Drp

General Information[edit]

Chrono Cross[edit]

1. Introduction

Like many other games, Chrono Cross just loves to compact disparate types of data into single files of a proprietary design. To be exact, CC has at least three separate types of "data lump" files, each with a different internal schema:

-The drp file, which begins with the ASCII letters "drp" and almost always contains visual or audio resources. The more I see of these, the more I think that Magil was correct in his speculation that the letters stand for "Dynamic Resource Pack".

-The tbt file, used only for text

-The cpt file, which is used for everything else (or in some cases, wherever the Squeenix dev team decided they wanted to)

What I'm going to talk about here is the drp filetype, which probably has the most complex internal structure.

2. Structure of a drp

A drp file contains a 12-byte header, a series of internal file pointers, and then a glob of files, each with its own individual 12-byte header. Here's a typical drp overall file header:

64 72 70 00 00 00 00 00 xx yy 00 00

The first three bytes spell out "drp" in ASCII. The other two non-zero bytes indicate the number of entries in the file, although unfortunately, not in an entirely straightforward manner (even when endianness is taken into consideration)—to get the number, perform the calculation yyxx / 64. We'll call this number num from now on.

After the header, the drp will provide num pointers to the beginnings of the files inside the lump. These pointers are 4 bytes each, little-endian (that is, with the byte order reversed from what the naive viewer will expect), and indicate an offset based on the beginning of the file. There is no end-of-file pointer.

Each subfile in the lump has a 12-byte header of its own. Here's a typical one:

00 00 00 00 nn aa mm ee tt xx yy zz

The bytes nn aa mm ee give a four-letter ASCII version of what appears to be the name of the file. If the chosen name is less than four characters long, it will be padded with 00 bytes. Filenames contain numbers, lower-case letters, and the following symbols: _-+></=! As I found out the hard way, some of these are not legal filename characters on all file systems.

tt is the file type indicator, of which more later.

xx yy zz are a little-endian equal to 16 times the length of the file.

The data for the file begins immediately after the end of the header and runs until the header for the next file in the lump (that is, the address pointed to by the next pointer), or to the end of the drp if it is the last file.

3. File type indicators

The type of each file inside a drp lump is indicated by a single-byte code. There appear to be only 15-16 codes actually in use; nine have been connected to an actual file type. Single-byte file codes in drps

hex	dec	ext	info	found in
01	1	drp	nested drp file	any
02	2	mesh	generic mesh	any except battle anims
03	3	timinfo	information about slicing, mirroring, etc., in tim textures, the game displays sprites using this format	any except battle anims
04	4	tim	any except battle anims
05	5	minst	music instruments	any except rooms
07	7	unknown[1]		0018, 1967
0A	10	unknown[2]		any
0B	11	mdl	model pack	rooms and elements
0C	12	unknown[3]	probably battle field position related.	any
10	16	unknown[4]		any
12	18	mesh	battle field main area(where the battle takes place) mesh	any
15	21	timinfo	Used for lens light effects?	battle field
16	22	mseq	music sequence	any except rooms
19	25	anim	model animation (cpt pack)	battle animations, elements
1A	26	unknown[5]		battle animations, elements
25	37	lzss	LZSS compressed data	2416

One of these has GOT to be the .atim texture type—10, 12 and 16 are probably the leading candidates—but I don't know which. Likewise, I would expect another of those types to correspond to the .cpt lump type.

[1]Type 7 is potentially a problem. It's used only a handful of times, but in an entirely inconsistent manner: two files marked as type 7 are recognizably tbt lumps, one is a TIM texture (despite ~TIMs having their own code) and the other 16 are inscrutable—one may be an executable. So the only way to tell what's actually in a type 7 file is to open it and check.

[2]Maybe relate to meshes and objects.

[3]They probably define positions of enemies and pcs. Swapping the content of two files in a battle field drp will cause, for example, position change of two or more player characters. Type 0c files in element drps are longer than those in those battle field drops, but they have similar format.

[4]May relate to meshes.

[5]Associated with things that cause damage, e.g. attack animations, offensive Elements.

From: Modification