Apex Legends Season 18 .vpk are gone

[snake-biscuits]

Season 18 of Apex Legends has removed all .vpk files
Map files are now split up across .rpak

.bsp & .bsp_lump.client go into mp_mapname_client_perm.rpak
.ent & 0000.bsp_lump.client are in mp_mapname_client_temp.rpak

mp_mapname.rpak holds materials

AFAIK the .client extension is new (some .nut scripts also have it)
Probably an indication of Respawn keeping some stuff server-side for privacy & security reasons
Scripts already redacted server-side blocks w/ whitespace, my guess is this is an evolution of that

TODO: catch .client extension in respawn.ExternalLumpManager

Haven't extracted maps to take a look, LegionPlus team are already working on that tho
All I can tell so far from peeking in a hex editor is the map version hasn't changed

Also, it doesn't look like depot/ maps are getting shipped anymore
Everything has moved to the r2/maps folder, according to .rpak paths

[snake-biscuits]

LegionPlus' feat/wrap-assets fork can get the files
Rendered lumps (Models, TextureData, Meshes) + others (GameLump, PakFile, LevelInfo) appear in *_client_temp.rpak

Not sure as to why they're split up like this, might be to do with how maps are cached at runtime

[snake-biscuits]

lots of files have a size of 0, think that might be a compression issue

[snake-biscuits]

Compressed data is ignored for now
LegionPlus/src/Assets/wrap.cpp:52
Only Lightmap Data & Unknown97 are uncompressed (complexity? Lossless pixel data)
Unknown97 might be a lightmap (RTL-C?)

[snake-biscuits]

IIRC Respawn’s VPK format added some flags for texture compression
RPAK wrap could have a bunch of flags
Maybe even struct aware ones

[snake-biscuits]

rexx has informed me that _temp rpaks are streamed (stbsp seems to be gone too)

[snake-biscuits]

There's a fresh pull request to LegionPlus which adds decompression
However, streamed lumps (those in mp_*_client_temp.rpak) are still untouched

[snake-biscuits]

Rendered Geo & lightmap lumps are streamed (in mp_*_client_temp.rpak

>>> import bsp_tool
>>> bsp = bsp_tool.load_bsp("E:/Mod/ApexLegends/season18/19sep23/maps/mp_lobby.bsp")
>>> bsp.external.loading_errors
{}
>>> bsp.external.ENTITIES[0]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "...\bsp_tool\bsp_tool\respawn.py", line 78, in __getattr__
    raise RuntimeError(f"The .bsp_lump file for the {lump_name} lump is empty!")
RuntimeError: The .bsp_lump file for the ENTITIES lump is empty!
>>> [L for L, h in bsp.external.headers.items() if h.length != h.filesize]
['ENTITIES', 'TEXTURE_DATA', 'LIGHTPROBE_PARENT_INFOS', 'ENTITY_PARTITIONS', 'GAME_LUMP',
 'WORLD_LIGHTS', 'MESHES', 'MESH_BOUNDS', 'MATERIAL_SORTS', 'LIGHTMAP_HEADERS',
 'TWEAK_LIGHTS', 'STATIC_PROP_LIGHTPROBE_INDICES', 'LIGHTMAP_DATA_REAL_TIME_LIGHTS']

Will have to archive .rpak & .starpak for when tools can extract these lumps

[snake-biscuits]

New LegionPlus PR fixing wrap export for bsp related files:

• fix bsp and wrap file export r-ex/LegionPlus#135

Includes decompression, so map geometry can now be extracted (perm lumps like 000E MODELS are compressed)