Project:Help wanted

Many secrets still remain to be uncovered. If you have experience with reverse engineering or if you are looking for a fun project to start with RE (or both!), please help us investigate the following mysteries.

Formats

The following tasks require reversing file formats. It is strongly recommended to also examine the executable to have more reliable information about formats and figure out how they are used by Nintendo exactly.

bfevtm

bfevtm files (binary event timelines) are extremely similar to bfevfl files (binary event flowcharts), but have a few significant differences.

Because timelines are exclusively used by the event manager — unlike flowcharts which are also used by smaller subsystems like TipsMgr — for demos, it has proven difficult to find the code that reads timelines.

If you are willing to take up this task, please ping leoetlino for the Switch 1.5.0 IDC.

Havok packfiles

Nintendo uses Havok binary packfiles for all Havok resources. Thus, it is difficult to manipulate physics files.

leoetlino discovered that the Havok library fortunately relies on reflection data to load resources. This makes it possible to parse the binaries and reconstruct a human readable representation with every single field name and even enum definitions. Reflection information has been dumped for the Switch version.

The following tasks remain to be done:

• Dump reflection data for the Wii U version. Data offsets are different since the Switch uses a different compiler, is a 64 bit little-endian platform unlike the Wii U (32-bit big endian machine).
• Write a library to manipulate binary packfiles: getting, modifying, adding and removing Havok objects from a packfile (and perhaps converting them to XML too?)
• Figure out how the compression for hkpBvCompressedMeshShapes works. Nintendo uses compressed mesh shapes for all static compound collision files.

Game logic

The following tasks require reversing the executable to have reliable information on how the mechanics work.

amiibo drops

• How scaling (weapon upgrades) works for amiibo weapons.

  amiibo weapons don't entirely follow the regular weapon scaling and bonus rules.

• What determines the drop table list that gets used?

  amiibo DropTables generally contain 8 tables: Normal, SmallHit, BigHit({Normal,Parasail,Remain}), and GreatHit({Normal,Parasail,Remain}). Parasail tables are presumably selected after the player receives the paraglider, and Remain after Link completes a divine beast; however this is pretty much only speculation. It is also currently unknown what determines which xxxxxHit table gets used.

One-Hit kill protection

It is well known that Link cannot die in one-hit under specific cases. What are the exact conditions for this protection to apply? Interestingly, it appears this mechanic is gone in Master Mode.

NoDeathDamageBase (in Link's bgparamlist) might be related.

Debug leftovers

The following tasks require reversing the executable and possibly patching it to re-enable functionality.

Demo mode

Setting the ROM type to demo ROM types (found in the executable) make the game crash. What is locked behind them?

Stage select screen

The release version has a stage select screen left (see Executable for more details). It should be possible to get it to work.

Actor debug utilities

In a similar fashion, Nintendo has also left an entire ActorDebug subsystem in all release versions, which can print information to the screen and interact with many different actor system components and things like map units.