Slot-4 records (the world map's animation bank) Confirmed

At a glance

Where on disc

Slot 4 of the kingdom bundles: PROT 0086 (Drake, map01), 0245 (Sebucus, map02), 0392 (Karisto, map03). Type byte 0x05.

Magic

None. Every sub-body carries the constant marker 0x080C at +4.

Size

15-16 clips per kingdom; 24-32 KB decoded; 8 bytes per (frame, part) entry.

In RAM

Loaded verbatim (LZS-decoded, no fixup) at the type-0x05 buffer pointer _DAT_8007B888, so the base differs per kingdom - see RAM layout.

Parser

legaia_scene_formats::world_map_overlay.

Confidence

Confirmed - container and RAM placement byte-verified, every header and entry field pinned to the instruction that reads it, clip lookup checked against a live map01 state.

Used by

World map, World-overview viewer

What it is

A kingdom's slot 4 is an animation bank: 15-16 self-contained clips, each an 8-byte header plus a table of 8-byte poses laid out frame by frame. An actor on the overworld picks a clip by number, the engine advances a cursor through it, and for each frame it applies one pose to each piece of the actor's model before drawing that piece. The model itself lives elsewhere - slot 4 carries only the motion.

• Not geometry of any kind. No vertices, no triangles, no coastlines. Slot 4 was read as a vertex pool for a long time; that reading is falsified (see History) and it is why the format looked like it had a missing “command stream” that nobody could find.
• Not the continent itself. The bulk terrain (~4300 textured quads in the top view) comes from the kingdom's slot-1 TMD pack, drawn through the overlay-mode dispatch table - see world map - bulk terrain.
• Not a world-map format. The type byte 0x05 is what asset-type labels “MOVE”, and every field scene's type-0x05 section has the same shape: the same 0x080C marker, the same header fields, the same size law. A town's bank is this format with more clips in it. See ANM.

Layout

Three nested levels: an outer pack of clips, each clip a header plus a frame-ordered table of poses, each pose eight bytes.

Outer pack

The offsets are absolute byte offsets into the decoded payload - unlike the slot-1 TMD pack next door, whose offsets count words.

Clip header (8 bytes)

Clip payload

Entry (frame f, part p) sits at +8 + (f × parts + p) × 8, so a clip is always 8 + parts × frames × 8 + 8 bytes. That arithmetic fits every clip in all three kingdoms exactly, and every trailer is zero.

Each entry is one pose

The pose decoder unpacks three 12-bit signed translation components out of the first five bytes - byte 2 carries the high nibbles of X (low nibble) and Y (high nibble), byte 4's low nibble carries the high nibble of Z - sign-extends each, and pushes the vector through the GTE against the piece's rotation matrix. Bytes 5, 6 and 7 are the three rotation angles, each shifted << 4 into the console's 4096-per-turn angle units.

Translations are small - the whole corpus spans roughly -541 .. 384 units - because they are offsets of one piece within a model, not world positions. When blending is on, the decoder also unpacks the next frame's entry for the same piece and interpolates both translation and rotation with the cursor's sub-frame fraction, wrapping to frame 0 at the end of the clip unless the actor is set to hold its last frame.

rate - the sub-frame divisor

The header's +0x06 field is the clip's sub-frame divisor: the cursor advances by ceil(speed × 2 / rate) when blending is on, and by the actor's plain speed when it is off. That is why the field and the blend flag co-vary - every rate = 4 clip sets the flag. Values 1, 2 and 4 are the only ones on the disc.

Clips are shared the way actors are: the three leading rate = 1 clips are byte-identical in all three kingdoms, a trailing cluster is shared across all three, and other clips are shared between kingdom pairs. Degenerate clips (one part, all-zero entries) are empty placeholders.

The one field nothing reads

Every field of the entry is read every frame except the high nibble of byte 4, which is zero in all 22 228 entries across the three kingdom banks and a town's bank - structural padding, not dropped data.

RAM layout

The LZS decoder writes slot 4 straight to its destination - byte-identical to the disc, no fixup - and the destination is the asset dispatcher's type-0x05 buffer pointer _DAT_8007B888, freshly allocated per scene load. That is why the base differs per kingdom, and it is also how a RAM probe should find it: read the pointer rather than hunting for the bytes. Clip 0's entries start 0x40 past the base.

In a live Drake overworld save the pointer reads 0x8011A624 and the 32 304 bytes there match the disc payload exactly - which settles the identity of that address rather than leaving it a coincidence of allocation order.

How it is played

Four plain calls, each reading a field of what it was handed. Only after the last one does the ordinary primitive dispatcher draw the piece.

1. Install - FUN_8001F05C case 5The scene loader LZS-decodes slot 4 into a fresh buffer and stores the pointer at _DAT_8007B888.
2. Select + clock - FUN_800204F8The actor tick resolves the actor's clip number to a clip and advances its 1/16-frame cursor.
3. Draw - FUN_8001B964The animated-actor renderer works out the frame, checks the part count, and walks the model's pieces.
4. Pose - FUN_8001BE80Decodes one entry into a GTE translation and rotation; the piece is then drawn by the primitive dispatcher.

The clip lookup is one-based: the actor's clip number indexes the offset table with no +4, so number 1 reads the first offset. An actor with the party flag set draws from the party bank instead, and numbers above 0x3FF from the “MOVE2” bank - neither of which the overworld uses.

• In place. A read-watchpoint tiled across the Drake window catches only reads (363 of 365 captures); nothing copies the bank anywhere.
• Six references, image-wide. The buffer pointer is written twice, read once in the actor tick, and read three times in the Baka Fighter minigame overlay. No world-map overlay touches it, and the primitive dispatcher never receives it.
• A hard structural check. If a clip's part count does not equal the model's object count, the renderer skips the whole draw. On a live Drake overworld save every animated actor satisfies it - 2, 12, 14 and 2 parts against models of exactly those sizes.

What actually draws the pieces

The primitive dispatcher FUN_80043390 is a TMD-style display-list walker: it reads a command word (primitive kind plus count), optionally loads the GTE depth-cue registers, and tail-calls a per-kind handler through a jump table - 0x8007657C in SCUS, or 0x801F8968 while the world-map overlay is paged in. Each handler transforms 3-4 vertices through the GTE and writes one GP0 packet into the ordering table. Its vertex pools are ordinary models from the global TMD table - never slot 4. The per-kind handler table and what each kind draws are on the renderer page.

The neighbouring TMD table

The same dispatcher draws field characters and per-tile kingdom objects from a global table of TMD pointers, DAT_8007C018. That is a separate path: slot 4 is walked at its resident base and never installed into the table, even though a field-scene RAM snapshot fills the same address range with that scene's TMD pack.

In the port

legaia_scene_formats::world_map_overlay parses a kingdom's slot 4 (parse, the clip header accessors, Slot4Record::transform for the decoded pose). The bank is the same container every scene's type-0x05 section uses, so the generic ANM reader handles it too.

The first dumps each clip's parts / frames / rate / blend flag; the second is the generic animation-bank detector, which reports a kingdom bundle exactly as it reports a town.

The older slot4-png / wireframe projections plot raw 16-bit slices that straddle the entries' nibble boundaries - byte-inspection aids, never geometry.

How we know

Every header and entry field is pinned to the instruction that reads it, the resident bank is byte-identical to the disc payload in all three kingdoms, and the clip lookup matches every animated actor on a live map01 state.

Full capture transcripts and reproduction steps: docs/formats/world-map-overlay.md.

Readings that turned out wrong

Slot 4 is not geometry: neither a vertex pool waiting on a missing command stream nor a coastline wireframe. Both readings are falsified, along with a handful of smaller ones.

Open questions

• Which actor plays which clip. The numbers come from each scene's script, so naming a clip “the windmill’s spin” needs a script pass, not more format work.
• Which caller, if any, selects primitive-handler banks 2 and 3 - candidates are debug render modes, battle reuse of the dispatcher, or cutscenes.
• Whether the _DAT_8007B824 persistent-slot path is live. FUN_8001F05C case 2 with param_3 == 1 is its sole SCUS store and FUN_8001E1B4 resets the install cursor from it, but no dumped caller passes 1; a write breakpoint on _DAT_8007B824 answers it.

See also