Using the tools

Unlinking a fastfile

A good starting point is dumping an existing zone from your game installation to get a glance at how the raw asset data is structured. The Unlinker tool will create a dump of a fastfile that can be linked again in the same form with the Linker tool.

The Unlinker tool can be used the following:

# Load the original zone from the game folder.
# Change this if you have installed your game somewhere else
GAME_FOLDER='C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3'

# Verbose mode logs more details which can be useful to find errors
ARGS='--verbose'

# Specify the search-path to include the main folder to automatically load its IWD files for image dumping.
# For T6 also specify sounds;zone/all;zone/english to load appropriate IPAKs and sound banks.
# You can skip specifying the search path but it will not dump images then.
ARGS="$ARGS --search-path \"$GAME_FOLDER/main;$GAME_FOLDER/zone/english\""

ZONE_TO_UNLINK="$GAME_FOLDER/zone/english/ui.ff"

Unlinker $ARGS "$ZONE_TO_UNLINK"

The variables are only to better demonstrate the different parameters. You can also of course combine them:

Unlinker --verbose "C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3/zone/english/ui.ff"

When using Windows you can also drag and drop a fastfile onto Unlinker which will run the unlinking tool with just the fastfile path and no additional parameters.

After Unlinker ran successfully, you will have a zone_dump folder in your working directory. It contains another folder zone_raw which contains the definitions for the unlinked fastfiles. You can move the project definitions one level up in the folder structure to be able to use them with the Linker tool. That means zone_dump/zone_raw/ui becomes zone_raw/ui

Extending a vanilla fastfile

For an example of extending a fastfile, see the example "ExtendZone".

Building an IPak

For an example of creating an ipak together with a fastfile, see the example "IPakZone".