Best Compression Methods for 'Specific' Games. Q&A

[KaktoR]

Cyberpunk 2077

I did a bit of digging in last few days. Here are some observations. Maybe you might find it usefull.

audio*.archive
lang_*.archive

• Contains WEM's, BNK's and BIN's.
• For the majority of WEM's and BIN's you can use WEMTool from Masquerade (rename *.bin to *.wem first).
• For some of the files you have to use MSC, look out for this. Honestly I did not have checked how much files are affected by this, and I don't even know if there are tools out there which can check for specific blocks or decoded text to separate the files to be used by WEMTool or MSC.

basegame_5_video.archive
ep1_2_gamedata.archive

These two files contains bink2 files, for which you can use the xtool bink plugin. However the file "ep1_2_gamedata.archive" also contains other files alongside with bink2's, so I guess it should be wise to process the file together with all the other archive files if you don't want to extract the file entirely. However the binks are stored as plain text, so you can patch them out of the file and compress the extracted binks together with the "basegame_5_video.archive" file. Patch them back afterwards (not tested). Bink2 files have *.bin extension.

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You can unpack the archives with WolvenKit.
I used the console version and used command like this

WolvenKit.CLI.exe <command> <InputFile> <option><OutputFolder>

WolvenKit.CLI.exe extract "G:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Cyberpunk 2077\archive\pc\content\audio_1_general.archive" -o"E:\Test\audio_1_general"