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How to use prepacked files

If your package contains more than 1,000 files, then packing can be very slow, it's caused by slow selecting files from ZIP archive.

As a solution was created special prepacked files. It's basically a lot of files packed to a DAT file. The DAT file is then added to the A3 archive.

Prepacked file has two files (dat and xml) with these name rules:

  • <your name>.prepacked.dat

  • <your name>.prepacked.xml

Prepacked can't contain info_replace! It's just for completed files.

Files are packed directly without processing.

How to create prepacked file

In new versions of Mod Installer you will not be able to create prepacked, you'll need to use the CMD version of Mod Installer.

Mod Installer has this functionality, you just need to keep these steps:

  1. Create a directory with name: for example myfiles_prepacked

  2. Then keep in this folder same folder structure as in unpacked game files or like in alternative package structure, so for example: myfiles_prepacked\soundbinary\2066755731.wem

  3. Now we need Mod Installer, it's required to start it with a launch param:

ModInstallerCMD.exe "d:\modding\myfiles_prepacked"

  1. Now it will create prepacked file from source directory with name: myfile.prepacked.dat and myfile.prepacked.xml

  2. Now copy these two files to your package

  3. If your package has Pairs, you need to add this:

    <Pair>

      <Source>myfiles.prepacked.dat</Source>

      <Prepacked>true</Prepacked>

    </Pair>

  1. If your package uses alternative structure, then you don't need to do anything

  2. That's all, now you have prepacked file

Unpacking prepacked file​

If you lost your source files of prepacked file, you can unpack existing prepacked file. Again you need to run Mod Installer with special launch param:

ModInstallerCMD.exe "d:\modding\myfiles.prepacked.xml"

Files will be unpacked to new directory located in the same folder as the DAT file: d:\modding\myfiles_prepacked