[SWTOR] Star Wars: The Old Republic

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Sparky
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[SWTOR] Star Wars: The Old Republic

Post by Sparky » Sat Mar 09, 2013 8:36 pm

Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) is an MMORPG by BioWare and Electronic Arts (EA Games).

I play on the Jedi Covenant server.

I was researching how to extract the game files from the .tor archives. I found some nice information at these specific locations.

1. Start a new folder on your desktop and call it "swtor_file_analysis".
2. Inside, add a folder called "downloads".
3. Download EasyMYP and place the newest version (Debug v.3.2 as of this writing) inside.
4. Extract the EasyMYP archive to another folder inside swtor_file_analysis called "tools".
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for these files, adding them to the downloads folder and extracting them to the tools folder:
- bnkextr.zip
- QuickBMS (on Luigi's site, at the top of this page)
- ww2ogg019.zip
- revorb.exe
- foobar2000 for playing the .ogg sound files on your Windows computer/partition
- NodeViewer for viewing the game's metadata (kind of like Eschaton for Halo map files, but read-only and non-descript)
- HxD for viewing the hex data of the files on your Windows OS in question... I mean the files are in question, not the OS... well, never mind. :roll:
6. Find the SWTOR application directory, open it in another window: C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic\Assets
7. 31.5 GB (33,849,452,868 bytes) is required for the extraction of all the SWTOR .tor files inside this Assets folder as of Saturday, March 9, 2013, totaling 395,059 files and 322 folders. Make sure you have this much free space before attempting to extract all the .tor files, if that is what you plan to do in the next step.

Optional: Open the EasyMYP folder and add a folder called "Hash", then download the hash file located in this forum post's .zip file and place it inside the Hash folder before running EasyMYP. Do the optional step I said here only if you would like to use an existing conversion of some of the hashes, to convert filename strings from the 3-info values (like FEF449E2_231DA92E633F7AE8.ogg) to legible strings (like "/resources/bnk/streamed/sfx/music_action_highintensity_bountyhunterclasstheme_mx_038_class_bounty_hunter_combat_3959c1d5.ogg"),

8. From your tools folder, open up EasyMYP and go to Archive > Open Archive ... , navigating to the Assets folder and choosing the desired .tor file(s) that you would like to extract. Each selected file is added to the left side of the window, so to select multiple .tor files for extraction, choose them one at a time using the Archive > Open Archive ... menu item. If you make a mistake, you will need to exit the program and open it again and retry this step again so that you only have the desired files loaded into the left side of the window.
9. When you are ready to extract SWTOR's .tor files that you have opened in EasyMYP, as visible on the left side of the window, choose File > Select Extraction Folder ... , and add a new folder inside your swtor_file_analysis folder called "tor_extracted_files". Choose that folder.
10. Now use File > Extract All , and enjoy the fireworks (just kidding) whilst grabbing a cup of orange juice and a box of tissues out of sheer joy that something works on the Windows OS....
11. When this extraction has completed, locate the tor_extracted_files folder and gawk at all the files...
12. When you have completed the gawking stage, quit EasyMYP and use this very helpful tutorial which explains in detail how to convert the game's sound files: http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?p=66311#p66311
- to clarify this tutorial is this subsequent post, listing which .tor files (now directories by the same name, if you extracted those audio-related .tor files with EasyMYP) contain which kind of sound files
-- it's kind of funny, because EasyMYP considers all the sound files to be .wav files, so all the actual sound files will have the extension .wav on them. What you need to do is open these in HxD in order to view their headers, or simply use the previous point's forum post to know which of these "wav" files (which are not actually .wav audio files, but either two kinds of archives or .wem files, as he says in that forum post) is of which format. So basically, if you're just working with the "wav" files in the "swtor_main_bnk_streamed_*_1" folders, those .wav files will actually be just the .wem files which you can directly convert to .ogg as he explains... so with those music files, you would start from #5 under his section "Guide: Converting .bnk to .wem".
13. After using the .bat conversion files coded in that post, you should have three directories of music files, and a few directories of foley and voice sounds, in corrected .ogg format. You can now play back these audio files using the recommended foobar2000 program, or your favorite audio program such as VLC, Amadeus Pro, etc.
14. Using NodeViewer, linked above, is as easy as opening its .config file, which is located in the same location as the program, and entering the AssetsPath value to "C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic\Assets" . Then open NodeViewer and look around the files. Note that this program is of limited use, but reveals some cool things, and if you have experience in the game, you can figure out what some of the integer values mean. ;)

Also:

- Reverse-engineered specification for Wwise Sound Bank (.bnk) files: http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php?title= ... nk_(*.bnk)

- Reading the description of ww2ogg on its download page, it mentions:
Exports loop points as Vorbis comments for use with vgmstream (rename .logg).
So if you are going to loop these files as they loop in-game, you'll need to get vgmstream for foobar2000, VLC, or whatever else. However, you'll have to use it before you use revorb.
Either you are groping for answers, or you are asking God and listening to Jesus.

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