Virtual File System

Gothic stores it’s files in something called a Virtual File System, or short VDFS. It is built out of multiple packages, which are all loaded into one file index. Think of it as putting all textures, meshes and other content into different ZIP-Archives and have the engine merge them all during load-time.

The package format used by Gothic is not ZIP, but an uncompressed proprietary format. We won’t get into details about how that format is structured here.

Creating a VDFS-File index

To do anything with this library, you need to populate a Virtual File Index with the packages from the original game, which is rather straight forward:

First, you need to include the VDFS-module from ZenLib:

#include <vdfs/fileIndex.h>

In main, you then need to initialize the VDFS with argv[0], which is the path to the running executable. This is a detail of the underlaying PhysFS library.

VDFS::FileIndex::initVDFS(argv[0]);

Now you can create a FileIndex and load some packages from your games DATA-folder into it:

const std::string dataDir = "D:/Games/Gothic II/Data";

VDFS::FileIndex vdfs;
vdfs.loadVDF(dataDir + "/Meshes.vdf");
vdfs.loadVDF(dataDir + "/Textures.vdf");
vdfs.loadVDF(dataDir + "/Anims.vdf");
vdfs.finalizeLoad();

With the file index populated, you can now access the files stored inside the packages:

for(std::string file : vdf.getKnownFiles())
{
    std::cout << file << std::endl;
}

The full example:

#include <vdfs/fileIndex.h>
#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    VDFS::FileIndex::initVDFS(argv[0]);

    const std::string dataDir = "D:/Games/Gothic II/Data";

    VDFS::FileIndex vdfs;
    vdfs.loadVDF(dataDir + "/Meshes.vdf");
    vdfs.loadVDF(dataDir + "/Textures.vdf");
    vdfs.loadVDF(dataDir + "/Anims.vdf");
    vdfs.finalizeLoad();

    for(std::string file : vdf.getKnownFiles())
    {
        std::cout << file << std::endl;
    }

    return 0;
}

Importing content using a FileIndex

A populated VDFS FileIndex can now be used to import files, as an example, this is how one would import a texture:

HTexture wood = BsZenLib::ImportTexture("WOOD.TGA", vdfs);

The a file matching WOOD.TGA must be registered inside the passed VDFS FileIndex.

Note

The Texture-Importer searches for WOOD.TGA and WOOD-C.TEX automatically.