CDMW Archive Lite

CDMW Archive Lite is a standalone, read-only Windows desktop application for browsing Crimson Desert PAMT/PAZ archives. It can search, inspect, preview, and export archive content without modifying the source archives.

The application is self-contained in this repository and keeps archive queries, decoding, media conversion, and mesh rendering outside the UI process.

Highlights

• Browse large archives through a folder tree or a flat list, with an optional category navigator, paging, filters, sorting, and persistent indexes.
• Search text across archives or loose folders with cancellation, result limits, and in-file navigation.
• Find known items by localized name and follow exact or related archive links.
• Preview text, XML, images, DDS textures, supported media including the sounds a Wwise .bnk embeds, archive metadata, and read-only PAC/PAM/PAMLOD/PAT geometry.
• Export a mesh as OBJ, GLB or FBX, byte-identical to what the full CDMW workbench writes. A skinned character carries its skeleton and its per-vertex weights into GLB and FBX, so it arrives posable rather than as a frozen shell.
• Discover and export associated assets without altering game data.
• Run as a portable Windows application or a single self-extracting executable.
• Switch the interface between the fourteen languages Crimson Desert itself ships; every one but English is machine translated and unreviewed.
• Keep settings, caches, logs, and crash reports isolated from the full CDMW workbench.

Safety boundary

Archive Lite has no archive-write, replacement, patching, backup, restore, or mod-building authority. PAMT, PAZ, and PATHC sources are opened read-only, and exports are written to a separate destination selected by the user.

The repository does not contain game archives, extracted game assets, or other local game data.

Requirements

• Windows 11 x64
• .NET 10 SDK
• CMake 3.24 or newer
• Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with the Desktop C++ workload
• PowerShell

Pinned third-party sources are documented in DEPENDENCY-SOURCES.md.

Run from source

First run the focused nonvisual gate:

.\scripts\test_archive_lite.ps1 -Configuration Debug

Then launch the desktop application:

dotnet run --project .\src\Cdmw.ArchiveLite.App\Cdmw.ArchiveLite.App.csproj -c Debug

The launch command opens a visible desktop window and is intentionally separate from automated validation.

Build

For a fresh standalone executable, run:

BUILD-FRESH-EXE.bat

For the complete verified Release package:

.\scripts\build_archive_lite.ps1

Build outputs are written beneath the ignored artifacts/ directory. On a clean checkout, pinned native dependencies are downloaded into the ignored .tools/ directory.

Architecture

flowchart TD
    UI["App"]
    W["Worker"]
    MESH["Mesh viewport"]
    CORE["Archive core"]
    HELP["Native helpers"]
    CONTENT["Content library"]

    UI -->|named pipe| W
    UI -->|child process| MESH
    W --> CORE
    W --> HELP
    W --> CONTENT

Loading

node	process or library	responsibility
App	CdmwArchiveLite.exe	WPF presentation and selection state
Worker	CdmwArchiveLite.Worker.exe	archive queries, search, preview, export
Mesh viewport	cdmw-mesh-dotnet-editor.exe	read-only Vortice D3D11 rendering
Archive core	cdmw-archive-core.dll	read-only PAMT / PAZ / PATHC decoding
Native helpers	helper processes	indexing, DDS, model and media preparation
Content library	managed	semantic archive documents

The named pipe carries request IDs and cancellation. The UI owns presentation; long-running work stays cancellable in the worker or a dedicated native process, and the renderer runs in its own child process.

Model preview

A model preview is assembled from the geometry, its material sidecar, and the textures those materials name. Crimson packs surface response into one map, so the preview reads the channels rather than guessing from a filename.

flowchart LR
    PAC["geometry"] --> P["Preview core"]
    XML["materials"] --> P
    DDS["textures"] --> P
    P --> A["Adapter"] --> R["Renderer"]

Loading

.pac geometry, the .pac_xml material sidecar, and the .dds textures it names go to the preview core, which assigns each binding a role, selects a slot per submesh, and resolves colour layers. The adapter turns that into channels, packed components, and layer bindings; the renderer samples them.

suffix	role	notes
X.dds	albedo	the part's own colour
X_n.dds	normal	two-channel BC5; Z is rebuilt
X_sp.dds	surface response	G roughness, B metalness
X_ma.dds	colour-blending mask	selects among colour layers, not a response map
X_emi.dds	emissive intensity	single-channel BC4; the colour is authored, not sampled
X_disp.dds	height
X_f.dds	strand direction	orients the anisotropic hair highlight

Preview output is checked against the assets themselves rather than by eye. PREVIEW-MATERIAL-AUDIT.md records the method, what is confirmed authored, and which explanations were refuted.

measured over	result
brightness reproduced vs. the asset's own textures	0.982 (1.000 = exact)
colour reproduced vs. the asset's own textures	0.926
lighting preserves albedo, lit/unlit over 728 assets	0.97 – 1.01
equipment assets rendered and compared	~5,400
whole-corpus scans of all 12,340 equipment PACs	4

Mesh export

A mesh exports as OBJ, GLB or binary FBX. The vertices, their order and the part names are byte-identical to what the full CDMW workbench writes, so a mesh exported here and one exported there can be joined as shape keys without moving a vertex.

	OBJ	GLB	FBX
geometry, in the archive's own units and order	yes	yes	yes
material names, and a material library	.mtl	material per part	material per part
armature and per-vertex weights	—	yes	yes
bones written	—	those the mesh uses, plus their ancestors	the whole skeleton
round-trip sidecar naming the source entry	.obj.meta.json	—	—

Geometry is in game units, and a game unit is a metre: a character body measures 1.84 tall in all three. The FBX declares this rather than leaving an importer to assume centimetres.

Only a skinned .pac carries a rig. A rigidly bound mesh — a prop, an accessory, a vehicle — puts its whole weight on one influence and records no bone anywhere in the file, so the bone it follows is not the mesh's to state; it exports unrigged. So does a smooth-skinned mesh whose bone palette no skeleton named by its own path accounts for, which is most NPC and monster gear. The preview package records which of those cases it found and why.

scripts/blender/ holds a headless script that imports an export, checks every vertex is weighted and sums to 1.0, poses a bone and asserts the vertices that moved are the ones near it. It is not part of the focused gate, since it needs Blender and licensed game assets.

Verified behaviour

These are asserted by the focused gate, not measured by hand. scripts/test_archive_lite.ps1 -Configuration Debug reproduces them.

focused scenarios	53, covering archive, preview, export, worker lifetime and cache eviction
model preview, cold cache	~100 ms
model preview, warm cache	~1 ms, and warm across sessions
renderer	headless GPU soak, production D3D11 backend, windows stay hidden
archive access	read-only; export is contained, atomic and manifested

Repository layout

• src/ — WPF application, worker, shared contracts, and managed archive services
• native/ — read-only archive and preview implementations
• tools/ — repository-owned helper and renderer projects
• tests/ — managed regression coverage and synthetic fixtures
• scripts/ — focused validation and packaging entry points
• schemas/ — versioned repository-owned data contracts
• .github/ — GitHub Actions, dependency update configuration, and collaboration templates

Local data

Portable builds keep settings, caches, logs, and crash reports beside the executable. The single-file launcher extracts its verified runtime beneath %LocalAppData%\CDMW\CDMWArchiveLite\standalone\; it does not place user settings, game data, or exports there.

These paths and all build outputs are excluded from version control.

Neither package is code-signed. The standalone launcher unpacks its runtime — 990 files, 978 of them DLLs and EXEs — and then starts it, and that sequence is what scanners react to: Microsoft Defender's machine-learning heuristic has flagged a fresh release as Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml, VirusTotal carries generic packed-executable names such as Trojan.Win64.Crypt, and its sandbox reports the PEs written as executable creation and the asynchronous write handles bound to I/O completion ports as Data Encrypted for Impact (T1486). All are false positives, and nothing already on the disk is read, changed or deleted. Each release lists the SHA-256 of both packages, and the portable zip carries the same application as ordinary files rather than as a self-extracting executable.

Project documents

• TESTING.md - validation matrix and proof boundaries
• PREVIEW-MATERIAL-AUDIT.md - how a preview is checked against its source, what is confirmed authored, and which explanations were refuted
• CONTRIBUTING.md - development and review expectations
• SECURITY.md - supported versions and private reporting
• CHANGELOG.md - notable version changes
• THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md - bundled component notices

License

MIT. Bundled third-party components keep their own licences, listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

Archive Lite reads game files that it never ships. It contains no Crimson Desert content, and the archives it opens stay read-only. Whatever you export from your own installation remains subject to the game's own terms.