Extracting map name and db name from map mods

[CodeMage]

@Xevyr

Yea because those can be almost anything ranging from blueprints to datatables or textures… basically it’s what the extension implies… whenever you create or import ANY asset to unreal, it’s going to end up as a .uasset file, (maps are .umap) and .uexp and .ubulk (exports and bulk data) are parts of the corresponding .uasset file that are simply stored separately for convenience (fast parsing etc) and to avoid large filesizes

Yep, that much I understood so far. What I’m saying is that the serialization logic for a .uasset file isn’t documented anywhere. Epic doesn’t wanna document it, probably so they can introduce any changes to it without having to maintain docs, and although other people’s reverse engineering efforts have produced some documentation, it’s not very clear. But I’m slowly getting a hang of it

Fortunately, I don’t need to worry about supporting several different versions of UE, so I can cut some corners there

@Xevyr

For example you could present the user with a list and let them load up the save that has “George Shrub, level 60 on Exiled Lands

“Let them load up” is precisely the thing

Here’s how you launch Conan Exiles straight into single-player mode, so that the player doesn’t have to click on anything in Conan Exiles main menu:

• In the [SavedCoopData] section of the Game.ini file, set LastMap to the correct map name. For Exiled Lands, that’s /Game/Maps/ConanSandbox/ConanSandbox, for Siptah it’s /Game/DLC_EXT/DLC_Siptah/Maps/DLC_Isle_of_Siptah.
• In the same section, set the StartedListenServerSession to True.
• Launch Conan Exiles with the -continuesession command line argument.

If I want my users to be able to say “I wanna continue my current Savage Wilds single-player session”, I need to be able to set the LastMap key to its correct value. If I want them to be able to say “I wanna play in this particular saved Savage Wilds single-player session”, I need to be able to copy the .db file that represents that saved session over the savagewilds_game.db file, for which I need to know that savagewilds_game.db is the name of the “current” session.

That’s why I’m trying to determine this stuff by inspecting the mod .pak files. I mean, I figured out how to measure a server’s “ping” the way Funcom does it and a bunch of other stuff like that, how hard could this be? (that’s the “famous last words” joke right there)

@Xevyr

The thing about this though is that while modders like to keep some form of legible standard… that table could be named “basdkjackvjaushc” and it would still work

But it has to be somehow linked to the original MapDataTable, right? I’m guessing that can be identified by inspecting the .uasset imports section. Which would, unfortunately, require me to scan every .uasset file if I can’t find one that follows a reasonable naming convention. Still, it sounds doable. I’ll worry about getting it to work first, then I can check whether it’s too slow and needs to be cached or something like that.

Shіt, this is much more fun when I have someone to talk to about it