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

Repo setup

1. Clone the repo
2. cd into the repo and run git submodule init && git submodule update

If building under Linux (or probably any Unix-like)

1. Run cd src
2. Run meson setup builddir
3. cd builddir and then run ninja and it should build, hopefully. If not, you're probably on your own

If building under Windows (MSVC)

1. Ensure that you have the Visual Studio toolchain installed
2. Open Developer Command Prompt for VS 20XX (whichever version you have)
3. In the developer command prompt navigate to the repo and enter the src folder
4. Run meson setup builddir --vsenv
5. Run meson compile -C builddir and pray (important)

Windows troubleshooting

• Meson can't find the Boost library: set the BOOST_ROOT environment variable to wherever you have it installed (for example: set BOOST_ROOT=C:\Libraries\boost_1_83_0)
• Meson can't find the zlib library: try installing it with meson wrap. To do that:
  • Create a directory called subprojects inside of src
  • While in src, run meson wrap install zlib
• The binary got built but running it gives missing DLL errors when running:
  • z-1.dll - copy it from src/builddir/subprojects/zlib-x.x.x/z-1.dll
  • boost_whatever.dll - it should be prebuilt somewhere in your Boost installation (check lib64-msvc-x folders for 64bit builds and lib32-msvc-x folders for 32bit builds)
  • Debug DLLs such as MSVCP140D.dll (notice the D at the end) - if you don't have them someone else probably built the program and sent it to you, they should build it in release mode instead (append --buildtype release flag when running meson setup). If you built the program yourself and they are missing, I don't know how that's possible but something is very wrong about the Visual Studio installation.

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.