In an attempt to figure out what's going on when the game reads these unpacked files, I decided to log disk activity with Process Monitor.
First of all I fired up the game packed, to get a baseline of some sort.
It was very interesting to see that even when packed, the game tried to read files from
\SleepingDogs\Data\Animation and
AnimationNIS, which didn't exist. Even more strange is that the folders and files it was trying to read were "switched".
For example,
\Data\AnimationNIS\Zodiac_Into.bin is not in AnimationNIS.big but in Animation.big.
And
\Data\Animation\NIS_GAME_INTRO_OPENING.bin is actually in AnimationNIS.big. Maybe this is due to broken code that got left in the game.
Other than this it keeps to bix and big files as expected.
Then I unpacked vehicles and started the game. It crashed immediately because my save is currently in a crowded area. The best place to test this is in that home with a driveway.
According to the log, it only tried to read Vehicles.bix once, failed, and then started reading unpacked files. Coincidence or not, it only reads files from
Vehicles_New.
The strange part is that there are no failed read attempts logged for vehicle files. It simply crashes and begins to write a memory dump. No read failures prior to the crash either.
@Ekey If you don't mind me asking, what's with those 0byte vehicle files? Are you sure there aren't any problems with the extractor?
Another interesting thing is that the game tries to read a bunch of hashed .bix files that don't exist.
Could we create these files and use them as patches for mods?
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