Chowdren extractor

This is a tool to extract data from the Assets.dat file of games that use Chowdren. It was originally written just with Cyber Shadow in mind, but it has since evolved far beyond the original scope.

TODO

• Allow extracting files from the font, files and platform sections (what does platform even mean?).
• Check if platform-specifics format exist and make them compatible if they do
• An option to repack the data, somehow

What you need to build

• The Boost library
• The zlib library
• meson and ninja*

* ninja is only needed if you want to use it to build. You can apparently also generate vs and xcode projects, but I never used that. Instructions below assume ninja.

How to build

1. Clone the repo
2. cd into the repo and run git submodule init && git submodule update
3. run cd src
4. run meson setup builddir
5. cd builddir and then run ninja and it should build, hopefully. If not, you're probably on your own

How to use

Run ./chowdren-extractor --help for info.

Usage: chowdren-extractor [options] input.dat output-dir
Named options:
  --format arg          see versions.md for details
  --probe-offsets       only find offsets and exit
  --no-images           skip extracting images
  --no-audio            skip extracting audio
  --no-shaders          skip extracting shaders
  --help                print help message

Note that there are no filenames included in the Assets file, so files are just extracted as image1.png, audio1.ogg etc.

Archive versions

See versions.md for more details.