Module assembly::pk

The pack (*.pk) files

The game stores most of its resources in custom zip file variants which are called Pack files. These contain a sequence of possibly compressed file streams and an index of all contained files streams at the end of the file.

Pack files do not contain the actual names of the contained files, but the index is layed out by the CRC value of the respective filenames, so it is trivial to find the correct data for any given filename.

When the game was in operation, players could choose between Full Download, setting up the complete PKs at load, and While Playing, where the resource manager would try to locate a file in the PKs, and load it from the content delivery network if it wasn't found.

The file would then be added to the appropriate PK file, as specified in the PKI (Pack-Index) file.

This module

This module contains datastructures, parsers, readers and and possibly writers to (de)serialize, analyze and manipulate the pack archive files.

Rough guidelines on which API to use is as follows:

• Use PackFile to walk through the raw data
• Use PackLoader for an efficient representation of the data
• Use PackData for a datastructure that you can manipulate and write back easily

Modules

file	The structures as the appear in the file
parser	Parsing functions
reader	Low level reader for PK files