PAK file
More info
- Creator
- id Software
- Released
- 1996
- Type
- Archive format
- Predecessor
- WAD (Doom)
Quake's asset archive: one flat file with real paths inside, so the engine could pretend it was reading an ordinary directory.
Where the WAD had eight-character names in a single level, PAK stored full paths such as maps/e1m1.bsp or sound/weapons/rocket1.wav. The format is almost embarrassingly simple: the header PACK, the directory's offset and size, then 64 bytes per entry — 56 for the name, four for the offset, four for the length. No compression whatsoever.
The engine looked in the file system first and then in the PAK files, higher numbers before lower. A mod only had to drop a pak2.pak next to the originals. Quake III (1999) switched to PK3, which is just a renamed ZIP — instantly turning every archiver into a modding tool.