Revision as of 15:05, 10 January 2021

The Burnout Vehicle file format is used to store data for a particular vehicle in all Burnout games from Takedown to Dominator. It uses the file extension .bgv, or .btv for traffic vehicles. It is the successor to Point of Impact's Burnout 2 Race Car file format.

This format contains most of the data related to any given vehicle, including mesh data, Level of Detail models, texture data, pointers to external files, deformation matrices, collision detection parameters and physics configuration info.

Versions

	Burnout Vehicle version
	0x14	0x17	0x1D	0x1F	0x25
Date	Apr 2004	Jul 2004	May 2005	Jul 2005	Jan 2006
Games	Takedown (Early Demo)	Takedown Legends Dominator (PSP)	Revenge (2005, Early Demo)	Revenge (2005) Dominator (PS2)	Revenge (360)
Body parts
Max body parts	6	6	8	8	8

0x14 BGVs are the only version to use global pointers for their LOD database submesh lists. These point to the exact location in the file of each submesh, whereas local pointers, used by 0x17 and up, use offsets relative to the beginning of the LOD. For example, a pointer to offset 0x1820 in a 0x14 BGV would appear to point to 0x140 in all other revisions.
Version 0x1D and onward store deformation matrices in a different order to previous revisions.

All currently known offsets for revision 0x17 can be found here.

LOD database format

LODs, or Levels of Detail, are lower-poly, lower-detail (hence the name) models that games use for objects that are far away from the player, to keep framerates smooth. BGVs contain 4 LOD Databases, which in turn each contain one LOD model of minimum (LOD 0), low (LOD 1), medium (LOD 2) and high (LOD 3) quality.

Each LOD in a BGV contains a list of pointers to its submeshes at the very beginning; there are always exactly 12 pointers since it seems the maximum amount of submeshes a BGV can contain is 12, though it's unknown if this rule is enforced by the game or if it can be larger than that.

Layout

Version 0x1F

Offset	Name	Type	Value
0x00	mxVersionNumber	RwUInt32	0x17
0x04	mxLoadedState	RwInt32	0x00
0x08	mn8NumBodyParts	RwInt8
0x09	mn8NumWheels	RwInt8
0x0A	mn8MinLOD	RwInt8
0x0B	mn8MaxLOD	RwInt8
0x0C	mrObjectRadius	RwReal
0x10	mrWheelRadius	RwReal
0x14	marWheelScales	RwReal[6]
0x2C	marBodyPartRadii	RwReal[8]
0x4C	marBodyPartRadii	CB4VehicleLODData*[5]
...

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 ! 0x14 || 0x17 || 0x1D || 0x1F || 0x25
 |-
-| Date || April 2004 || July 2004 || May 2005 || July 2005 || January 2006
+| Date || Apr 2004 || Jul 2004 || May 2005 || Jul 2005 || Jan 2006
 |-
 | Games || Takedown (Early Demo) || Takedown<br>Legends<br>Dominator (PSP) || Revenge (2005, Early Demo) || Revenge (2005)<br>Dominator (PS2) || Revenge (360)