Entry 29

Characters, cinematics between levels, room music

2026-10-1512mplayaudiovideo

Three more pieces of a playable game.

Characters. The player's four-track animation is now rugrats::animator::Animator, loaded by character.

• 0x8008a42c's table pairs are read off its switch. Two point at run-time tables and are skipped.
• A placed character's character number is its template's shape, which is also its hierarchy (0x8004822c sets +0x15c from template +0x10).
• Placed characters play their stand state on the floor under them: root = floor + root offset, as 0x80081bac's query does. Lil in the hub stands instead of sinking into the floor.

Cinematics. Stream::read now reads every cine, not just the opening, through the stream table at 0x800b4290 (u8 cine, s8 channel, u16 file).

• A cine with a channel lives in one of the CINEPAK files. Its stream starts 2 × channel sectors in, its XA is filtered to (1, channel), and its data sectors are those whose first word is the channel, with the frame from +4 (0x80019da4, 0x80019c88).
• cine_list reads all of them. 91 stream and 2 have no file. Each stream's last frame time equals its sound length: Episode 1 Intro is 79.5 s for both.
• Entering a level plays its start cine (0x80074958's table; the hub and level 2 only the first time). A door with a cine plays it on the current database, then the level loads.
• The Reptar Puzzle cine on DB01 matches the oracle's pictures.

Room music. The hub's music is not XA. The oracle (call_args, a new tool printing a function's arguments per call) shows the level setup opening song set 0x800b8198 (HOUSE.SEP), then song 2 from 0x8006efcc as play starts.

• The chain: RoomChange (0x80077a54) plays room +0x64 less one, crossfaded over 30, when the room has flag 128. Songs 5 and up are speech clips instead (0x8008da4c, the ISF).
• Room flags come from LP kind-6 records. Their data from +4 is: room, +0x5b, +0x5d, camera +0x5c, flags 32 and 16, +0x5f, and the song. The loader clears +0x0c first.
• The port loads 0x800b82e8[level]'s set on entering a level and plays the song of each room the player walks into. Levels 22 and up play set +0x07 at once (0x8006fea8).
• The hub start room 23 asks for song 2, as in the oracle.