I made a new tool for extracting and creating .big files.
You can download it from https://mega.nz/file/31tUSTYb#tYdmBFwMe_VcOwjb_6HwMvNa4OSx5qmmUENbgvSageM and you can get the source code at https://github.com/jonwil/sagetools
To extract the contents of a .big file run bigtool -big path_to_big_file -path output_path where path_to_big_file is the path to the .big file you want to extract and output_path is the directory you want to extract the contents to. It will extract the entire contents of the .big file and decompress any compressed files in the process.
To create a .big file from a folder full of files, run bigtool -big path_to_big_file -path input_path -create where path_to_big_file is the path to the output .big file and input_path is the directory containing the files you want to add (all files in this directory including those in sub-directories will be added to the .big file unless they have a .asset extension)
If you want compression, add -compress to the command. All files will be compressed with refpack unless they have a .cdata, .vp6, .snd or .imp extention as those are generally already compressed in other ways.
To create a .big file from a list of files, run bigtool -big path_to_big_file -list input_path -create where path_to_big_file is the path to the output .big file and input_path is path to the file containing the list of files to add.
Lines in the list file can be:
-pack1 (to enable compression for files that follow)
-pack0 (to disable compression for files that follow)
or a filename such as "c:\blah\blah\blah.bin"="blah\blah.bin" with the first part being the source file path and the second part being the path inside the .big file. The quotes are required around both paths.
Compression is off by default (i.e. -pack0 is the default if none is specified before the first filename)
Feel free to modify the source code and to distribute your modifications but if you distribute modified binaries you also need to distribute modified source code to comply with the various licenses and I would appreciate a heads up that you are doing things with my code
Any questions about this stuff or how to use it (e.g. if the instructions aren't clear), please feel free to post here or hit me up on Discord (I am "Jonathan Wilson" on most of the C&C/SAGE/modding discords)
If you want to know more about how this works internally, read the source code (or ask me questions on Discord
The purpose of this tool is to provide an easy way to work with .big files and to produce .big files that come out the same way as the .big files from the stock game (e.g. this can be used to replace makebig.exe from the SDK and get proper refpack compression support when making your .big file) and also to share source code that shows exactly how the .big files in the later SAGE games work and how they are made so other people can use it as a reference or use it in their projects.
This is the first in a new batch of tools I am working on for the later SAGE games, more tools are comming in the future.
