Help with .pck files

[moon899]

Hey everyone,

I would like to translate an otome called "Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk" to my mother tongue and the game has that type of file (pck).

If anyone knows of a tool or way to work with this file. I would appreciate to hear from you.

I will leave the file in case anyone is interested: https://www.mediafire.com/file/xmvc06kxx91bbz4/Script.pck/file

Edited September 11, 2021 by moon899

[moon899]

ㅤ

Edited July 6, 2021 by moon899

[moon899]

On 3/10/2021 at 2:49 AM, Plastic Memories said:

you should at least give people here the title of this visual novel, which you want to TL
So we can identify the game + dev + engine and help you
 

Oh I have already edited the board with the name

Edited July 6, 2021 by moon899

[Tester]

1 hour ago, moon899 said:

Oh, It's called Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk

On which language, for instance, are you planning to translate that game?

[moon899]

On 3/10/2021 at 10:13 AM, Tester said:

On which language, for instance, are you planning to translate that game?

Into English to my mother tongue

Edited July 2, 2021 by moon899

[Tester]

I don't know any tools for this kind of archive or engine, but the format did seem somewhat easy, so I decided to hack it myself.

Well, here you are, try PsyhedelicaPCKTool, latest of my "fast tools".
It does need Python 3, maybe latest version.

It has a CLI interface. First enter mode (0 for unpack and 1 for pack), next enter the pck archive name (with extension!), next enter the directory name.

Theoretically it can extract and repack all of this kind of .pck archives.
Test it with other archives and post results here.

Edited March 11, 2021 by Tester

[foubou]

Hello !

@Tester Thank you so much for your Python    PsyhedelicaPCKTool , it works perfectly with Psychedelica but also with Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation and it will probably work with other games using PCK archives too, so congratulations for this very handy tool ! Your tool also worked with some other PCK archives of the game, but not all.

I would like to translate Psychedelica in French, and so far I successfully extracted the contents of Scripts.pck in \Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk\Data\ENG\Script in a new folder I created named <ScriptExtracted>. Inside this folder, there are a lot of .bin files : they contain the scenario texts but I don't know how to edit them in French. The repack process seems to work properly too (I need to test it after editing some bin files though).

@moon899 Have you been able to edit the .bin files insides the Script.pck archive ?

 

 BIN FILES TO EDIT FOR FAN TRANSLATIONS : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQOuu9zDlN8PxUqpUzmmfxyjJeiXYA_U/view?usp=sharing

 

 

 

 

[Tester]

  

On 3/13/2021 at 9:38 PM, foubou said:

Your tool also worked with some other PCK archives of the game, but not all.

Hmm, interesting. Could you post here some of that unsupported archives? I could modify the tool if I'll have time.

On 3/13/2021 at 9:38 PM, foubou said:

with other games using PCK archives too

No, only with this kind of PCK, maybe on the same engine, and all. I did not write any sophisticated structure analyzers algorithms in this one, the tool is very basic. Maybe Rio Reincarnation uses the same engine...

On 3/13/2021 at 9:38 PM, foubou said:

Inside this folder, there are a lot of .bin files : they contain the scenario texts but I don't know how to edit them in French

Oh, it's a compiled binary script. Fully edit them would be quite a hassle, because you'd need to diasssemple/decompile them, and hacking engine languages is such a pain...
But in case of this format it's possible, I think, to write a relatively easy string editor.

I did some testing and found out that kind of script uses strings just at the end of file (divided by \x00 (\0)) and some commands points to string offset beginnings. Theoretically it's possible to edit the end strings just fine, you just need to separate them with \x00 (\0) and recount offsets in the commands arguments.

As for strings encoding... may be UTF-8? Or Shift-JIS? It'll need some testing with the actual game.

Edited March 28, 2021 by Tester

[moon899]

On 3/10/2021 at 5:51 PM, Tester said:

I don't know any tools for this kind of archive or engine, but the format did seem somewhat easy, so I decided to hack it myself.

Well, here you are, try PsyhedelicaPCKTool, latest of my "fast tools".
It does need Python 3, maybe latest version.

It has a CLI interface. First enter mode (0 for unpack and 1 for pack), next enter the pck archive name (with extension!), next enter the directory name.

Theoretically it can extract and repack all of this kind of .pck archives.
Test it with other archives and post results here.

The tool seems to work perfectly, I have only tested with the script that foubou showed so I can't tell if it is causing any kind of error.

Edited July 6, 2021 by moon899

[moon899]

On 3/13/2021 at 4:38 PM, foubou said:

@moon899 Have you been able to edit the .bin files insides the Script.pck archive ?

No, I have not yet been able to edit the .bin files

Edited July 2, 2021 by moon899

[foubou]

@Tester There are 14 PCK archives. Your tool works properly with most of them, except the following ones :

Bust, Cg2, Chapter, DebugFont, Exi_psy2, PatternFade and Se

I uploaded them all here : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XdkWbUmYc0I024lAVhTM6CRkNJdZx1_s/view?usp=sharing

@moon899 If I make any progress regarding the BIN files, I'll keep you posted

 

 

 

 

 

[Tester]

Okay, I did look into this (quite briefly) and saw some abberations.

First, "PACK" may begin on 16n + 8 offsets sometimes.
Second, files only begin on 16n + 8 offsets sometimes.

I did modify the tool to switch between classic (16) and abberate (8) version. Try 1.1 version of PsyhedelicaPCKTool.

So you could extract any (I hope) archive from 16 or 8 version (try 16 first, if it's not working, then switch to 8).
And pack to either 16 or 8 (pick the one with which game doesn't crash).
Unpack version and pack version doesn't need to be the same.

(Theoretically there could be a case then PACK starts on 16n + 8, and files starts on 16n, but I won't implement it unless necessary).

===

It has a CLI interface. First version (8 or 16), next enter mode (0 for unpack and 1 for pack), next enter the pck archive name (with extension!), next enter the directory name.

===

Still I did test quite brief, so I could miss something.
Write if some game crashes after repacking (after trying to repack to both versions) or there is still some problems in extracting.

Edited March 31, 2021 by Tester

[moon899]

On 3/25/2021 at 2:59 PM, foubou said:

@moon899 If I make any progress regarding the BIN files, I'll keep you posted

Thanks! if I find out anything be sure I will keep you informed too

Edited September 11, 2021 by moon899