PACK File Extension

What is the .PACK file type?

The most frequent occurrence of the filename extension .pack relates to the Warscape Resource Package (.pack) file type/format, with reference to the Warscape game engine developed by The Creative Assembly (CA). Warscape is the core technology behind the Total War warfare strategy game series (Empire: Total War, Napoleon: Total War, and others).

The .pack file is a filesystem-like container in CA's proprietary format. PACK files contain all game assets and configuration data in Warscape-powered games and are the primary modding target. There are boot, release, patch, and mod packs, each type covering a certain function. For instance, patches and hotfixes are provided in patch .pack files. The key tools for manipulating .pack files for modding purposes are the Pack File Manager (PFM) and the Mod Manager utilities developed by the Total War modding community.

Thea Render, a multi-platform commercial 3D visualization tool from Solid Iris Technologies, uses the .pack extension to designate its material, texture, and model package (.pack) files. PACK files are used in Thea Render as storages for exported assets. The .pack file itself is a regular ZIP archive with a set of bitmap images (.jpg, .png) along with .mat.thea (materials), .mod.thea (models), or .tex.thea (textures) files. Contents of such .pack files can be directly imported in Thea Render, or extracted with any ZIP archiver.

Another use of the .pack extension is related to the Pak200, a compression technique built in Java for processing Java archives (.jar). Java from Sun Microsystems/Oracle is a widely popular advanced platform- and OS-independent programming and virtual runtime environment. When processed with Pak200, a Java application archive (.jar) is modified (normalized, optimized), encoded, and gzip-compressed into a .jar.pack.gz file. Such .pack.gz files are handled by the Jar Processor.

A famous free/open software version control system named Git uses the .pack extension to represent packed archive (.pack) files. A .pack file packages and compresses objects in a Git repository, removing redundant data and recording only changes between versions (delta). Each PACK file has a companion index (.idx) file. Such .pack files can be generated automatically by Git in the course of its routine housekeeping, or manually through the "git gc" command.

Software to open or convert PACK files

Pack Unzip

 

CraftArtist

 

Thea Render by Solid Iris Technologies

 

VIP

 

WinRAR by win.rar GmbH

 

Free File Viewer Pro

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