ao_something.iff: Do they do something?

I was stuck in the Loading screen of a Quick Game so I guessed the game couldn't find an asset, so I used Sysinternals' Process Monitor to see what the game was doing and it was actually looking for a dorna file that had somehow gotten deleted. Well... that's not the interesting part, but I'm just saying that Process Monitor could help you find out what's causing the game to hang at a loading screen, help you figure out which file is missing.

The interesting part is that while watching nba2k13.exe do its work, I noticed it was looking for some files named ao_something.iff, where something was either wishbone, tri, u, v, or vtri. AO is a common acronym for Ambient Occlusion, so I got interested in figuring out why it's looking for those files, which aren't there in the game's folder.

So I remembered I had re-installed NBA 2K9 to see if I could figure out how to edit the audio in the newer games, and I noticed that 2K9 actually had those files. So I copied them over to the 2K13 installation, game doesn't crash, and Process Monitor says that the game reads them fine, but I'm wondering, is there an actual difference between them being there, and them not being there? I'm not seeing much, if at all. Would strengthening the lighting parameters in the global do something?

Without:




With:

"wishbone, tri, u, v, or vtri." - these are jersey necktypes

let's have some fun though

Yeah, should've thought of that. No idea what they do then.