Because Lia has a Baten Kaitos problem

This page is the kind of thing that happens when you're a nerd who got metaphorically clubbed over the head by a silly videogame as a teenager, and proceeded to turn into a game engine programmer with special interests. For now it's going to be a mix of index of twitter threads and resource repository, and we'll see what it becomes over time.

BK:EW playthrough semi-livetweet

From 2020-10-14 to 2020-12-24, I replayed through all of BK:EW, aiming for 100% completion and making obnoxiously long Twitter threads about the entire process. The final format ended up being something ressembling a text-based Let's Play.

The following is a list of all those Twitter threads, in chronological order. All the threads were complete last I checked them, but I've gotten a couple reports of Twitter poking holes in them occasionally. Let me know if something is broken. The entire thing comes with major spoiler warnings from the start, for all of EW and The Big Plot Twist in particular, because analyzing how it is and isn't signposted was a major part of the fun. Also contains strong opinions by a queer antifascist but if that bothers you I don't want you reading my stuff anyway.

Those threads include a ton of screenshots, all of which have alt-text for every textbox. There are also content warnings on the most egregious bits, but they are not necessarily extensive or sufficient for everyone! For example, because this a somewhat typical JRPG, solving problems through violence is constant and did not get tagged.

2020-10-14: Tech setup.
2020-10-14: Opening, Cebalrai, Moonguile Forest.
2020-10-15: Nunki Valley, Pherkad.
2020-10-16: Rodolfo's Mansion, finishing Sadal Suud.
2020-10-17: Nashira.
2020-10-18: Lesser Celestial River, Nashira.
2020-10-19: Nashira, Cloud Passage, Sheliak.
2020-10-20: Elnath.
2020-10-21: Shrine of the Winds, finishing Diadem.
2020-10-22: Combat explainer, Anuénué Port, Komo Mai.
2020-10-23: School of Magic, Corellia's Palace.
2020-10-24: Ancient Library of Magic.
2020-10-25: Holoholo Jungle, Opu.
2020-10-26: Komo Mai, Opu.
2020-10-26 cont, broken thread: Opu, Celestial Tree.
2020-10-27: Celestial Tree.
2020-10-28: Celestial Tree boss.
2020-11-01: Finishing Anuénué, Trail of Souls.
2020-11-02: Trail of Souls.
2020-11-03: Parnasse, Detourne.
2020-11-04: Detourne.
2020-11-05: Detourne, Parnasse.
2020-11-06: Reverence, Nekton.
2020-11-07: Nekton, Mira Drama.
2020-11-09: Balancoire.
2020-11-10: Duke's Manor, Coccolith.
2020-11-11: Coccolith boss.
2020-11-12: Finishing Mira.
2020-11-14: Mintaka.
2020-11-15: Battleship Goldoba.
2020-11-16: Azha.
2020-11-16, cont: Lava Caves.
2020-11-17: Azha, Lava Caves.
2020-11-18: Lava Caves boss, Plot Twist, Imperial Fortress.
2020-11-18, cont: Corellia's Palace.
2020-11-19: World tour, fetch quests.
2020-11-21: World tour, fetch quests.
2020-11-22: Interdimensional cracks.
2020-11-23: Corellia's palace, Wazn.
2020-11-24: Kaffaljidhma, Cursa.
2020-11-25: Lake of the Dragon, Kaffaljidhma.
2020-11-26: Finishing Wazn, Corellia's palaca, Mintaka.
2020-11-27: Imperial Fortress.
2020-11-28: Imperial Fortress boss, Mintaka.
2020-11-29: Labyrinth of Duhr.
2020-11-30: Gemma.
2020-12-01: Capella, Algorab.
2020-12-02: Zosma Tower.
2020-12-03: Algorab boss.
2020-12-04: SP combos, nothing to see here.
2020-12-05: Finishing Duhr, Corellia's palace, fetch quests, SP combos.
2020-12-06: World tour, fetch quests.
2020-12-07: Celestial Alps.
2020-12-08: Celestial Alps boss, Corellia's palace.
2020-12-09: Komo Mai, Illusory Fortress.
2020-12-10: Nashira, Greater Celestial River.
2020-12-11: World tour, fetch quests.
2020-12-12: Phantom Goldoba.
2020-12-13: World tour.
2020-12-14: Nihal Desert.
2020-12-15: Nihal Desert boss.
2020-12-16 aside: Alternate Geldoblame read.
2020-12-16: Zosma Tower.
2020-12-17: Zosma Tower boss.
2020-12-18: Corellia's palace, opening Cor Hydrae.
2020-12-19: Cor Hydrae.
2020-12-20: Cor Hydrae.
2020-12-21: Cor Hydrae.
2020-12-22: Cor Hydrae boss, 100% achieved.
2020-12-23 aside: Victory Banquet interpretations hot take.
2020-12-23: Cor Hydrae boss, Victory Banquet.
2020-12-23, cont: Moonguile Forest, ending.

BK:EW, "Graphics programmers can't play games normally" edition

Fun glitches to investigate

Emulator only:

Bad masking, Goldoba control room screen.
Bad masking, Detourne.
Bad masking, Reverence.
Bad masking, Goldoba.
Bad masking, Lava Caves.

This one is known and was mentioned on the Dolphin forum years ago.
It even has a dedicated test case in the Dolphin graphics CI.
But the potential fix looks like it opens a giant can of worms.

Confirmed on original hardware:

Unknown:

Things to look into

Dynamic snow and dynamic sand. Likely using the same tech, not done on GPU in the emulator. The vertex transform unit is probably emulated on the CPU.
There's some cool vertex displacement during fights in Coccolith.
Figuring out the bad masking. Though from the Dolphin links the answer seems to be "clean up the implementation of a major part of the Gamecube GPU", so, we'll see how that goes.
Pondering the Duhr port glitch.
Extracting the ACTUAL drop tables and figuring out how correct the wiki and GameFAQs are.
Relatedly: a Japanese speedrunner reported an incorrect drop on the final boss during a recent run. Is that a bug that can be exploited to completely change 100%, since seeing a Magnus is enough to add it to the Gathering? Or does Malpercio just drop Bamboo Shoots sometimes?
How does the blur / depth-of-field work?
How does the dynamic exposure from Light / Dark moves work?
How does the photograph aging process work and why does it sometime break on emulator, resulting in 1G pictures?

Poking at it all in RenderDoc

Note that the Twitter threads are purposefully kept non-graphics-programmer friendly.
RenderDoc 101, depth buffer.
Greythorne colors, snow and sand, reflections, Detourne cubes, masking.
Trying to extract a Greythorne mesh.
What shape are those petals anyway? Plus weird post-processing effects ordering.
A quick look at a combat scene, ft. Cursed Hell Turtle.
The Greythorne model viewer and the related Twitter thread.

Niche jokes and other shitposts

Look if I'm going to bother coming up with terrible jokes that only three people will get, it's only natural to keep track of them.
The Cor Hydrae drop rates are terrible.

Game / lore resources

Game discs info:

Eternal Wings:

Japan:

Disc 1
Disc 2
Demo disc ("Special experience"). This was apparently sent to people who filled a survey, and includes a couple playable areas.

USA:

Europe:

Origins:

Japan:

Disc 1
Disc 2
NB: there are two revisions of the Japanese Origins disc, because the first printing apparently had a game-breaking bug. The data for those is here: Disc 1, Disc 2.

USA:

The Internet Archive and Demoban.net have interesting preservation efforts you might want to look at.
Remember however that downloading ISOs is not legal, no matter what you might have read in some places.

The official (US) website used to live at http://batenkaitos.namco.com/ but is long gone.

Every file the Internet Archive saved can be found here.
Unfortunately, the website was in Flash, so none of it works anymore.
I did manage to pull out the main SWF file and get that running in the standalone content projector, but it pulled in other SWF files that were not archived.
The wallpapers that used to live there can be found on GamesWalls (thanks BatenPosting, who posted one of those and is why I ended up looking into the old URL)

The official Japanese website used to live at http://namco-ch.net/batenkaitos/index.php and is also long gone. However, since that wasn't Flash, it seems to have gotten crawled and saved: the last valid snapshot seems to be this one.
Japanese game manuals on the Internet Archive's Manual Library:

Scenery Recalled translations:

There are actually TWO novels (as described above) and a manga. You can find scans if you look, but there's no full translation out there.

I will not provide full scans of the novels, but I did scan the 11 illustrations they contain. You can find those here (at time of writing), and lower resolution versions on Twitter.
Tori is working on a translation of the "Castle of Storms" novel. I'm afraid it might also be pretty darn bad. The novel, not the translation. (Linked with permission)

GameFAQs has a whole bunch of old guides though there seem to be a lot of mistakes in most of them.
The Fandom-hosted wiki has more data than one would expect, including a full list of Magnus with locations. It does not, however, mention the existence of the novels.
The Cutting Room Floor has some more technical tidbits, plus some fun localization differences.
There are people who speedrun this, including 100%. You can find those resources on speedrun.com.
More to be added after I ask people whether it's okay to share their stuff, duh.

Game-specific technical resources

bk-undub: a tool to replace the oh-so-special English VO with the original Japanese. Unlikely to be easy to use for non-technical players. But it's open-source and probably contains some insights about the file formats so it's on my radar.
French fan translation for Origins. Same as the above, probably some insights to be had about file formats.
A Spanish one is also in progress, which is what even made me stumble on the completed French one. (Thanks to BatenPosting again)

General technical resources

Dolphin emulator:

The devblog is absolutely amazing.
EFB versus XFB in Dolphin.
EFB access from CPU, somewhat comparable to modern occlusion queries and framebuffer readbacks..
How Dolphin now emulates the very special Gamecube GPU.

Gamecube architecture overview.
Detailed hardware study, notably with lots of details about the RAM choices.