Everything from the mod is in the pak file. Everything. If data exists there is always a way to retrieve it.
(He doesnât)
Tot this, Tot thatâŠcould you all just shut up and wait until Tot and Funcom hash things out? This is taking up all the oxygen when we need to be discussing a more important issue to the entire playerbase: The new purge SUCKS.
Hello, can we help you?
Did you pop in here by accident?
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Why rehash a topic you know will be locked? You do realize the moderators can suspended or ban you from posting for spamming a locked topic right.
This topic isnât locked and clearly people want to discuss it.
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The same people who opened 20 posts already.
IT IS (OVER)DISCUSSED ALREADY.
You wait until something happens. Preferably in silence, and not by opening a shitton of posts.
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Iâm not entirely sure how to explain this to you for you to understand, but Iâll try. You canât unpack a .pak file and see everything that was there as it was pre-compression and packing. Youâre not going to find assets that are usable without a lot of work to make them usable. Youâre not going to find human usable code, just instructions that would only really make sense to the game and are likely encrypted or packaged in such a way to make it practically impossible to read.
Also, Iâve never said that things arenât in the .pak file, just that getting them in a usable, readable state after unpacking them is very unlikely.
darthphysicist has lived inside the devkit for 3 years
but go ahead and tell him he doesnt know what hes talking about
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You can get some data simply by opening the pak file in the text editor. The content might make little sense that way, but if you find your Steam ID there (which is what happened in this case), then you can assume with a fairly high degree of certainty that it is used for some reason.
Yeah sure, whatever. Until they come out with irrefutable proof that someone could
- Unpack a .pak file
- Harvest everything (Assets, code, etc. It all has to be taken, nothing reproduced or custom made in the kit)
- Finally repackage it as their own mod
Iâm not convinced this is possible due to the fact that there have been multiple mod authors that have lost content via storage device death (And also had no back ups to restore from) and they had to recreate their mods from the ground up. If it were as easy as everyone states to steal assets and code from .pak files, then that wouldnât have been the case.
Theyâre both right, but the communication wasnât very clear.
@darthphysicist is right, the data is all there.
@Alymer is also right, itâs in machine-readable format that you, a human, would need to decode to make sense of it. I donât know if thereâs a tool that does that. Someone more acquainted with modding might know.
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This is where you are wrong. To compress a file (encrypted or not) you need a tool. The devkit has that tool, that is how it comoresses the .pak. If someone uses enough effort, they can figure out the way it is compressing. Then using that knowledge can work it in reverse to unpak. How do you think the hack exploit programs work. Someone figured the âkeyâ and uses it to incorporate scripts at certian points. Not saying this is what hapoened. But to say unpaking is impossible is wrong. Just takes knowledge and effort.
To someone dedicated to doing it with the right knowledge, unlikely is merely a matter of time. With the right no-how, it doesnât even take very long. At any rate, âunlikelyâ simply makes my point. Itâs very possible. I donât know why this would surprise anyone honestly; if you can hack bank accounts and you can hack DoD servers, Unreal is the equivalent of âhackingâ into my motherâs email account.
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Thereâs an upper limit to breaking encryption. Iâm not saying that datamining these things is impossible, just highly improbable and I donât think thereâs a tool out there advanced enough to harvest from .pak files what is being claimed to have been stolen.
Itâs not encryption. Although the .pak file format does support encryption, and although certain .pak files are encrypted (like the Siptah DLC), what youâre talking about is not encryption at all.
The format of the files contained in the .pak archives is not very well documented, but Unreal Engine is open source and you can read the source to figure out how to get the information you need.
Iâve done it myself, as part of my BUGLE project, to analyze mod files and extract information about the maps they add. There are other devs out there who have done even more. I used to use DAUM to examine .uasset files, but it seems that it has been succeeded by UAssetGUI.
Long story short, these things are not trivial, but theyâre doable and theyâve been done.
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I donât doubt that theyâre doable. I doubt that someone new to modding who came in then made their own mods inspired by others actually did anything actually violating ToS. What I believe is more likely is someone was trying to cover their ass for breaking ToS themselves.
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âNew to moddingâ isnt relevant. If your day job is game development in UE, your first mod is likely to be pretty slick. If your day job has to do with database management, youâd probably make some interesting mods too. Our day jobs are much more relevant than how long weâve been modding a 5 year old game.
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There are lots of free tools to harvest .pak files with a click of a button, then there are also premium tools like IDA that are quite a lot more advanced, there are even free tools on github that will give you a reference graph of function calls within a uasset.
I wouldnât be surprised if IDA didnât have a plugin that can spit out actual blueprint script given the open source nature of UE, that program is insanely powerful, we used to use it to reverse engineer old Sony Ericsson firmware, it would break the whole ROM down into ARM assembly language (which is readable code), list all known libs by function name and address (std, png, zlib etc).
But simply reverse engineering a pak file and itâs contents probably wonât breach TOS, itâs what you do with the data/code that will get you in trouble, for example packing some files within your own mod, copying code, intentionally disabling another mods features would all be considered malicious acts and breach TOS.
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I guess you could build some ai key translator that will machine bash the shit out of the pak and spit out something your inferior fleshy mind can understand.
Reliability? Questionable. Practicality? Nonexistent. Sensibility? My man, if you can spin that on your good afternoon, you have better things to do than fish for communal spaghetti in a 5-year-old game.