Jedipedia File Reader
- Introduction.
- Nodes as the most complete source of information.
- File Reader's user interface.
- Loading the game's .tor files:
- Navigating the Item Information Area.
- Ways to approach this tool.
Jedipedia's File Reader is a powerful tool that lets us inspect SWTOR's game data without needing to do an assets extraction. It can preview objects, textures, animations, sounds, etc. and it can export some of those, if a file at a time.
It is the primary tool for SWTOR datamining, as it shows information that goes far beyond just the audiovisual aspects of the game.
SOME DATA CRUCIAL FOR 3D WORK IS ONLY AVAILABLE THROUGH FILE READER: Character Creator's sliders-related data, garmenthue IDs used by characters and armor, location data… We will show a few recipes for solving such stuff.
Using File Reader doesn't alter the game's files in any manner: it is safe to use without fear of breaking something. It works locally in our computers: once the tool's page has been loaded, everything it does happens in our PCs or Macs without eating Internet quota.
File Reader lets us see the game's data as both a hierarchy of files and as a "node tree".
Nodes hold information on how each logical game element relates to the rest, and which files (if any) it uses and how.
Nodes can describe such things as a weapon's stats, a player character's hair color reference, a dialogue's tree… and how it relates to other nodes and files: a dialogue's lipsync animation file, the hair color's garmenthue file, an attack ability's animation sequence file…
The node tree organizes game information in a way that makes sense to the developers and the game's engine.
For example, the information about our player character looks' options, that the Character Creator exposes in the game, is stored in the node tree's pcs branch, which forks into classes, each of which forks into genders, each of which holds the nodes for all the available species (e.g.: pcs -> bounty_hunter -> female -> chiss node).
Each node has:
- A Global ID (GUID, "Globally Unique Identifier") which is just a long number (e.g: 16141092652040033155).
- And a FQN ("Fully Qualified Name") which is the path to where the node is located in the node tree (e.g.:
pcs.bounty_hunter.female.chiss).
In Jedipedia's database, many search results show both the GUID and the FQN in their pages, which makes finding their nodes in File Reader very easy (we can just copypaste any of them to the appropriate File Reader search field). See this armor chest piece's example:
(The actual node tree data is stored in the swtor_main_global_1.tor file, which isn't human-readable, and even if it were it is very complex. that's why File Reader)
We can access File Reader from Jedipedia.net's top menu or by a direct link.
Its page is divided into a Navigation Menu (left panel) and an Item Information Area (right panel).
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Navigation Menu: where we load .tor game files, and view their content by selecting it in the following tabs:
- Archives tab: it lets us load the game's .tor files (a compressed format similar to .zip) and lists the ones already loaded. Clicking on them lets us see their content as a flat list of files in the Item Information Area.
- Files tab: merges the content of the .tor files into a common hierarchy of folders (the same one we see when we extract them with ExtracTOR). Depending on how many .tor files we have loaded, this structure of folders will be more or less filled.
- Nodes tab: shows the game's node tree (only if the swtor_main_global_1.tor file has been loaded in the Archives tab).
Keyboard shortcuts:
- F1, F2, F3: Switch between Archives, Files and Nodes.
- Ctrl+O: Open a file (by name) or node (by FQN or ID).
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Item Information Area: where a new tab appears every time we select something for inspection, letting us go back and forth between them. Depending on the data to be shown, File Reader will use different tables arrangements and asset previewers.
Keyboard shortcuts (learning the Close Tab ones at the very least is imprescindible, as there are no other means to do it, and it is easy to end up accumulating dozens of open tabs).
- Tab, Shift+Tab: Switch between open tabs.
- Shift+W: Close current tab, Alt+W: Close all tabs.
Many elements in both sections show tooltips when hovering the cursor over them. For example, hovering over a FQN will show the matching GUID.
They are typically stored in one of those positions:
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If you're using the Steam version of SWTOR:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Star Wars - The Old Republic\Assets. -
If you're using the SWTOR Launcher from the SWTOR website:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic\Assets -
You can load any .tor files from anywhere else: from the Public Test Server (PTS), from a backup before the recent character modernization, from an old copy of the 32-bits versions… It doesn't even have to be a whole set.
To load them, we use the Archives tab's Add .tor files button. It lets us add one, several, or all .tor files, in one go or in successive ones.
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The simplest approach is to just LOAD ALL OF THEM AT ONCE, as knowing which file has what can be rather difficult.
That could take from 4 to 20 seconds depending on our computer's speed, but we don't need to wait until it finishes: we can start navigating and searching right away. Either the result appears instantly or it takes it a bit to show up.
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Loading a single or a few .tor files can be useful to find which .tor files hold certain assets (and there are ways to use the ExtracTOR app on only those .tor files).
(The menu besides the button is only needed when we want to load Public Test Server files and aren't using Steam's launcher).
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In this area, many references to other elements come with a little yellow link icon. Clicking it will open the referenced element, typically in a new tab.
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File Reader, whenever possible, will show previews of images, models, animations, sounds, conversations, etc.
We can save the inspected element's data as a file, using the top right corner Extract link.
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If the element is an actual game file (an image, a 3D object, an index.xml file, etc.), the result is the same kind of file we would get if we had done an assets extraction with the ExtracTOR app.
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If we are inspecting a node, the result of exporting it won't typically be human-readable.
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Also, if the file or node lists sub-elements that File Reader can preview, it might give us options to save them directly. For example, sounds that it can save in formats such as .ogg (Windows and many audio players understand it) or .wem (a popular game audio format).
Oftentimes we'll start by looking for something in Jedipedia's Database Search using its in-game name (say, "Casual Vandal Jacket"). If the results don't give us directly what we need, we'll copy the FQN ("itm.mtx.armor.season4.sexy_v08.chest") or GUID ("16141170170017167441") and move on to File Reader, loading the game files and then pasting the FQN or the GUID to the appropriate search field.
In other cases, when we know the name of a file we need, we'll just type or copypaste it in one of File Reader's search fields. We might need to fill a Body Type or Gender wildcard (or just omit them and let show all the variants in the search results).
File Reader will show so much data that the results can feel overwhelming: too many strange labels and cross-links, specially when dealing with nodes. But we don't need to know everything, and typically we'll be doing the same things over and over and they'll quickly become second nature. Using the web browser's in-page text search helps highlight the labels we need to check.
We'll show some use cases and list a few of the most useful node tree branches and labels in the pages following this guide.