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Author Topic: Possible to use PS4 DLC with a PC UE3 Game (Batman Arkham Knight)?  (Read 1416 times)
Koomazaz
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« on: September 24, 2019, 01:06 »

Hello,

I have acquired decrypted PS4 pkg files for two exclusive pieces of Arkham Knight DLC (Scarecrow Nightmare Missions and some skins).  Using Ps4PKGViewer, I extracted the Content folders for each.  Within the Content folders are "Config" (containing Orbis-BmGame.ini) and "CookedOrbis" (containing .bin, .xxx, and .tfc files).

If I rename Orbis-BmGame.ini to BmGame.ini, the in-game menus show the Scarecrow Nightmare missions and the skins as selectable options.

However, if I select the Scarecrow Nightmare racing mission, it just loads a different racing map.  And if I select one of the exclusive skins, the game crashes with an error (something about being unable to locate one of the .xxx files).  I tried passing in the -seekfreeloading launch parameter.

I have very little knowledge of how to use the Unreal Engine 3, so I started doing some research about cooked files.  I understand that these .xxx files are cooked for the PS4 version of Arkham Knight.  I also understand that it is not likely that we could extract and repackage these .xxx files or "uncook" them.

Simply, is there any chance of getting the PC version Arkham Knight to use the exclusive PS4 exclusive DLC files?  Is there anyway to "recook" PS4 files into a PC-cooked file?

Any guidance or suggestions would be welcome!  Thanks!
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Gildor
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« Reply #1 on: September 24, 2019, 09:38 »

PC, PS4, Xbox etc packages are not compatible with each other. Most likely engine will not notice new files at all. If it will notice and attempt to load - in this case you'll get crash.
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Koomazaz
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« Reply #2 on: September 28, 2019, 03:57 »

I think I know the answer, but there is no way to re-package the package, right?  No way to either covert it directly to a PC package or to "un-cook" it?
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Koomazaz
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« Reply #3 on: September 28, 2019, 04:03 »

In other words, is there any possible way to get this PS4-exclusive content to work with the PC game, even if it requires some serious work?
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paulmr95
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« Reply #4 on: October 05, 2019, 10:09 »

If you could upload the files to mega or mediafire, I could take a look at those files and work on integrating them in Arkham Knight on PC.
« Last Edit: October 05, 2019, 10:29 by paulmr95 » Logged
Koomazaz
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« Reply #5 on: October 14, 2019, 03:43 »

Check your private messages!
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Koomazaz
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« Reply #6 on: April 16, 2020, 19:49 »

PC, PS4, Xbox etc packages are not compatible with each other. Most likely engine will not notice new files at all. If it will notice and attempt to load - in this case you'll get crash.

From a technical standpoint, what are the differences between the different package formats that cause the incompatibility?  Do you have any notes or documents that detail the differences between the various package types?
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Gildor
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« Reply #7 on: April 16, 2020, 20:31 »

There's no documents. All of the knowledge has been collected piece by piece from reverse engineering and research, sometimes (especially with UE4) - with working with engine's source code. I think making a document about modern UE file formats is nonsense due to complexity of these "formats".

I have no idea how DLC system works in UE3. However I understand the difference between PC, XBox360, PS3 and other platform's package formats. Actually, package formats are SAME for them, with exception to endianess (little-endian for PC, big-endian for consoles). However, DATA formats are also differs. For instance, each platform has special texture "swizzling". Each platform has different sound systems. PS3 games sometimes uses "Edge" library by Sony, which offers advanced geometry compression, what makes mesh data absolutely different from anything else (including UE Viewer).



Just to clarify - the information below may be known for those who closely worked with UE, useful or interesting for someone, or absolutely useless for others.
  • "Package" is .uasset, .upk, .xxx, .ukx etc - a file with special structure, it contains some exported objects inside. Package may use objects from other packages via imports. The system is very similar to how DLL works in Windows, with exception that it exports data, not the executable code.
  • Each OBJECT inside a package has data type ("class"). Usually (may be always) objects has a property block before binary data, it's structure is a kind of "binary xml" (of course with totally custom data format, there's nothing from xml). After that, binary data is stored.
  • Binary data format depends on C++
    Code:
    ClassName::Serialize(FArchive& Ar)
    function. This function exists for most of classes, for ALL engine versions, starting with UE1. UModel uses the same code structure. I think I provided examples of how typical serializer looks like in "Unreal Coding" section of this forum, a long time ago.
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Koomazaz
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« Reply #8 on: February 03, 2023, 06:20 »

Hey Gildor,

I saw that there have been some additional topics recently about Arkham Knight, as well as cooking/uncooking assets.

Has anything changed since April 2020, or is it still impossible to uncook a PS4 DLC file and recook it for PC?

Thanks!
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tashmailok
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« Reply #9 on: March 28, 2023, 12:48 »

Hey. I think it's possible to import PS4 exclusive DLCs to the PC version. You've already tricked the game into looking for the missing PS4 DLC files by copying over the .ini file. All that remains now is to locate the files for the DLCs in the PS4 version then copy them over to PC. I'm confident because this is how someone managed to port the PS3 exclusive DLCs (where you play as Joker) to PC for Asylum just by replacing an ini file and copying over the DLC files. I suppose the same could work for Knight.

EDIT: I did some digging on the internet and also by downloading PS files for Arkham City and it appears they are in .xxx format which is unreadable by UE Viewer, extractors, etc and different than the usual .upk files for PC. Then I took two similar files one .upk from PC and it's .xxx version from PS3 and opened them in a hex editor and they're entirely different from one another. So they've been cooked using different techniques/algos whatever. Then I also removed a couple .upk files from the Steam version and copied the matching .xxx files from PS3 and changed their extension to .upk to see if the game would accept them. But I got an error saying bad address, incorrect indexing found in the .upk file I just changed.

As for how the PS3 Joker exclusive mode was ported over to PC, it was because the 'PS3 exclusive' content was also released for the Mac version of Asylum which has an identical file structure to Asylum on Steam. So all that the mod author had to do was copy over some ini and the related package files, then finally hex edit the main exe to get it to recognize the DLC packages.
« Last Edit: March 28, 2023, 16:15 by tashmailok » Logged
tashmailok
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« Reply #10 on: March 28, 2023, 16:23 »

Hello,

I have acquired decrypted PS4 pkg files for two exclusive pieces of Arkham Knight DLC (Scarecrow Nightmare Missions and some skins).  Using Ps4PKGViewer, I extracted the Content folders for each.  Within the Content folders are "Config" (containing Orbis-BmGame.ini) and "CookedOrbis" (containing .bin, .xxx, and .tfc files).

If I rename Orbis-BmGame.ini to BmGame.ini, the in-game menus show the Scarecrow Nightmare missions and the skins as selectable options.

However, if I select the Scarecrow Nightmare racing mission, it just loads a different racing map.  And if I select one of the exclusive skins, the game crashes with an error (something about being unable to locate one of the .xxx files).  I tried passing in the -seekfreeloading launch parameter.

I have very little knowledge of how to use the Unreal Engine 3, so I started doing some research about cooked files.  I understand that these .xxx files are cooked for the PS4 version of Arkham Knight.  I also understand that it is not likely that we could extract and repackage these .xxx files or "uncook" them.

Simply, is there any chance of getting the PC version Arkham Knight to use the exclusive PS4 exclusive DLC files?  Is there anyway to "recook" PS4 files into a PC-cooked file?

Any guidance or suggestions would be welcome!  Thanks!

Orbis was the codename for the PS4 so it makes sense that the devs used that term to specify PS4 files.

I think the game crashes when you select the PS4 skins because perhaps there's more .xxx files related to the skin that are missing because you haven't copied them over. I could be wrong though.

The files also seem to be using indexing and pointers internally so there seems to be no work around that other than uncooking
then recooking.

Also, people have managed to port over the Earth 2 and Adam West (1960s Classic Batman) skins from PS4 to PC, the mods for those are up on Nexus Mods. And surprisingly, if we assume that the PS4 has .xxx file format for these skins (which is highly likely), neither of those mods uses .xxx files but rather standard .upk so it looks like the modders were able to extract meshes from PS4 then recook them for PC. I would contact them to know how they were able to do it. Also there's a discord channel for Arkham modders, you can probably find said modders there.

Also, could you upload the DLC files somewhere so I could take a look at them?
« Last Edit: March 28, 2023, 17:03 by tashmailok » Logged
Extricated
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« Reply #11 on: July 26, 2023, 01:00 »

Was there ever an update on this? Would be very nice to be able to get them on PC.

Edit: Managed to find the files here: https://mega.nz/folder/Wd0lQagB#q28i-MbiUZOl3jKqmTGo1Q

But similarly to OP, I'm not sure what to do with them.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2023, 01:41 by Extricated » Logged
VendorX
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« Reply #12 on: July 31, 2023, 23:36 »

*.xxx files are standard UE3 package (Zlib compressed) so renaming to *.upk should do the trick. Shaders probably will cause the problem, but those can be recompiled with respective UDK version.
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Locopells
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« Reply #13 on: January 13, 2024, 20:47 »

Anyone made any progress on this, the last few months?

Also:

Was there ever an update on this? Would be very nice to be able to get them on PC.

Edit: Managed to find the files here: https://mega.nz/folder/Wd0lQagB#q28i-MbiUZOl3jKqmTGo1Q

But similarly to OP, I'm not sure what to do with them.

Can we get these again please, MEGA insists the folders are empty?
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