NfS Shift .BFF files

[Simon]

What about these:

-partpak -tandemdrift -solodrift -timeattack -phantomduel -phantomderby -phantomtt -campaign -vehicle -ai -aivehicle -randomai -disablehud -skipmenu -novehicles -track -password -login

[venomtrk]

Hi there , i need to edit language files for Turkish translation.

I extracted language_english.bff file. There are two files in there. English.bin and English_histogram.bin. How can i edit these files and put them back. Any ideas ?

[redilS]

What about these:

Tried those already...

partpak: maybe, in combination with 'loose', allows the use both packed and unpacked files. though, partpak alone makes shift go awkward
disablehud: easy, disables hud ^^
skipmenu: for me, this skipped the player selection dialogue
novehicles: disables rendering of AI vehicles and track, making your car fall into the void

all others: by now i've found no useful combination. maybe useful for demo purposes, directly booting the game into a race

there's also:
nosoftshadows: shadows are not filtered anymore
noshadows: does nothing apart crashing the game
windowsize
windowpos
plus a few more i don't recall atm

[japamd]

Hi there , i need to edit language files for Turkish translation.

I extracted language_english.bff file. There are two files in there. English.bin and English_histogram.bin. How can i edit these files and put them back. Any ideas ?

I'm trying to translate English.bin, but I didn't discovered how the strings are indexed, you can translate all strings *if you keep the original string size*, change just one string length and the game will get crazy.

[HeliosDoubleSix]

Unpacking all the Data SLOWS your load time due to slow random access speeds on HDD's

Loading a typical race goes from 14 seconds to 23 seconds. (17 seconds if you have an SSD)

--

If people are going to go the unpack everything route, I think it would be wise to test if unpacking has any affect on load times.

Anyone notice any load speed changes after they unpacked everything?

Id imagine you have less cpu use as it no longer needs to uncompress the data, but at the same time you have more data to load in from disk which means if your HD isn't that fast it would probably be slower than when they were compressed, but this is just speculation. Id bet it makes things slightly slower for most people and much slower for laptops or people with slow or fragmented drives.

-EDIT AGAIN-

*sigh* When the game is uncompressed/unpacked it's not much bigger than before so the compression seems minimal.

Cars in the Car Lot/Garage load twice as fast it seems, however loading a race takes a good deal longer, in my test it went from:

14 Seconds to load Elise Invitational

to

23 Seconds.. ouch, that's rather unacceptable so I think I'll be repacking everything!

I can hear my HD crunching away which is a clear sign its doing heavy random access with HD's suck balls at. Packing the files prevents this heavy random access as the files are consolidated.

My bet is if you have a good SSD (solid state storage drive, none moving parts storage, expensivo) it will overcome this slow down entirely and load at the same speed as normal. So I'm going to go test that theory now...

Yah the SSD helps a lot, but it's still slower loading a race in 17.3 instead of 14 when packed.

[redilS]

If you're just playing Shift, leave it as it is. Unpacking is ideal for the modders, because the don't have to repack everything only for testing a small change.

[HeliosDoubleSix]

Indeed, though apparently you cannot mod the races/maps as they will not repack. So for so things unpacking everything is the only way... unless someone knows how to use the partial pack argument and it does what it sounds like?

I also cannot get IGPHASEACTIVATE.bff to repack, notsure if thats a bug in the repacker as it used to work now I get some error message about array lengths or something.

[Shelly]

I have discovered, that unpacking via *.bat does not work if the Shift Patch 1.01 is installed.

On my machine it works only if I try to unpack an unpatched Shift.

Please make the patched version unpackable too.


Edit:
I think the difference between patched and not patched Shift could be an explanation for why the repacker worked for some and for others not?

[aluigi]

if they are new files not available in the non-patched game it's enough to use the new feature of quickbms 0.3 which scans the input folder:

Code: Select all

quickbms -F "*.bff" c:\nfsshift.bms "C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Need for Speed SHIFT\PakFiles" c:\output_folder

instead if it's a new version of a file I need the exact file to analyze to know what is changed

[Shelly]

if they are new files not available in the non-patched game it's enough to use the new feature of quickbms 0.3 which scans the input folder:

Code: Select all

quickbms -F "*.bff" c:\nfsshift.bms "C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Need for Speed SHIFT\PakFiles" c:\output_folder

instead if it's a new version of a file I need the exact file to analyze to know what is changed

Ahh, sorry man. I had an old version of quickbms. Now with 0.3 it works fine. Thanks!

[japamd]

Indeed, though apparently you cannot mod the races/maps as they will not repack. So for so things unpacking everything is the only way... unless someone knows how to use the partial pack argument and it does what it sounds like?

I also cannot get IGPHASEACTIVATE.bff to repack, notsure if thats a bug in the repacker as it used to work now I get some error message about array lengths or something.

There was a problem with last version uploaded, try downloading it again.
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3717&p=31886#p31886

[Arachnus]

I have discovered, that unpacking via *.bat does not work if the Shift Patch 1.01 is installed.

On my machine it works only if I try to unpack an unpatched Shift.

Please make the patched version unpackable too.


Edit:
I think the difference between patched and not patched Shift could be an explanation for why the repacker worked for some and for others not?

You might have done something wrong or missed something, cause batch worked 100% here in my Shift patched! But i saw that even unpacking all the files with Batch command, still remais many folders with BFF files inside, so this files i had to use japamd´s BFFRepacker and quickBMS to work around with them, and worked OK too! maybe this is just cause who wrote the full extraction batch, forget to search in game folders for "ALL" the BFF files, and focused only in the "Pakfiles" folder!

I´m so busy and running now even could make good mods, as i have a little time i´ll try to edit the Batch for really all the BFF´s OK!

Thanks and see you

[mesa]

Hi!

(Sry for my poor english)

I have a problem with Repack tool. The repacked file size is larger than the original.


I unpacked Escort RS file, which is about 16 MByte, then i got 1106 files, and they are using 40 MByte space in unpacked
I did not made any changes, just used repack gui, and the result is 1 new file, ~40 MByte

I copied this new archive into the right place, but in the Shift game's garage no Escort is visble
Just endless spinning circles...

May the problem is that the new file is not compressed ?
Thx

[japamd]

The repacked files are not compressed, yet.

I'll take a look on Escort RS file.

[japamd]

Just tried repacking ford_escort_rs.bff and it went fine.


I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit build 7600