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Kyka

Turning pk3 files into something useful.

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So could someone please tell me how to take a pk3 file and extract the actual maps from it, so as I can look at these maps in Doombuilder or SlumpED/XWE.

It would be really helpful to me if I could pull apart projects like Zpack or KdiZD to see how the mapping/scripting/polyobjects etc etc is implementsed.

Thanks people. :)

(I tried exporting the individual .wads from the pk3 and opening those. I didn't think it would work, and predictably enough, it didn't.)

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You should be able to open KDiZD with DB2 as it is.

ZPack on the other hand is a total mess - multiple WADs just lumped together in one big file. Getting somewhere with that is not that easy.

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Kyka said:

(I tried exporting the individual .wads from the pk3 and opening those. I didn't think it would work, and predictably enough, it didn't.)

What do you want us to say? They're maps. They can be opened in normal editors (unless they're UDMF, then they can only be opened by DB2). If you want the resources (textures, etc.) to be loaded as well, load the pk3 itself as a resource in DB2.

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tbh I am still using DB1.

The error i get with DB when opening either Zpack or KDiZD is:

"Could not browse the WAD contents of this file. Error -2147221504: File is not in PWAD or IWAD format." The same error comes if I extract individual .wads from the pke3 itself.

I may have to get a copy of DB2 then.

Thanks for the replies. :)

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Neither DB1 nor DB2 are capable of opening maps that are inside a PK3. You'll have to extract the wad. However, if the pk3 is in the recommended format (like KDIZD), DB2 can open it as a resource. When you have just a bunch of wads zipped together, you'd have to extract them all and load them all (except the ones with maps) as resource files. DB1 only supports one resource file per wad, and it must be in wad format; so you'd pretty much have to switch to DB2 for such maps.

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I'm confused, what is it that you actually tried to do? PK3s are just zips with a different file extension, so you should be able to just rename them to zip, extract with whatever zip program you're using and use the files from inside the archive normally. There shouldn't be anything else to it.

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Jodwin said:

I'm confused, what is it that you actually tried to do? PK3s are just zips with a different file extension, so you should be able to just rename them to zip, extract with whatever zip program you're using and use the files from inside the archive normally. There shouldn't be anything else to it.

You do realize that that usually corrupts a file?

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Vendettagainst said:

You do realize that that usually corrupts a file?


Not if it's actually a zip file with a .pk3 extension!

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Vendettagainst said:

You do realize that that usually corrupts a file?

Your archiver program must be really horribly written if it does this to a ZIP file.

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Have you been reading the windows "Changing extension will make this file unusable" dialog a little too much? Those 3 letters at the end of the filename have nothing to do with the contents of the file. It only assists in what software will attempt to read the file as. In this case as explained a PK3 file actually contains data found in a ZIP format file. Renaming it to .ZIP allows your archiver to realize that its a zip file

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