The structure of the dats

You may of noticed some large dat/cats inside the game folder. These files hold the game-files including textures, sounds, models, text etc. To open these files you will need a CatTool - which will hopefully be released soon by Egosoft. When the tool is finally available, you will be able to open up the files and see a list of files. You will need to extract from 01, upwards replacing any existing files. Files found in the later dats replace those from eariler ones.

When finally extracted all the files to a folder, you will see a list like so:

aiscripts	Contains scripts on AI functions
assets	Models, textures and macro for those files,
cutscenes	Cutscenes found through-out the game.
index	XML files to tell the game where to find files.
libraries	Item definitions (like the older types folder).
maps	The map files, broken into zones, sectors etc.
md	Mission director - basically files which deal with missions (plot and non),
music	err... music? in xwma format.
particles	Where all the particles effects are defined,
sfx	Sound effect files - all your bing, bang and boos..
shaderfx	shaders, used apply graphical effects
t	Language files - ie. where all in-game text is stored (44 equals english),
textures	Where some of the textures are found (compressed .dds files).
ui	User-interface files
voice-L044	Speach, 044 is the english files,

Most of the folders above will either contain a XML, wav, dds (mostly compressed by .gz), xwma or xmf file.

XML files

To view/edit XML files you dont really need any special tools however they can be made a lot easier to read with certain editors. You will need to know XML pretty well to change/add things to X-Rebirth, as most things will require you to edit a XML file. Sometimes you may need to open-up mutliple XML files to decode something.

DDS files

DDS files are used for textures through-out the game, often compressed inside a .gz file. So to be able to open these textures you will need a tool to uncompress .gz files and a graphics program that can open .dds files. Fortunately both of these file formats aren't too rare, and should be easy enough to open.

XWMA files

You may think at first that xwma files are similar to that of WMA, however they arent. To edit/play xwma files you will need special programs to do that. Egosoft decided not to use MP3 for music.

XMF files

For the moment, XMF files are a bit hard to open - due to a lack of editors. They can not be opened with gMax at the moment, as there is no plug-in for them. XMF files provide most of the models used in-game, such as ship models, station models etc. So atm they are a bit hard to open-up.