unvivtool - portable VIV decoder/encoder (NFS3-5)

[bfut]

@meredich:

1. I decoded all of these special archives. I superficially checked and most if not all contained files seem to be in the SSH / SHPS format (which is similar to FSH / SHPI). But they are all compressed using RefPack. I googled for a minute and there are tools that can deal with that. Good luck. (In the attachment is a tool that can decompress Refpack, unrefpack)

2. Nevertheless, if you have the time, I'm really interested if a decoded and then re-encoded FE_ART.VIV is accepted by the game, using the step-by-step guide from my earlier post for unvivtool 1.16. If you can report on that, that would be helpful. Thanks in advance.

[Meredich]

Thank you. A little later I'll try to do everything according to the instructions

[bfut]

unvivtool117_cli_win32.zip is now available from https://github.com/bfut/unvivtool/releases/tag/1.17

Changes:
+    CLI: Windows 98 compatibility
+    Decoder: improved utf8 support

Functional update. Even under Win98 it is now possible to extract VIV archives that contain files with CJK, Cyrillic, etc. characters.

[pete9516]

unvivtool117_cli_win32.zip is now available from https://github.com/bfut/unvivtool/releases/tag/1.17

Changes:
+    CLI: Windows 98 compatibility
+    Decoder: improved utf8 support

Functional update. Even under Win98 it is now possible to extract VIV archives that contain files with CJK, Cyrillic, etc. characters.

Nice update.
By the way, can you have a look at this car.viv? It seems your tool can't handle it

[bfut]

Got it, thanks. Manipulated file.

Do you also use unvivtool to create archives? Since you requested the drag-and-drop mode, I wondered whether you'd like the drag-and-drop mode to automatically write the re-encode command to txt-file? At present this is only possible using the -we parameter, but it's an easy change. Appreciate the feedback, thx

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unvivtool d -we <path/to/input.viv> <path/to/existing/output_directory>

[pete9516]

Got it, thanks. Manipulated file.

Do you also use unvivtool to create archives? Since you requested the drag-and-drop mode, I wondered whether you'd like the drag-and-drop mode to automatically write the re-encode command to txt-file? At present this is only possible using the -we parameter, but it's an easy change. Appreciate the feedback, thx

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unvivtool d -we <path/to/input.viv> <path/to/existing/output_directory>

WOW i wasn't aware of this handy feature. So just selecting the extracted files from car.viv and drag'n'drop them onto the unvivtool.exe creates a clean, new car.viv? That is pure awesomeness, it saves so much time, i gonna try out asap
EDIT: Firstly i didn't understand how to use this, i thought it would be like the drag'n'drop function, but unfortunately, it isn't. I took as least as long as i would open up an empty car.viv and put every extracted file into it with NFS Wizard manually, but i think if one gets used to your function, it might be faster than doing it the manual way

[bfut]

Drag-and-drop encoding multiple files will be in the next version.

[bfut]

edit: get version 1.18 from https://github.com/bfut/unvivtool/releases/tag/1.18 /edit

Find unvivtool 1.18ReleaseCandidate for Windows in the attachment.

Changes:
* decoder now simply skips invalid files instead of erroring out
* handles vttt/car.viv (one of the contained files has a manipulated filesize)
* new drag-and-drop encoder: drop multiple files (that are not VIV archives) onto the executable to create an NFS-compatible archive

ofc win98-compatible

[pete9516]

Find unvivtool 1.18ReleaseCandidate for Windows in the attachment.

Changes:
* decoder now simply skips invalid files instead of erroring out
* handles vttt/car.viv (one of the contained files has a manipulated filesize)
* new drag-and-drop encoder: drop multiple files (that are not VIV archives) onto the executable to create an NFS-compatible archive

ofc win98-compatible

Thanks so much

[pete9516]

I don't want to spam you, but at the moment, i'm adding tons of cars to my HS Mixer archive and i've encountered another car.viv file which not even VIV Magic or VIV Edit can handle. It says it got an invalid headersize.

[bfut]

Thanks for the heads-up. Minor regression in the RC, will be fixed in 1.18

[bfut]

unvivtool118_cli_win32.zip is now available from https://github.com/bfut/unvivtool/releases/tag/1.18

Changes:
+    CLI: drag-and-drop multiple files onto the executable to encode them into a VIV archive
+    CLI: drag-and-drop a VIV/BIG archive onto the executable to decode it
+    Decoder: skips invalid files instead of erroring out

[bfut]

unvivtool119_cli_win32.zip is now available from https://github.com/bfut/unvivtool/releases/tag/1.19

Changes:
+    De/Encoder: improved filesystem behavior, especially on ancient Windows
+    Decoder: add overwrite mode (auto rename existing files)
+    Decoder: create non-existing output directory
+    Decoder: never overwrite archive
+    CLI: passing an output directory to decoder is optional, and it need not exist
+    CLI: command-line options -dnl -i -f -fmt and their respective arguments are no longer separated by whitespace (breaking change)
+    Python: easy installation via python -m pip install unvivtool on Win, Linux, and macOS

Appendix:
1)    The optional overwrite mode is called with command-line argument -aot
+    the same filename may be present multiple times in an archive; as needed, existing on disk file.ext will be renamed to file_1.ext, file_2.ext, and so on
+    more: use it to avoid overwriting files on disk by accident
+    default decoder behavior is to still overwrite, but a warning is printed to console

2)    Always: the VIV archive itself can no longer be overwritten on decoding

3)    painless Python installation on all systems. Requires Python 3.9 or later:

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python -m pip install unvivtool

[bfut]

unvivtool202 is now available from https://github.com/bfut/unvivtool/releases/tag/2.2

Note: the latest unvivtool.exe for Windows can be found at: https://github.com/bfut/unvivtool/releases/tag/1.20

Changes:
+    Decoder: much faster, reduced memory consumption
+    Decoder: improved format analysis
+    Decoder: improved handling of format deviations
+    Python: new function get_info() returns dictionary of archive header data

Appendix:
+    painless Python installation on all systems. Requires Python 3.10 or later:

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python -m pip install -U unvivtool

[bfut]

unvivtool204 is now available from https://github.com/bfut/unvivtool/releases/tag/2.4

The 64-bit Windows executable is back. Enjoy.

Changes:
+    Decoder: improved performance
+    Decoder: improved format analysis
+    De/Encoder: more informative console output

Appendix:
+    painless Python installation on all systems. Requires Python 3.10 or later:

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python -m pip install -U unvivtool