Mandible

Mandible eases the process of working with the packed assets of a game that uses the ForgeLight Engine.

Mandible currently supports the following formats (R = read, W = write):

• .dma/DMAT (R/W)
• Locale data (R/W)
• .pack (R)
• .pack2/PAK (R/W)
• .zone/ZONE (R/W)

Additional features include:

• A pack2 namelist extraction utility.
• Parsing and downloading of digests and files served by the Daybreak Manifest CDN.

Documentation and ImHex patterns on some of the file formats that Mandible supports can be found in the docs folder.

A command-line tool is also distributed with Mandible, which offers:

• pack/pack2 extraction.
• Namelist generation and merging.
• Pack index generation.

This package is unofficial and is not affiliated with the developers of the ForgeLight engine or its derived games in any way.

Installation

Mandible is available as NuGet package:

# Visual Studio Package Manager
Install-Package carlst99.Mandible
# dotnet console
dotnet add package carlst99.Mandible

The command-line tool can be found in the latest release.

Usage

The IDataReaderService

Components that need to read data from an IO source, such as a pack reader, use the IDataReaderService interface. Mandible currently has two implementations of this interface:

• The RandomAccessDataReaderService uses .NET 6's RandomAccess APIs to read data from a file. It is recommend that you use this implementation when possible due to its increased performance, as pack reading is not often sequential.

• The StreamDataReaderService reads data from any backing Stream. The backing stream must be seekable.

Reading Pack Files

Mandible supports both the pack and pack2 format, by way of the following interfaces and their default implementation:

• IPackReader; PackReader
• IPack2Reader; Pack2Reader

Both interfaces provide the means to read the pack headers and the asset data. The Pack2Reader will also unzip any compressed assets.

Here is a sample method for reading all the assets from a pack2 file. The process is very similar for a pack file, albeit without the need for a namelist.

This example is modified and minified from what can be found in the Pack2ReaderExtensions class.

public static async Task ExportAllAsync
(
    string packFilePath,
    string outputPath,
    Namelist? namelist,
    CancellationToken ct = default
)
{
    await using RandomAccessDataReaderService dataReader = new(packFilePath);
    using Pack2Reader reader = new(dataReader);

    IReadOnlyList<Asset2Header> assetHeaders = await reader.ReadAssetHeadersAsync(ct).ConfigureAwait(false);

    foreach (Asset2Header assetHeader in assetHeaders)
    {
        string? fileName = null;
        namelist?.TryGet(assetHeader.NameHash, out fileName);

        using SafeFileHandle outputHandle = File.OpenHandle
        (
            Path.Combine(outputPath, fileName ?? assetHeader.NameHash.ToString())
        );

        using MemoryOwner<byte> data = await reader.ReadAssetDataAsync(assetHeader, ct).ConfigureAwait(false);
        await RandomAccess.WriteAsync(outputHandle, data.Memory, 0, ct).ConfigureAwait(false);
    }
}

Namelists

The pack2 format does not store asset names, instead opting for a CRC-64 "Jones" hash of the original file name. This means that an external namelist is required in order to export assets with a sane name. The external list should contain a list of names, separated by LF characters.

Mandible provides the Namelist class to help with this. It provides various overloads of an Append method to insert names at runtime, the WriteAsync method to export a correctly-formatted list to a stream and a static FromFileAsync which is self-explanatory.

Namelist nl = await Namelist.FromFileAsync("master-namelist.txt");
nl.Append("my_fantastic_name.dds");

await using FileStream nlOut = new("new-namelist.txt", FileMode.Create);
await nl.WriteAsync(nlOut);

Extracting a Namelist

The NameExtractor class can be used to extract plaintext file names from a directory of pack2 files. It will also make guesses by constructing known name patterns - but this does mean that some of the generated names will not exist as actual files.

When extracting a namelist, it is useful to note that some game distributions will include a namelist file ({NAMELIST}, no file extension) in the packs themselves. For example, PlanetSide 2's test distribution. If you can extract your names from these sets of packs, you will likely get a much more complete namelist.