WORLD.WDB
WORLD.WDB or World DataBase is an asset file for LEGO Island. It is one of the few files copied to the hard drive during installation, as opposed to the majority which are streamed from CD-ROM.
Overview
WORLD.WDB is the only .WDB file in LEGO Island, unlike the much more common Interleaf File format. As such, it is generally even less well understood. It does not follow the chunking/streaming conventions of the Interleaf format as it is always read from hard drive.
Contents
It is known that WORLD.WDB contains most of the 3D models used by the game and many of the textures (but notably excluding the phonemes, which are in Interleaf files). There have been successful attempts at ripping and even swapping assets from WORLD.WDB, but no known attempts at reconstruction.
The file contains a list of worlds, where each world references a number of models and parts. After the models exists a list of textures and a single part. Each model and part can also have a list of textures themselves. The textures use a palette and store an uncompressed stream of bytes referencing the palette. Model references also contain a location, direction and up vector placing them in the world.
A model contains an ROI (Realtime object instance), which can contain other ROIs, allowing them to be animated separately as the animation modify a ROI. A part contains a list of ROIs directly although those cannot contain another ROI.
External Links
- ImHex Patterns to parse several LEGO Island related files with the hex editor ImHex
- Incomplete reverse-engineered WDB documentation
- WDBRipper, unmaintained but decently functional tool for extracting assets from WORLD.WDB