Ramblings

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Highly interactive
Video Games

Entertainment medium of the future

Extraction
Helldivers 2
DEFCON (Game)
The Crew
Rebel Inc.
F1 Manager 2023
Stop Killing Games

Video Games/Assets/
Extraction

Welcome! This is my hub for video game asset extraction related information and guides. I will be going through everything one step at a time to explain how everything works.

Please note that these tutorials presume a basic, general understanding of how to work with a computer. It demands that you are comfortable with the Windows file system, understand file paths and are capable of performing basic PC procedures like installing and running applications, editing standard file formats like .txt, download files or programs from Github and can perform basic operations in Command Prompt (I prefer cmd over ps). For example, I will not be teaching how to open the Command Prompt or how to navigate between folders with it. However, this tutorial does not expect you to be advanced enough to actually build Github projects, for example.

Step 1: Basics

Before you can work with video game files, you need to understand some basic game development concepts. I have compiled the most important ones here:

Extraction Basics

This page includes only the strictly necessary information related to extraction.

Step 2: Identify Game Files

The approach to extraction depends on what the game files look like.

Games on Android, for example, come packaged as .apk files. That's all you need to know for now and you can already move to Step 3.
On Windows, you will now need to dig into the game's folder and see what you can find.

Unreal games, for example, tend to place their files into the \<gamename>\Content\Paks folder and contain .pak and .utoc files.
Unity games often have their files in the \<gamename>\<gamename>_Data and contain .assets and .res files.
In some cases, the game might store middleware files outside of the game engine's files. Rocket League for example stores many Wwise files in rocketleague\TAGame\CookedPCConsole.

Step 3: Select Approach

Depending on the file identification, follow the following links: