i'm hacking Phantasy Star Online again and i uncovered something very concerning
i'm fairly certain PSOBB just loads the NREL map scenes directly into a malloc'd block and then gives Direct3D8 the index/vertex buffer pointers it contains rather than doing any real parsing of the data
in fact I'm pretty sure this is all just storage of Ninja SDK stuff directly into files so the Dreamcast load times would be better
jumped the gun a bit, someone _has_ already gotten pretty far with N RELs and found many direct uses of dreamcast sdk structures.
still wtf