[REQ][PC]Sleeping Dogs .big files

[pro spy]

nothing official yet
http://forums.sleepingdogs.net/viewforum.php?f=11

[onixer]

the story was over?

[cra0]

so no news on a script release for quickbms

[Gishank]

As a general note, people who want modding tools for Sleeping Dogs should chceck out the thread I made on the official forums (here), and add your opinion/vote on the poll. Assuming it gets enough support the devs may consider making official tools.

[H1Vltg3]

I know I personally cannot wait to get access to this games files. Please don't give up on this!

[Herf]

I'm sorry if this is offtopic but I'm interested in ripping the music from the game.
I extracted the data from .pck files (using the script from Assassin's Creed topic) and found audio streams there (wwise), but ww2ogg tool tells about 'unknown header' or stuff like that (forgot what it exactly said, beat the game already, but can reinstall and provide some stuff, if needed).
If someone managed to successfully extract and convert this stuff, please, give some instructions.
Thanks in advance.

[ner0]

Hello everyone, I just dropped by to say that I'm also expecting some progress from the very talented people here at Xentax.
I'm not a coder myself so I won't be contributing in terms of technical development but I will give those tools some usage since I'm interested in translating and modding this game. Anyway, keep motivated and take your time. Everyone appreciates your hard work.

[JonhOliver]

Any progress?

[ner0]

Any progress?

I was contacted by a forum member that took a peek at a .big and .bix sample files (thanks again, friend!) but his reply didn't bring good news:

sorry, this format has far too many unknowns
there are some compressed zlib chunks in the .big file but there is no string table for locale - just names of various textures and some references to flash or lua packages

[Vash]

the main problem is that both original and cracked executables are protected so it's not even that easy to run an ASM check on the algos

[ner0]

the main problem is that both original and cracked executables are protected so it's not even that easy to run an ASM check on the algos

I didn't know that, but makes perfect sense.
A highly knowledgeable reverse engineer is needed to make some progress. Unfortunately I'm neither.

[ner0]

Wow, this is an amazing piece of work, thank you.
At least we got a working unpacker which, for the moment, is more than enough for the modders out there to start peeking into the game resources and get to know it better. That being said, I am aware that our friend wasn't able to get the repacker working on such short notice but I'm positive that either him or someone else will be able to sum up the knowledge acquired so far to make some progress towards that goal. Anyway, thanks to everyone involved on this.

P.S.: Out of curiosity, what did you mean by this:

First of all, I'm just using this account temporarily to post this, with the consent of the account holder. Sorry guys, I won't pay 5EUR to be able to share the results of the research I did on my free time.

[JonhOliver]

Could you explain how to extract the texts?

[ner0]

P.S.: Out of curiosity, what did you mean by this:

First of all, I'm just using this account temporarily to post this, with the consent of the account holder. Sorry guys, I won't pay 5EUR to be able to share the results of the research I did on my free time.

I would have liked to register my own account normally here, but the registration page demands a 5 Euro "donation" in order to create a new account. I didn't feel fair that after spending a significant amount of my free time to research this stuff, I need to spend some money to share my results. So I found an alternate way to post here without paying the donation.

I'm sorry, I was not aware of this. When I registered at Xentax one year ago this was not the case.
Although I understand that maintaining the community has it's costs, I do not agree that registrations should have mandatory donations.
In the end, I think this will hurt the community more than it will help. Anyway, this is just my opinion and this is also not the place for discussing it. Sorry about that.

[neburas]

Awesome work. SD modding is back!
I installed Python3 and tried to extract with it, but always said "Invalid magic number; file may not be an IDX file at all".
Am i doing something wrong? Or scripts are under WIP?