Colour Cube

ColourCube resources are used by both the EnvironmentSettings and PostFX to change the colour and tone of the world.

ColourCubes used in Burnout Paradise.

A ColourCube is a set of 32 32x32 textures forming a CLUT, which is usually colour corrected to give a different art style to the game at a given time (i.e., the red filter when wrecking a vehicle in versions 1.0-1.3 of Burnout Paradise).

Some time after the February 22, 2007 build of Paradise, ColourCubes were added to the EnvironmentSettings folder and were used specifically to give the game a unique art style.

In the 1.4 update to Burnout Paradise, the ColourCubes were changed to a standard CLUT, possibly due to the extended time cycle conflicting with the ColourCube's art style. In the 1.6 update, these were again updated to use a default RGB CLUT.

Layout

32-bit

Offset	Length	Type	Name	Description	Comments
0x0	0x4	uint32_t	m_size	Either the number of textures or the width/height.
0x4	0x4	uint8_t*	m_pixels	Pointer to the texture data.

64-bit

Offset	Length	Type	Name	Description	Comments
0x0	0x4	uint32_t	m_size	Either the number of textures or the width/height.
0x8	0x8	uint8_t*	m_pixels	Pointer to the texture data.

Data

In Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box on PC and Burnout Paradise Remastered on PC and PS4, data is in a standard RGB24 format (that is, each pixel takes up 3 bytes, one for each color). Textures in the PS3, Xbox 360, and Switch versions of the game are also RGB24, but swizzled. There is a functional implementation of an Xbox 360 to PC texture converter on GitHub.

Xbox 360 Swizzle Algorithm

The following algorithm assumes that the data is stored and accessed as m_size cubes, each m_size*m_size pixels, oriented left to right with an m_size*m_size*3 bytes stride, rather than as m_size cubes oriented top to bottom with a m_size*3 bytes stride (i.e. only one cube's data per line). Regardless of which is true, it seems that the following algorithm works to produce exact conversions from Xbox 360 colourcubes to PC colourcubes.

With the above in mind, to find the 3-byte (R, G and B) pixel data for position (x,y) in the PC m_pixels data, 3 bytes (R, G and B) can be read from the Xbox 360 m_pixels data at the offset calculated as follows where x and y are represented as a number of bits, x0 to x9 (values 0-m_size*m_size) and y0 to y4 (values 0-m_size).

x	y	offset
xxxxxxxxxx 9876543210	yyyyy 43210	o0=x0 o1=x1 o2=x5 o3=x2 o4=x3 o5=x4^x8^y2 o6=x6 o7=x7 o8=y0 o9=x8^y2 o10=y1 o11=x9 o12=y2 o13=y3 o14=y4

Example Ruby implementation:

class Fixnum
  # calculates the number of bytes
  def pixels
    self * 3
  end
end

# calculate offset, in pixels, of where to find the (x,y) pixel in the Xbox 360 data
def calc_offset(x,y)
  x0 = (x >> 0) & 0b1
  x1 = (x >> 1) & 0b1
  x2 = (x >> 2) & 0b1
  x3 = (x >> 3) & 0b1
  x4 = (x >> 4) & 0b1
  x5 = (x >> 5) & 0b1
  x6 = (x >> 6) & 0b1
  x7 = (x >> 7) & 0b1
  x8 = (x >> 8) & 0b1
  x9 = (x >> 9) & 0b1
  y0 = (y >> 0) & 0b1
  y1 = (y >> 1) & 0b1
  y2 = (y >> 2) & 0b1
  y3 = (y >> 3) & 0b1
  y4 = (y >> 4) & 0b1

  o=(y4<<14)|
    (y3<<13)|
    (y2<<12)|
    (x9<<11)|
    (y1<<10)|
    ((y2<<9)^(x8<<9))|
    (y0<<8)|
    (x7<<7)|
    (x6<<6)|
    ((y2<<5)^(x8<<5)^(x4<<5))|
    (x3<<4)|
    (x2<<3)|
    (x5<<2)|
    (x1<<1)|
    (x0<<0)
end

# read m_size and m_pixels data from Xbox 360 file
# ...

# now, convert the m_pixels data
data="".b
m_size.times do |y|
  (m_size * m_size).times do |x|
    offset = calc_offset(x, y)
    pixel_data = m_pixels[offset.pixels...(offset + 1).pixels]
    data << pixel_data
  end
end

# write data to file
# ...
‎