[Non-WOW] Analyze a files structure

[streppel]

Hey

yeah,it's me again
first of all, merry christmas to all of you

so after the latest threads created by tanaris4 i decided to take a look at recast and detour myself. i was kinda amazed how great the navigation worked with it and decided to implement it in my bot too
now the problem is,there are lots of wow-examples where the structure of all files is know(thanks to all the great people in this community), where in the game i'm writing a bot for, i can't seem to find any information about how to open the map files.
hell i don't even know yet if the files i have there are the mapfiles i could use for navigation.
so how do you start on doing something like this?
i tryed to load the files in blender with every possible extension, but had no success there(would be too easy, i know) and i took a look at it with a hex editor,found out about 4 header bytes and that's about it

thanks and enjoy those days with your family

[namreeb]

Generally the approach I would use is looking for the functions within the game which parse the files, and reverse those to define the file format.

[sitnspinlock]

what namreeb said. In most cases developers will write functions to wrap the NtCreateFile and NtReadFile/NtWriteFile (which are already wrapped in kernel32) for example the fstream library, which i noticed swtor uses.

but those functions will always give you a good starting point, because you can just walk the call stack from there.

[streppel]

ok thanks for your help,i just started doing it this way and will try to get it working, but now i'll relax a little,some big headache is killing me