# Statement of Goals

Why this decompilation exists, and where the project is headed.

## Why

*Xenosaga Episode III* (2006) is the conclusion of a series that will almost
certainly never see an official port, remaster, or source release. Its
original source code is gone — what survives is one pressed disc per region.
Twenty years of fan knowledge about its internals lived in scattered forum
posts, lost tool downloads, and a handful of people's heads (some of whom we
have lost touch with). The first goal is simple:

**1. Preservation.** Recover and publish, in durable and searchable form,
how this game actually works — every function, every subsystem, every file
format — so the knowledge can never be lost to a dead forum or an
unmaintained Windows EXE again. This package, together with the open-source
[extractor](https://github.com/LinuxJessi/Xenosaga3PythonExtractor),
replaces the fragile legacy tool chain with documented, reproducible,
cross-platform tooling.

**2. Enable the modders we already know exist.** Undubs, fan translations,
and a Chinese HD edition were all built over the years with far less
information than this package contains. With named middleware functions, a
complete call graph, identified text-rendering and subtitle paths, and the
file-format index, those projects get dramatically easier — including
finishing ideas the original authors couldn't (the CN team wanted an
English-subtitle option for their build; the code paths for that are now
mapped).

**3. The HD modernization pack.** The active goal on top of this research:
an AI-upscale-based enhancement of the game — UI, textures, and FMV — that a
non-technical fan can **double-click and play** (a portable emulator bundle
with a friendly settings splash; you bring your own disc and BIOS). Stretch
goals: accessibility options built from the engine's own flags and cheat
infrastructure — easier battles, fast-forward, the shipped-but-disabled
photo mode. The decompilation is what turns those from memory-scanning
guesswork into precise, documented patches.

**4. The long game: an engine reference.** A byte-faithful PC recompile of a
PS2 game is a team-scale, multi-year effort and not the plan. But a
*recreation* — a modern engine that plays this game's data, the way OpenMW
plays Morrowind — becomes plausible once the script VM, actor system, and
file formats are fully documented. This package is the reference manual for
whoever (us, or people we haven't met yet) takes that on. The immediate
research frontier is struct/type recovery: re-decompiling with recovered
structure layouts makes thousands of functions readable at once.

## Ground rules

- Built from legally owned discs. No ROMs, no ISOs, no assets, no BIOS —
  not in this package, not ever hosted here.
- Non-commercial, forever. This is fan research into a game we love.
- Everything reproducible: the full pipeline ships in the package, and the
  tooling is open source.

## Get involved

Findings, corrections, struct layouts, identified functions — bring them to
the [Godsibb forums](https://godsibb.net). The work is grep-friendly by
design: pick a string from `strings.txt`, find its function, figure out what
it does, tell us what you learned.

*— jessiray / the Godsibb community, June 2026*