Interested to hear
vaanrose
's take on this:
Also paging
@wildvine47.
Just popping in a day late to specify that a .mchp file is a cached vertex animation. You take a model, run non-realtime physics simulation on it, and then store the changes each vertex makes throughout the length of the animation into a cache file. This allows you to run an animation that alters each vertex position on each frame to look exactly like it was driven by physics, without it actually being driven by physics. It's stored data that, when played in realtime, appears to be dynamically calculated, and is one of many tricks video games use to render as fast as they need to. It is
not simply a placeholder template for any kind of hair, like he offers as a potential explanation; it's specifically linked to the exact mesh and even a single vertex out of place renders it unusable.
I haven't spent any time studying Ultimate or its physics engine to state this definitively, but the mere presence of a cached vertex animation suggests that the in-game hair isn't physics driven at all. It only appears that way because every animation a character has has a corresponding hair animation that was calculated in Maya.
What can we conclude based on this? "Jane" was far enough along in the development pipeline to have cached vertex animation. This means that she'd already have a model, said model would already be rigged, said rig would already be animated, and only then, the animation was used to calculate the way the vertexes will animate. Whoever "Jane" is, she was/is near the very end of the development pipeline, and I very much doubt she's scrapped content for that reason.
Here is what she is not:
1.) Any of the background characters. Joker is still referred to as "Jack" in the code, post-release, while all his party members (most notably, of course, being Ann) are referred to with their respective P5 codenames. Ann is "panther," not Jane.
2.) Morgana. It's been suggested the ponytail is Morgana's tail, but Morgana's tail is not a vertex animation. It's a skeletal bone animation that may have secondary physics attached to it under certain animations, but this is a wholly separate spring joint physics system, rather than cached Maya hair. This sort of system is considerably less expensive to render in realtime and is used all over the place.
This poster is correct that, usually, the female and male alts alternate. This isn't only different gender alts, however, but all separate model alts. The two versions of Link, Ike, Wario, Cloud and Bayonetta also alternate, despite not being divided by gender. Therefore, the alts do not alternate because they are separated by gender, they alternate simply because they're alts. There's a notable exception to this, however. Olimar and Alph are separated with four Olimars, and then four Alphs.
I believe this sets a precedent for characters that are explicitly
different characters to not alternate, but instead separate them into two groupings. They may be the same character functionally, but they are not the same character thematically. What little we know about this new Persona girl suggests that, even if she fulfills the same in-universe role as Joker, she is still a different character, being at the very least in a different year. It's likely that, as with P3's female protagonist before her, she'll also have a different name and different personality. Even if she is "Joker," she very much will not be just the distaff counterpart to the male version. We'll know whether this is truly the case or not next week.
There is also the fact that, when a character only has one or two alts, they are always the last costume slots. Mario, Little Mac, and Ridley are all this way, and now Joker is, too, with his c06 and c07 alts being his school outfit. I believe it is completely in line with current conventions if Joker's last two slots were originally intended to be female Joker, perhaps only getting two instead of four because she's not an established character and it's unknown yet if she'd be as warmly received as male Joker has been. And taken at face value, the "Jack6" and "Jane1" strings are connected. If Joker originally had four Jane alts, then "Jack6" would be "Jane3," but if he only had two, then "Jane1" would, indeed, be correct.
With this established, I think the notion that "Jack6_C06_v01_070925.mb" and "Jane1_pony_hairSystemShape2.mchp" are wholly separate strings only coincidentally next to each other in the junk data is unlikely. Possible? Yes. But I'd bet against it. Instead I'll offer a much simpler explanation:
These two separate files are next to each other in the junk data because they were stored in the same folder. Because that's exactly the correct workflow for this kind of thing. Your character file is stored next to its necessary secondary files, like animations and caches. These secondary files are then referenced into the main mb file when needed. This makes it easy to replace them, and the next time you load the mb asset, the new file is automatically loaded in.