A shader entry is shaders\_0xNN\<family>.shaderbin, stored beside the family’s compiled permutation files (.pcdxil with .pso, .vso and .lso); in Stripped\gs the families also have <family>.shaderbin.xml files, which are not read. Observed The family container is on Shader containers.

Season folders

In each bin.zip, the materials\spring\, materials\autumn\ and materials\winter\ folders hold exactly the entry names of the base materials\ folder, no more and no fewer. Proven The manifest lists only the base folder; the three season folders are not named in it. Proven How the season folders are selected is on Seasons.

Resolving a material chain

A model’s material instance names its parent material by the source’s game path, Game:\Media\<Source less .material>.materialbin. To find the stored entry, look the Source up in the manifest and take its Name. Observed · materials of one Shibuya area; not a census

A material names its shader with the family once more as a folder: the shader whose Source is <folder>\<family>.shader is named Game:\Media\<folder>\<family>\<family>.shaderbin. Proven[every shader path the materials of the three bin.zip archives give, 1,956 references counting each season folder’s copy] The paths that match no manifest’s shader are all under _library\shaderspg (28 of the 1,956), whose families are not in any bin.zip. Proven The chain itself is on Materials.

Textures

A Texture element is one of two shapes, by manifest.

The loose manifest has three attributes: Source (the texture’s source, ending .swatch), SourceHash and PVSTextureIndex. PVSTextureIndex counts 0 to 48,732 in file order, and 48,733 is the number of texture descriptors of the Tokyo instance file brio_00.pvs. Proven

The bin.zip manifest (homespace02, 6 textures) has these attributes: Name (<name>_<guid>_quality1.pb), Source, Limited, AtlasIndex, AtlasX, AtlasY, AtlasWidth, AtlasHeight, QualityLevels, Width, Height, Depth, LightMapType, LargeTextureDim, MipReduce, OriginalWidth, OriginalHeight, OriginalDepth, Compression and SourceHash. Observed · the 6 textures of homespace02 Compression is Bc7, UnsignedBc5 or R8G8B8A8 on those six. Observed Beyond their names, what the atlas, limited, quality, light-map, large-texture and mip-reduction attributes mean is not established. Unknown

SourceHash

SourceHash is the CRC-32 of the lower-case game path game:\media\<Source less .swatch>.swatchbin, the same path hash that a material’s texture parameter names a texture by (Texture path hash, Swatch textures). It holds on every texture of the install’s manifests: the 48,733 loose and the 6 of homespace02. Proven

Models and instances

The loose manifest has 134,330 Model elements. A Model is named brioout.NNNNN.modelbin and holds one Mesh (attributes Name and Source, a .max scene) and zero or more Instance elements. Proven

• The numbers NNNNN of the names are the model numbers of brio_00.pvs, 0 to 134,329, each exactly once. The models are not in numeric order in the file; 85,324 stand at their own position. Proven
• An Instance has Id, Ribbon, Index and sometimes IsLone. Id is a GUID: the 593,706 instances carry 127,920 distinct ones, so a GUID is shared by many instances. Proven
• Index is a LOD row of brio_00.pvs whose model is the number of the model holding the instance. Every one of the 593,706 LOD rows of the file is named by exactly one Instance. Proven
• 4,090 models have no Instance. Proven
• Ribbon is 0 on every instance. IsLone is absent from the loose file; the one Instance of homespace02 has IsLone="0", and its model carries MaterialKeys="Material__26, Material__28". Observed What Ribbon and IsLone select is not established. Unknown

What do the Ribbon and IsLone attributes of an Instance select?

Ribbon is 0 on all 593,706 instances of the loose manifest and IsLone appears on one instance of homespace02 only; the manifests give no value to compare.

The names in brio_00.pvs

The hand-placed instance file names its 46 shaders and 419 materials as game:\media\tracks\brio\bin\<Name of the bin.zip manifest>; bin\ there stands for the bin.zip archive. This holds on all 465 of 465 names. Proven The file’s table is on Hand-placed instances.