Which resources rename, scene by scene

The companion to Game versions and your mod, which explains what Prelude does about version drift. This page measures it.

Community archive fingerprints (details in the last section) give us, for every ROM version, the exact resource-name inventory of every scene. Names are the compatibility axis — references resolve by name, and byte differences under an unchanged name are harmless — so two versions are mod-compatible for a scene exactly when their name inventories match.

The scene breakdown

One row per conflicted scene, worst first. Each cell counts the resource names of that kind which are missing from at least one version group — the references a mod built on another version cannot resolve — over how many exist in total. The Renamed column is the whole scene: renaming names, total names, and the share.

• Headers — the scene and room headers, plus every day/night Set_ variant.
• Display lists — the drawing commands for a room's or a model's geometry.
• Vertices — the vertex arrays those drawing commands read.
• Textures — textures, their palettes, and prerendered backdrops.
• Collision — the collision mesh and its surface types.
• Actor lists — the placed-actor lists of each room and setup.
• Paths — the waypoint routes NPCs follow.
• Cutscenes — cutscene command scripts.
• Other — everything else (transform matrices, material-animation headers, raw blobs).

Two patterns show up immediately. Renaming is concentrated in room meshes: display lists and their vertex arrays rename almost completely, while a scene's collision header and its textures usually keep every name — which is why an edit that touches neither can load across versions untouched. And it is bimodal — a scene either renames nearly everything (a byte shift early in the file moves all that follows) or only a thin tail.

Scenes some versions don't have

8 test scenes ship only in the debug builds. Nothing renames — the whole scene is simply absent elsewhere, so an export that touches one carries it for the same reason:

The conflicts, grouped

The 33 conflicted scene inventories fall into just 12 recurring partitions. In each strip below, the neutral-grey chips are the largest agreeing group and each colored cluster names its inventory differently — every ≠ boundary is a set of mods that break crossing it.

MQ PAL + MQ Debug named differently from the rest — 7 scenes

PAL 1.0 + PAL 1.1 named differently from the rest — 5 scenes

MQ JP + MQ PAL + MQ US + MQ Debug named differently from the rest — 4 scenes

MQ PAL + MQ Debug ≠ NTSC 1.0 + NTSC 1.1 ≠ PAL 1.0 + PAL 1.1 split from the rest — 4 scenes

MQ PAL + MQ Debug ≠ PAL 1.0 + PAL 1.1 split from the rest — 4 scenes

NTSC 1.0 + NTSC 1.1 named differently from the rest — 3 scenes

Debug 03-21 + GC PAL + PAL 1.0 + PAL 1.1 ≠ MQ PAL + MQ Debug split from the rest — 1 scene

MQ Debug named differently from the rest — 1 scene

NTSC 1.0 + NTSC 1.1 + NTSC 1.2 + PAL 1.0 + PAL 1.1 named differently from the rest — 1 scene

NTSC 1.0 + NTSC 1.1 ≠ PAL 1.0 + PAL 1.1 split from the rest — 1 scene

NTSC 1.0 + NTSC 1.1 ≠ PAL 1.0 + PAL 1.1 split from the rest — 1 scene

NTSC 1.0 named differently from the rest — 1 scene

Scene × version, in full

Every conflicted scene against every version. Letters are scene-local groups (A = the largest agreeing set, in grey; B–D name the scene's resources differently); a dash means the version doesn't carry that scene variant. Hover any cell for the inventory size.

How much of a conflicted scene renames

The same share the table's Renamed column carries, drawn — the share of a scene's resource names not common to all of its groups.

Version-pair compatibility

Scenes with different names for each pair of versions — the practical "will a mod made on A load on B" number.

0 = every scene both versions have resolves identically. Darkest cells approach the maximum observed (26 scenes).

Safe scenes

These 81 scene inventories are the same set of names in every fingerprinted version (MQ dungeon copies counted separately, marked MQ). A mod that only references these resolves everywhere, and Prelude adds nothing to it:

The data behind this

Evidence: 16 distinct fingerprints from 17 submissions, each generated with Prelude's fingerprint tooling from a contributor's own archive (metadata-only: names, sizes, hashes, references — no game assets). Coverage gaps:

• Debug ROM (2002-03-13) (0x87121EFE) — no fingerprint yet.
• iQue (China) (0xB1E1E07B) — no fingerprint yet.
• iQue (Taiwan) (0x3D81FB3E) — no fingerprint yet.
• Majora's Mask — nothing yet (GameCube (US), NTSC 1.0).
• Release-build confirmation for Debug 03-21, GC JP-CE, GC JP, GC PAL, GC US, MQ JP, MQ PAL, MQ US, MQ Debug, NTSC 1.1, PAL 1.0, PAL 1.1 — these are currently observed only from development builds (extraction fixes on develop change a few dozen bytes-level resources, never names, as far as observed).