Revision as of 22:04, 1 August 2006

Archive format used for SimCity 4 and The Sims 2 archive data files.

Format

Most Sims2 Data is as you probably know stored in various types of archive files that all have the same internal format such as package, cache, etc. This format is proprietary to Maxis and has been used in the SimCity 4, and The Sims Online as well as this one.

Entries may be compressed with QFS compression depending on their entry data.

Overview

This is the general structure of DBPF packages:

Header (96 bytes)
File 1
File 2
...
File n
Index Entry 1 (20 bytes)
Index Entry 2
...
Index Entry n 

Header first, individual files following with no filenames and a small file header area at the beginning of each followed by an index of all the files in the archive.

Header

DWORD

Identifier (DBPF - the type of dat)

DWORD

Version Major (1 in SC4/Ts2 Dats)

DWORD

Version Minor (0 in sc4 dats, 1 in most TS2 packages)

12 bytes

Reserved (Users can store DBPF info data here if they want)

DWORD

Date Created in Hex (Unused in Version 1.1)

DWORD

Date Modified in Hex (Unused in Version 1.1)

DWORD

Index Major Version (Always 7 in SC4/TS2 dats)

DWORD

Number of entries in the index

DWORD

Location of first index entry

DWORD

Size of index

DWORD

Number of Hole entries in the Hole Record

DWORD

Location of the Hole Record

DWORD

Size of the Hole Record

DWORD

Index Minor Version (Version 1.1+ in TS2 only)

• 01 - 0
• 02 - 1

32 bytes

Reserved for future use in other versions.

File

Bulk of DBPF packages.

Header

Only if the file is compressed

DWORD

Compressed Size of file

WORD

Compression ID (0x10FB) QFS Compression. (Compression spec is seperate covered on the packages page)

3 bytes

Uncompressed Size of file

Body

Raw data

File Table

There are 2 known formats of indexes in the game. The format version is found in the file header.

Version 7.0

(20 bytes, some 1.1 entries use this format)

DWORD

Type ID (see InternalFormats)

DWORD

Group ID

DWORD

Instance ID

DWORD

Location of the file in the archive

DOWRD

Size of the file

Version 7.1

(24 bytes)

DWORD

Type ID (see InternalFormats)

DWORD

Group ID

DWORD

Instance ID

DWORD

Second Instance ID

DWORD

Location of the file in the archive

DOWRD

Size of the file

Hole Record

A Hole record contains the location and size of all holes in a DBPF file.

repeating

DWORD

Hole Location

DWORD

Hole size

Holes are created when the game deletes something from a DBPF. The holes themselves are simply junk data of the appropriate length to fill the hole.

This article is imported from the old MTS2 wiki. It's original page, with comments, can be found at http://old_wiki.modthesims2.com/DatabasePackedFile