Death by Degrees' Nina Williams makes her debut on Noesis

With the help of the crazy talented people over at the Xentax forums, Death by Degrees, more than 10 years after its release, is finally decoded and ready for extraction. 

Several people have tried their luck on this game before, me included (So many times. Over and over.), but it wasn't before I posted a little bounty on the Xentax forums that the true talents in the scene took notice and gave this game a closer look. With the help of the users mariokart64n, chrrox and MrAdults (the creator of the excellent and renowned Noesis, a tool for previewing and converting between hundreds of model, image, and animation formats) Death by Degrees' assets are finally extractable, and after MrAdults himself implemented support for the game into Noesis, 3D models can now be previewed, exported and converted, together with textures, armatures and weight data. I've spent the last month+ browsing through hundreds of assets, sorting and naming them, and I'm far from being done with all of them, but still, I thought it might be a good idea to post a little preview/sign of life.

As most people who've played Death by Degrees know, the modeling work in this game is fantastic. All character models are present in their in-game and their cinematic version, the latter of which being quite the achievement for a PlayStation 2 era game, with impressively detailed meshes and intricate bone structures. For me personally the most exciting aspect, though, is the level design. The cruise liner ship and the penitentiary island the game takes place on are not just individual rooms strung together in the game, but indeed 2 giant coherent "levels". While multi-partitioned and individually loaded in the game, with the help of a 3D program all rooms and parts load in their correct place in the 3D environment to form both, the complete ship model and the full penitentiary setting. With 3D printing quickly evolving and so readily accessible, the thought of rebuilding the complete cruise liner ship in a ration of 1:30 (too small? too big?) is definitely not too far-fetched, and something I really want to do. But it's a project that's likely going to take me a couple of years to finish, so I'll try to not get too far ahead of myself, and instead focus on going through the rest of the assets to sort them first.

Of course it wasn't long before the first models would show up on deviantart, which in recent years has quickly become the main nexus for video game character models and 3D assets. One of deviantart's finest porters ("Porters" because they format and port the models to an XNA based posing tool, which is a slightly more complex task than the word "porting" might imply) XKamsonX, has already released two of Nina's models from the game. So if you're interested in the models keep an eye on his gallery.
My highest praise and thanks goes out to MrAdults, mariokart64 and chrrox from Xentax for the masterful job they've done in cracking the code and providing easy access to the games' assets.

Visit Xentax and the Xentax Game Research Forum if you want to learn more about video game modding, file formats, and extraction of assets like sound, video and models.

Visit Rich Whitehouse's site to download and learn more about his famed tool Noesis, and  take a look at mariokart64n's youtube channel for information on game modding, tutorials, guides and more.

Visit XKamsonX's deviantart gallery to find Death by Degrees' Nina in her cocktail dress and bikini, amongst other carefully ported XNA Posing Studio compatible character models from game series' such as Dead or Alive, Tekken and Soul Calibur. (FYI the cocktail dress model will be updated soon to feature an armature for the lower part of the dress, in case you are planning to pose her)