Glad of you to join in!
hazballs wrote:Firstly, is the 50% complete hash list tied to a specific version of the beta client?
Actually, until now I have only been working with older beta files so I could not test the 50% hash list yet.
It could be possible that the hash list no longer works because Bioware
a) changed all the file names, eg. by renaming the top directory /resources/ to a different name. In this case, no wonder that the file list no longer works.
b) changed the hash generation, so that the same filenames now have different paths.
Any case is bad news for us. Under a), we would need to find out the new filenames, under b), we would have the disassemble swtor.exe and would need to fix the Easymyp algorithm.
By the way, the hash list does not store any version information nor the filenames of the TOR archives, so there shouldn't be any problem with that.
hazballs wrote:Secondly, as the game uses zlib compression, do the extracted files need to be "decompressed", or does easymyp do that in the process of extracting them?
Easymyp already decompresses all files during extraction, so you do not need to worry about that. However, there are some proprietary files, like the bucket or BKHD files, that are encoded twice, so we need to decompress/extract them once more before we can use them.
hazballs wrote:Thirdly, are the DEADBEEF files useful in any way?
The DEADBEEF files are really just normal files, they just have a different filename. So you can open them in a hex editor, look for the file header, rename the file extension and open it in the correct program.
The only disadvantage with the DEADBEEF files is that for files like the textures they are not of much use: if you have a directory of multiple thousand DEADBEEF files and don't know what filename they have, good luck finding the right file
.
But XML files work fine even if you do not know their filename as the FQN name is always specified in the first tag.
hazballs wrote:Fourth, does a new hash list need to be made every time the game files change?
Similar to question one, the hash list should work with all versions so we do not need to update the format everytime, unless Bioware changes the algorithm again.
However, there will always be the case that old files are deleted, new ones added and other files renamed or modified. However, the majority of the files should stay the same so we only need to update a few file names everytime there is an update.
hazballs wrote:Finally, how is everyone else's research coming along on the "close to release" version of the game files?
Well, right now I am still working on recognizing all file formats and hope that I will fix the filename issue soon.
In my opinion, we rather need a TOR viewer instead of an extractor like easyMYP, because the extracted files can be up to 60 GB in file size. It would be better to have a program similar to the Windows Explorer that can be used to look into the archives, preview the files and extract them on a "on demand" basis.
The only problem then is how we can keep track of file changes during patches.