Difference between revisions of "Piñata Vision barcode/Accessory bits"

Revision as of 14:28, 15 February 2011

Accessory data

Accessories can be found in the 1900-2000s range of the ID table. There appear to be less than 256 accessories in-game, so it's possible that information about what accessories a pinata is wearing is encoded as normalized 8-bit values within the Piñata Vision barcode. I.e., an accessory value of 22 added to an accessory base offset (e.g. 1905) could indicate that the scanned pinata will be wearing caterpillars (1927). On the other hand, there may be no correlation between the PlaceTag IDs and the encoded accessory item values.

Another detail that apparently is encoded is the accessory color. Various cards have scanned with green, orange, and white disco wigs. It's uncertain if the color details are separate from the accessory value, or if there are different accessory values for different colors.

It's also uncertain if there's a cap to the number of accessories a pinata can wear -- 1 for each of the 10 accessory slots? (E.g., head, eyes, ...) -- or the number of accessories that can be encoded on a card. The most seen so far on a (3-row) player-created card is 6 accessories.

Options for possible storage representations

Since no bits have been identified yet, it's uncertain how the data is encoded, or whether the accessory fields are optional, variable length, or fixed.

Accessory flag bit?

Perhaps a (PlaceTag-specific) accessory flag bit indicates the optional presence of accessory data further within the data. The accessory data may be preceeded by an accessory count, indicating a variable number of (8-bit?) accessory values follow:

Accessory count as flag?

Possibly the accessory count value serves as an indication of whether (optional) accessory data exists. I.e., accessory count of 0 indicates no accessory data is encoded on the card.

Location of accessory bits

After decoding use costs for obfuscation sets 0 and A, it was observed that use costs weren't being read correctly for cards that also had accessories. This makes it likely that the accessory data starts in row 1 (and the obfuscation of the use cost is apparently affected by non-zero accessory bits).

Identifying the accessory bits will help to understand where and how accessory data is encoded on the card. To start, we can try searching for bits that match the count, or that may match values encoded for accessory 1.

Sample of cards with accessories

This is an incomplete list of cards where scanned pinatas are wearing accessories. Most of the cards are official versions released by Rare before the launch of Trouble in Paradise. (Recognized by a SpeciesPV name, and a picture of 3 accessories on the front of the card.) A few of the cards are date-locked, while the remaining cards are player-created from VivaPinata.com.

In addition to having accessories, pinatas may be variants and/or wildcards, or even have pinata names (Rare-only) encoded in the data.

The order of the accessories must exactly match the Journal accessories list, seen when viewing the scanned pinata's information. (Likewise, the variant numbering is from the Journal, not the wiki.)

The more accurate data we can collect for cards from the same obfuscation set, the more likely we can decode the underlying accessory data, and start to read accessory details from future/other cards.