Handling with PAK files

On this page you will learn how to handle with PAK files. PAK files are those files which have the file extension *.pak. The most common one is  in   directory, but there are lots of more examples of PAK archives. It should also be said here that PAKs in Outfront games, unlike those from Company of Heroes, are nothing different than common *.zip -archives with another extension.

Opening
PAK files can be opened by almost every file archive program. Most common ones are i.e. WinZIP, WinRAR and 7Zip. Normally, the file extension *.pak is not linked with one of these applications, so you have to choose one by following these steps:
 * 1) Left-click on the PAK you want to open. You can select multiple ones optionally
 * 2) Right-click on that file to open the popup menu
 * 3) Click on the item Open with...If a sub-menu is shown, click on Select program
 * 4) A window should be shown now. Select an archiver of your choice and click the OK -button, finally

Extraction and compression
After you opened a PAK file with an archive program you can unpack it as you do would do it with a "normal" ZIP file. How to do that depends on the application you are using.

To (re-)compress a PAK file you can use your achive manager program to create a ZIP package of your folder. After doing that you need to change the file extension to *.zip, so that the file name should be something like  in the end.

Working with PAKs
There are two different strategies of working with PAK files. One possible is to extract the whole file (may take a few to a lot time one) and re-pack it afterwords with your archive program (see above.

The other possibility is to sirectly modify the PAK in runtime. This slows down the whole modding process for each file you have to replace, delete or create, so this method is only recommended for smaller mods (max. 10 megabytes). You should create a "clean" backup of your original PAK file before you start.

This can be done as follows:
 * 1) Open the PAK file
 * 2) Double-click on the file you want to edit
 * 3) Modify the file as you want to
 * 4) Save the file (do not use: Save as
 * 5) Activate the archive manager's window
 * 6) A message should appear which asks you whether you want to update the whole archive. There, select: Yes or OK
 * 7) Wait (do not close the archive manager) until the whole archive has been regenerated. If you cancel it, the whole archive becomes unusable