PakFS is an application that utilizes the Windows Projected File System feature to display pak files as if they're folders on your computer, without having to unpack them first. With the asset unpacker, it can take minutes to unpack files before you can browse through the assets and open the files you're looking for. With PakFS, it's a matter of seconds to open and browse pak files, all in the File Explorer you're already familiar with. More information can be found on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Silverfeelin/Starbound-PakFS
instructions unclear. Deleted my OS now seriously, how exactly does this work? does it just make the computer associate .pak with a special folder system like .zip or...?
It's similar, but there are some differences.When you open zip files you're browsing through the actual zip file. Your path will be /file.zip/items/armors. When you open a file it is unpacked to a temporary directory, so you have to extract or save the file elsewhere. With PakFS the pak file is projected to a folder next to the file. As far as your file system is concerned it is an actual folder. Files that you access in this folder are automatically loaded from the pak file onto the disk, such as _fu_pak/player.config.patch. Files that you don't touch will remain virtual until you open them, copy them or close the application that provides them (in the last case they'll disappear). Both solutions would work fine for pak files, but Microsoft offers better support for this one. I'm not even going to attempt implementing pak files the same way zip files are.
ok. looks like my batch file is useless wen this exists! despite the negative undertone of that, thank you
Quote from the overview: So there's definitely still a place for other unpackers tools that help with unpacking . On top of the fact that this tool is only compatible with Windows 10, not covering all the Windows 7/8, Linux and macOS users. Basically, pak files start with an index which contains a reference to all assets (asset path, asset size and a pointer to the start of the asset data). When PakFS "hydrates" (unpacks) a file, it looks for this asset path, gets the pointer to the actual data and then proceeds to read this data. Since the order of assets in the pak is not guaranteed (neither is the order in which Windows tries to access the files), copying a large amount of files would basically make the tool jump around the pak file constantly to find the next file. I haven't done any benchmarks, but I doubt this would be even close to the speed of unpacking a file directly in sequential order. It's really just meant for browsing and finding/unpacking specific assets you're looking for. When I'm checking a mod I usually look for stuff in the items folder as well as the metadata file. I don't care about biomes, monsters, tiles, etc.
now my next question: how do I get the precompiled exe? i tried downloading from github but it just gave me files i would hav to compile to get the exe
Go to the release page! It's in the bar above the files. Here's a direct link to the page: https://github.com/Silverfeelin/Starbound-PakFS/releases Make sure you download the release and not the source code. It should speak for itself which of the 3 files that is.
Odd, and you have the prerequisites? Are you tech savvy enough to see if the sample application from this repository works? https://github.com/Microsoft/ProjFS-Managed-API
The page has step by step instructions on how to build the sample application which can be used to test if ProjFS works on your system. I have no clue if your issue lies with PakFS or with the feature not working on your system.
