Modding Discussion .Pak files What are they, how do they work?

Discussion in 'Starbound Modding' started by Whitlinger Doodle Do, Dec 19, 2013.

  1. mescale

    mescale Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    To unpack the assets into a folder in your starbound assets folder called starbound_assets you can use the commands below in a terminal window. The first line should change directory to the Starbound package with the unpacker application. The second is the command to unpack the package.

    Code:
    cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/SteamApps/common/Starbound/Starbound.app/Contents/MacOS
    ./asset_unpacker ../../../assets/packed.pak ../../../assets/starbound_assets/
    
     
  2. clapman7

    clapman7 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Alright! this works like a charm, i suppose i do something similar to re-pack it? or do i not need to do that? ./is sorry for asking these questions
     
  3. mescale

    mescale Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    To pack it you would probably use the command like this...

    Code:
     ./asset_packer ../../../assets/starbound_assets/ ../../../assets/starbound_custom_package/packed.pak
    Note the command above will pack it into the starbound_custom_package folder, otherwise it might overwrite the one in the assets folder, which might be bad, you can rename the original paked.pak file to keep a backup and copy the newly packed one in there by hand.


    Also note pack is being created in a different folder to starbound_assets because if we were putting the packaged file into the folder we're packing bad things could happen ;)

    Also the packing is a bit more involved that this. For instance you probably don't want to pack all the files, only the one's you've changed etc.

    Starbound isn't currently working with packed files properly yet, so we'll leave packing for another update ;)
     
  4. ProfessorPi

    ProfessorPi Space Spelunker

    If it did not matter then you would have never mentioned it correct.? Just an observation.

    Far as the .PAK goes thanks for the information.
     
  5. clapman7

    clapman7 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Code:
    ./asset_packer ../../../assets/starbound_assets/ ../../../assets/packed.pak
    Hello! I return from a day filled with modding, and the codes i tried before worked like a charm, except for the code above, that had a starbound_custom_package thing. That did not work for me, so i took it out, and everything works perfectly right now, apart from a few game crashes that have already been addressed in the Furious Koala patch notes. I highly recommend those to anyone else that was in my own predicament. xD
     
  6. Rival

    Rival Orbital Explorer

    Is there a way in windows 8 to fake packing the assets every time you want to make a change.
    Is it possible to just leave them extracted like earlier beta or maybe setting up a fake folder that is just a packed.pak ?
     
  7. Lrns123

    Lrns123 Big Damn Hero

    A .cpt extension would be just confusing. It's a package of files, regardless of the underlying structure, so a .pak extension makes sense.
     
  8. Healixzero

    Healixzero Space Hobo

    Okay, so I feel kind of bad that what I did just worked for me, while everyone else seems to have problems, but I just ran the "unpack_assets.bat" file in the Starbound\win32 folder and i got a new folder called "Unpacked" in Starbound\assets. I haven't tried the other methods, but... well... it had what I wanted, so i didnt do more...

    I dunno if this is something new that the previous posts didnt have access to, or what... but I figured I would be a really bad community member if I didnt at least try....

    BTW; i havent found a nice way to repack things, but since I can just dump the entire directory into the mods folder, and I'm not hard up for drive space, I didnt really try....
     

Share This Page