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Progress Report - Q3 2026

· 15 min read
OpenGOAL Team
OpenGOAL Team

New extractor features, and several bugs fixed - most of them from OpenGOAL, but a couple from Naughty Dog.

Release Info​

This month's OpenGOAL Tooling (jak-project repo) release is 0.3.9.

caution

We'd like to remind users that all official OpenGOAL releases will be on the jak-project repo on GitHub and will be available in the official launcher available from opengoal.dev, as has always been the case.

Any other sources (mods, forks, ports, etc) are not vetted by us and should only be used at your own risk. With the recent increase in AI/LLM usage, it's easier than ever for someone to develop software, whether that be for good or for bad, so please be cautious.

Community Spotlight​

The Fishing Legacy​

Kraken, who you might remember from the Roguelike Jak II and Hero Mode Plus mods, shifts gears a bit and brings us a nice cozy fishing simulator, played throughout the Jak 1 universe!

A Complicated Mod​

MikeGamePro makes things difficult in this challenging randomizer mod, where you race against a ticking clock to beat the game and deal with ever-changing rules and complications.

info

If you want to play these mods (and others), follow the instructions here to set up a mod list for the OpenGOAL launcher.

AI Usage Policy​

If you've been around the decompilation scene recently, you have no doubt been witness to the onslaught of new decomps/recomps/PC ports of questionable quality made with the help of LLMs.

As LLMs have continued to improve at an unprecedented pace, the barrier to entry for decompilation has been reduced significantly as plenty of people with little to no coding knowledge try to port various games to other platforms, more often than not simply for the clout of being the first one, not caring about how maintainable the end result is, understanding the code behind it (which is usually the reason people decompile games in the first place) or if it even works properly.

Unfortunately, while these tools can be powerful in the right hands, if wielded by people with little domain knowledge, the results they produce are often questionable at best and downright unmaintainable at worst, plaguing maintainers of open source software all over the internet with pull requests that are completely automated, with extremely lengthy AI generated nonsense paragraphs in the description and more AI text in comments when asking for clarification.

Our project has also been hit by this and it has become a problem too big to ignore, so we will be establishing a strict set of guidelines around the usage of LLMs when contributing to OpenGOAL going forward.

You can read our AI Policy here, and it will also be available in our GitHub repo and linked from the FAQ.

Launcher​

Restore external links on mod pages ​

Added back the icon to jump to a mod's website/README.

Add swap space metric to support package ​

Some Linux users have reported Decompiler process terminated by signal 9, which can result from the decompiler using all the RAM and swap space. Allocating more swap space results in the decompiler finishing successfully. This change added information to the support package to help identify this issue.

Hide (vanilla) tooling update icon while on mod page ​

The launcher header shows either the currently installed version of the vanilla tooling, or the version of a particuar mod if you're on the mod's page. There is also an icon that appears in the header when there's a vanilla tooling update, but it was still showing from mod pages, causing confusion. Now it only shows while the vanilla tooling version is shown.

General Changes​

Translations ​

All translations from Crowdin should now be updated and added to the games. This includes changes for Catalan, Galician, Polish, Portuguese, Finnish, Czech, German, Spanish, Croatian, Italian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian! We also improved some behavior in how translated subtitles are handled in Jak 2 and 3.

If you're interested in contributing translations, check out these guides.

Special thanks to rafalekkB for fixing up the glyphs for Polish, as well as fixing some broken filepaths copy-pasted from Jak 2 to Jak 3!

Add VSCode debug adapter support ​

Added a debug server to goalc that sends JSON over the socket to communicate with an external debugger using the Debug Adapter Protocol. This lets us debug GOAL code in a proper debugger with breakpoints, step over, step in and step out per line, stack frames and supports watches for global symbols, registers and local variables (local variables only work within the most recent stack frame).

Watches that track addresses holding a reference type generate a list of field names according to the object's type. All fields will show their name, type and value and, depending on the type, will try to infer extra info like symbol names/values, function names for function fields, enum values and more.

Support time-of-day colors in custom levels ​

Added support for storing different colors for changing time-of-day in custom level meshes.

Various GLTF exporter fixes ​

  • Merc and TIE envmaps now properly extract
  • Changed joint offset in convert_per_vertex_data since we now export the align bone
  • The bone accessor for merc models now uses TINYGLTF_COMPONENT_TYPE_UNSIGNED_BYTE, fixing a decompiler crash when attempting to reimport an extracted model into the game without first importing it into Blender and re-exporting
  • All model buffers now get merged into one large buffer before export, saving some space and increasing parsing speed of GLB files
  • Tfrags, TIEs and shrubs are now no longer stored in one giant mesh per tree and get grouped into categories:
    • Tfrags will be grouped by the tfrag tree name they come from (normal, trans, dirt, ice, etc.) and get separated by the texture their material uses (tfrags are not instanced, so this is the next best solution)
    • TIEs and shrubs get grouped by tree index and separated by their proto name (TIE wind will also be grouped separately)

Sound Effect & Music Extraction ​

Added the ability to extract sound effects to .wav files for each of the four games, and music to .wav files for Jak 1 and Jak 2. There are corresponding new decompiler options in the launcher settings for extracting these.

Fixed custom level region crash on Windows ​

On Windows, the pairs produced by custom regions (Jak 2 & 3) all become bogus, probably due to some compiler differences. Changing the pairs that get stored in the regions to not be pointers should avoid a potential use-after-free bug.

Fixed menu text boundaries and alignments across aspect ratios ​

Fixed the alignment of text and other elements in several menus of Jak 3 (as well as some of Jak 2) when using Automatic or Custom aspect ratios.

Fixed cloud mipmap issue ​

Fixed an oversight in TextureAnimator::run_clouds where it would read a texture that is attached to the bound framebuffer.

Fixed bug ignoring texture replacements for merc and shrub ​

Fixed a regression from decompiler optimization, where some texture replacements wouldn't be processed properly.

Limit decompiler threads by hardware concurrency ​

Fixed a regression from decompiler optimization, restoring the previous behavior prior and preventing the level extraction process from creating too many threads.

Retail reboot from imgui menu ​

Added an option to the imgui menu Reboot in Retail Mode, similar to the existing Reboot in Debug Mode.

ARM64 improvements and Apple Silicon support ​

Various fixes for ARM64 compilation, and support for building and running the game natively on Apple Silicon.

Misc CI/build fixes ​

Various fixes to the build process.

Jak X​

VU program disassembly ​

All VU programs are unchanged from Jak 3 except:

  • sparks-vu1 NEW
  • ocean-near-vu1 DIFFERENT
  • sprite-glow-vu1 DIFFERENT
  • tnear-vu1 DIFFERENT
  • hfrag REMOVED
  • ocean REMOVED
  • ocean-texture REMOVED

More decompilation (collide, debug, drawable, net, vehicle, etc) ​

Breaks the 300 file milestone, also includes the majority of mips2c functions carried forward from Jak 3.

Jak 3​

Fixed def-actor macro ​

Corrected the art group version number (8) used for the Jak 3 def-actor macro for custom actors. It was originally copied over from Jak 2 and still using that art group version number (7).

Fixed missing hfrag desert textures on macOS ​

Removed unused vertex attribute that macOS's OpenGL driver seems to dislike.

Fixed mirror world HUD alignment ​

Mirror world has a custom implementation in OpenGOAL, and some vanilla code that was meant to be disabled was duplicating the mirror work for certain HUD elements.

Fixed Onin's tent minimap icon showing in the desert ​

Fixed an original game bug where the minimap icon for Onin's tent would show up in the desert in the northwest, rather than showing the blue air train icon in the northeast. This icon was missing some of the flags that other Haven City icons have that tell the game to show the air train icon instead of the real icon while outside of Haven City.

Fixed crash in Glide to Volcano mission ​

Fixed an original game bug where the game would crash in the Glide to Volcano mission. Interestingly, the crash only occurs if you've played the Destroy Sniper Cannons mission beforehand (speedrunners would often encounter this when doing back-to-back runs, and learned to restart their game in between runs).

Glide to Volcano and Destroy Sniper Cannons are the only two missions with code that makes use of a type called simple-prim. The bug is that ND defined the relocate method for simple-prim in 2 different files - generic-obs.gc and cty-sniper-turret.gc.

On the first Glide to Volcano run, the code from generic-obs.gc is used, and everything works fine. Once you start Destroy Sniper Cannons, that relocate method gets overwritten by the version from cty-sniper-turret.gc. Once the Destroy Sniper Cannons mission is no longer active, this code is unloaded, and we no longer have a valid relocate method for simple-prim. So the next time you try to run the Glide to Volcano mission, the game crashes because it can't find the necessary relocate code for simple-prim!

Improved game-score related decomp, extended speedrun autosplitter to track ranked side missions and orbs by level ​

Jak 3 has leftover, unused money-per-level fields in game-info carried over from Jak 1 - so we repurposed these fields to actually track orbs collected by level. The speedrun autosplitter was extended to track orbs by level.

We also extended the autosplitter to track bronze/silver/gold rankings for side missions. As part of this, we filled out the game-score enum and cleaned up the decompilation of related code.

-    (set! (-> self game-score) (the-as uint 2))
+    (set! (-> self game-score) (game-score turtle-race))
-    (let ((v1-6 (game-info-method-29 *game-info* (the-as int (-> self game-score))))
+    (let ((v1-6 (get-best-rank *game-info* (-> self game-score)))

Extended secret selection and categories in speedrun menu ​

Extended the speedrun menu to allow secret selection separately for Act 2, Act 3, Post-Game, and Hero Mode categories. Also added Hero Mode Act 2 and 3 categories.

Jak 2​

Fixed broken language changing ​

Fixed a bug which would cause a language change from the progress menu to be ignored.

Jak 1​

Patched debug crash in subtitle code ​

Fixed a crash in subtitle code that only runs in debug mode, and tries to log information about any currently playing cutscene. The code was checking the handle (-> *art-control* spool-lock) rather than the process (handle->process (-> *art-control* spool-lock)) to decide whether or not to log. While the handle may not be #f, this might still not resolve to a valid process, in which case the game crashes trying to log the cutscene information.

Patched autosave/progress locked menu ​

There's an original game bug where under the right conditions, you can get stuck on a blank pause menu screen permanently, and have no choice but to reboot the game.

The first time you collect a cell after saving to a new file, the game will show a popup telling you about the autosave feature. If you collect such a cell during a pause buffer (the brief window after pressing Start and L2/R2 on same frame), the game gets stuck waiting on conditions that will never change.

The pause menu is waiting on the autosave to finish, but the autosave is stuck waiting on the cell cutscene to play, and the cell cutscene is stuck waiting to play because the pause menu has come up. The game is actually still running, it just has no way to get unblocked and ignores any player input (its unblocked by running code in the REPL in the video below).

This isn't a bug most players would run into, but it does affect speedrunners in certain situations. So we opted to fix this bug only while speedrun mode was enabled. In speedrun mode we were already skipping the autosave popup, but not until after the code that loops until there's no pending cutscene was satisfied. We changed the order of these checks, so that we wouldn't bother with the cutscene check if we were in speedrun mode.

Restored NaN check in nav code ​

Added back a NaN check in some common nav code which was inadvertently removed during decompiler cleanup. This was causing enemies to suddenly disappear in certain situations.