A File Format Uncracked for 20 Years
16 days ago
- #game-development
- #Splinter-Cell
- #reverse-engineering
- Splinter Cell (2002) is a favorite game of the author, developed by Ubisoft using Unreal Engine 2.
- The author explored cut content from Splinter Cell but found limited datamined information available.
- The game's file structure includes .lin files, which are a unique format the author sought to reverse engineer.
- The .lin files contain compressed data and a file table, but offsets and sizes are misleading, complicating static analysis.
- The author discovered that the game reads files in a specific order, ignoring seeks, which affects how data is accessed.
- A runtime dumping approach was developed to extract files by patching the game executable, allowing data to be saved after loading.
- Dumped files can be viewed in UE Explorer, but some textures and levels have issues when loaded on PC.
- The author acknowledges the challenges of dumping unused or unreferenced content and suggests future work for static recompilation.