How this wiki works

This wiki describes how games store and process their data: archives and file formats, meshes, materials and shaders, worlds and streaming, collision, animation, and the runtime that consumes all of it. It is written so that a person can learn an engine from it and a program can rely on it.

Organised by engine, then by system

Games that share an engine share most of their formats, and differ in places. So the wiki is organised the way an engine team’s own documentation would be: by engine, then by system (archives, geometry, materials, …), with the differences between games written where they occur instead of on separate per-game pages.

Section	What it holds
Engines	One section per engine. Its overview says which games run on it and what differs between them; its systems hold the pages.
Games	One short hub per game: the build our observations come from, where its data lives, what is special about it, and links into its engine.
Concepts	Ideas that cut across engines (levels of detail, layered materials, tile grids), each linking to how every engine does it.
Methods	How things become known: the checks behind each confidence level.
Coverage	Computed from every page: what is known per engine, system and game, how surely, and what is open.

The systems, in reading order, are fixed for every engine so that pages land in the same place everywhere:

System	Covers
Archives and files	Containers, compression, encryption, file naming and hashing
Data model	Resource headers, type and class registries, references, entities and components
World and streaming	Placement, cells and tiles, streaming, world state and layers
Geometry	Meshes, vertex formats, levels of detail, skinning
Materials	Material definitions, templates, parameters and texture bindings
Shaders	Compiled shader containers, bindings and what the shaders compute
Textures	Texture containers, pixel formats, mip storage
Lighting and sky	Lights, global illumination, sky, atmosphere, time of day
Terrain	Height fields, terrain materials and their blending
Vegetation	Grass, trees, SpeedTree and wind
Water	Oceans, rivers, lakes and their surfaces
Effects and decals	Particles, decals and other effect entities
Collision and physics	Collision shapes, physics materials and surfaces
Animation	Skeletons, clips, tracks and timing
Gameplay data	Params, scripts, events and the game’s own rules
Runtime and limits	What the running engine does with the data, its limits, and known crashes
Mod loading	How mods are loaded, merged and packaged

Reading a page

Under the title, a page shows its engine, its system and the games it applies to. Statements carry a badge saying how surely they are known: Proven Observed Sourced Inferred Unknown. Hover a badge for its meaning, or read Confidence. A badge can be limited to some games (Observed · Sekiro) and a statement can say which games it applies to: only in Elden Ring since Sekiro not in Sekiro.

Byte layouts are drawn as a grid of 16 bytes a row, each field coloured by how surely its meaning is known, with a table of the same fields below. Dotted bytes are inside the structure but not described at all.

Open questions are boxed; the coverage page lists them all.

Writing for the wiki

Anyone adding to the wiki, person or agent, follows Writing pages.