[RDR-CELL-XENON|RAGE-V]Red Dead Redemption knowledge base

[Mr. Leisurewear 332]

RDR knowledge base - Path to Rage(n)lightment

Who am i ?

Hello i identify myself with the nickname "Mr Leisurewear" (from the nickname that Trevor gave Steve haines in one of the mission),

and in my spare time i hold myself busy with graphics programming and game programming , as this is also my profession it interests me a lot.

3 years ago i started to look into the file formats from Red Dead Redemption, because i have little time available it took me some time to gather enough info about the game.

Soon a small group of people gathered around me and we started converting the whole map of RDR inside V PC which you may have known from the hyped "high profile mod Red Dead Redemption V"

Link to the forum thread

Shortly after i was contacted by Take Two to cease my activities , as to why you can look that up in the thread.

So one year goes by and nothing changed on RDR's front , and we are nearing 1 year after the alleged C&D of our project so i decided to share my knowledge to the gta community.

What the community does with this info is entirely up to them, i hope by dropping this quite large knowledge it creates some momentum towards more Redemption stuff

I will be dividing the info up into sections of interest like -> META (Text , xml , tune , etc...), GFX (Graphics), SYSTEMS (Anims , sound, cutscene etc...)

I will be adding info more and more by the day as i continue to find more stuff as i'm constantly researching RDR expect more to come.

I can only do some pieces per day because of time limitations so if it seems a little bit too little of information please wait a few days

You can always hit me up on PM for more info !

All of this info will aply to both platforms , CELL and XENON are mostly interchangeable

- Standard information

 

 

-Rage Package Files [xenon, cell] .RPF

 

 

• Version 6
• Big Endian
• Encryption: for the Table Of Contents : AES Rijndael16 , key is inside the XEX or ELF executables of each platform , which is 32 bytes long, sometimes key of certain paltform is interchangeable with other platform
• Encryption: Blocksize = 128
• Encryption: Key size = 256
• Encryption: Ciphermode = ECB , no padding
• Get the Table of Contents data block size by doing -> Rpf6Header::entryCount * 20
• Directory and filenames are Hashed using the Jenkins One At A time (JOAAT) Hashing algorithm
• The name table containing the names of each directory and file (hash) is located inside the TOC after all the entries

Header: (size = 0x10)	magic 		: int32 : 4b	entrycount	: int32 : 4b	unknown		: int32 : 4b	encrypted	: int32 : 4bToc: (starts right behind header block) (tocentry size = 0x20)Direntry:	nameoffset	: int32 : 4b	flags		: int32 : 4b	contententryindex	: uint32 : 4b	contententrycount	: uint32 : 4bFilentry:	nameoffset	: int32	: 4b	size		: int32 : 4b	offset		: unt24 : 3b	Resource Type	: byte  : 1b	flags		: uint32 : 4bData block

 

 

-Rage Package Files [cell] .RPF inside an .SDAT file

 

• On the PS3 the game downloads a certain amount of files inside the blu ray rpf to the internal hdd , these files are again packaged into an rpf but contained inside a Secure Data pack file (.sdat) , the file is entirely encrypted and can be decrypted using the "make_npdata" tool (google is your friend). Simply feeding this file inside the command line tool will give you the RPF and can be opened with the information above.

 

-Reading RPF files (Pseudo code)

 

• coming in the next edits

 

 

 

 

-Magnificent streaming AKA RSC's (ReSource Container files)

 

 

-Before you read everything else !

• In order to accomodate the insanely (by today's standards) small memory sizes of both the 360 and ps3 Rockstar decided to make everything streamable from a certain device. If a certain resource isn't needed anymore it can be unloaded from both the system and graphics memory.
• PS3 uses 2 seperate memory pools , the system memory which is accessible by the cell processor and the graphics memory which is accessible by the RSX graphics processor. Both are 256MB large.
• The 360 does it differently it uses a unified memory environment of 512MB large which both the cpu and the gpu can access.
• Therefore the RSC exists; which is a streamable file who's internal format is divided up into memory pages which can be easily relocated to find a suitable place inside the ram to fill up every piece of memory available efficiently.

-Dissecting a Resource container

 

• The real RSC data is contained inside the 16 byte size header (0x10)

• Resource Container example>The header of an RSC (size = 0x10) (not always !!)	magic		: int32 : 4b	version 	: uint32: 4b	SysBitfield	: uint32: 4b	GfxBitfield	: uint32: 4b

• Not all the RSC's used in the game contain two bitfields however all of the RSC's use at least the Sys bitfield , the Gfx bitfield is only added if the RSC also contains a Graphics segment more on that later.
• 
• Notice that the magic "RSC" is actualy backwards ? , this is because both system's processors work in the Big endian order which is the least signifcant byte is first , in V / IV / Payne this will be RSC on the pc versions because intel chips use Little Endian. Therefore in C# tools you need to have a adapted Bianry reader that swaps the bytes on the fly in the stream.
• After these 16 bytes the actual file begins where the game data is stored.

-What kind of gibberish is underneath there ?

• To save space on certain media devices these RSC files are compressed.
• Xenon rsc's use the proprietary LZX compression method which is exposed as a framework inside the Xbox development kit which only licensee's can get.
• Unfortunatly the method is entirely known and i will post info about that too.
• Cell rsc's are much simpler , just like the PC streamables for every other rage game they use the commonly used ZLIB Deflate algorithm
• You can identify ZLIB compressed files by this ZLIB header bytes
• 
• ZLIB has multiple compression types which generate slightly different header each time , but rockstar uses only compression type which is the BEST COMPRESSION type
• Identifying an LZX header
• 
• LZX header actually has some 2 byte header trailer , which can vary based on the file.
• After these headers the file begins.

-Decompressing both platform RSC's

Coming in next edits

 

 

 

 

-GFX

 

 

• Coming in the next edits !

 

 

 

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Edited March 11, 2018 by Mr. Leisurewear

[Smallo92 157]

Do you still plan to update this?

[Mr. Leisurewear 332]

Hi there , i ghave been been really busy with work , so i couldn't post anything more.

i plan todo some more updates this summer tho , but i can't really promise anything sadly ,as my time schedule is pretty variable