I've actually been wanting to read these .pak files for awhile. I knew of them and I knew if any thing I would find something in there.... but sadly I don't know how to search into my game disc to look for this stuff. :(

First off, you can only read .pak files if you have the software that created them. So all the people who did hack the game can't even read the .pak files even if they didn't want ignore them. I just want to know if there are any in the game, because it might answer some questions I have about SUs. However, they only guy I know competent enough to hack it is The Fox. Unfortunately, he didn't become a good hacker by leaving well enough alone. If I let him hack my game, he'd hack it alright. Then he'd manipulate it, try to mod it, and just generally mess my game the feezy up. So if you wanna see if he can find anything, which I know he can, then send me fifty bucks so I can buy a game specifically for the purpose of him destroying. Otherwise, we have to wait until Boon speaks up.

How about he rents the game? haha

Knowing him, and how hard up he is for some more MK (he only played once at my house during some after work beer and "work sucks bitch-fests," he'll probably end up buying. Then he'll break it trying to mess with it. So he'll buy another one... and break that one. By the time all this happens, MK7 will be out, and he'll probably just buy that, then break it. It's not that he's so bad that he breaks stuff on accident, it's just that he can't resist the temptation to "push the limits" as he says. He's gone through six computers in this past year alone. Seriously, this guy has self control issues. I don't trust him with anything electronic. I trust him to guard my wallet. I trust him to keep my ATM password secret. Hell, I'd leave him all alone in the same room as my girlfriend for hours. I can trust the guy with anything, even my drugs! Except with anything with wires that runs on the magic from the walls.

He can't mess up your game, he can't wright to the disk so your game is safe. He can't even change the aline in konquest text to say "Dimishi, you suck!" and save it back onto the disk. All professionally released games, DVDs, audio CDs are all 'finalized'. Basicly making modification, deletion, or general wrighting impossible. Those xbox mods you've all been reading about are downloaded into the xbox's hard drive or memory card, not onto the disk itself. And pak files don't take much to read them. Often enough you'll find that programs such as winRAR can read them quite nicely. The problem is when you try to read the files that are in the pak file.

All I know is what he tells me. He's kinda crazy, so I just nod in agreement. I know that you can't rewrite them. As a matter of fact, The Fox knows damn well you can't rewrite them. But as I have said, he's crazy, and dosen't let things like "facts" and "no man, a lighter is not a good idea" get in his way. The guy stockpiles guns in case (and I quote) "the damn liberals get into the White House." Complete nut job, but only dangerous to electronics. As for the .pak files, hey I don't know much about them. That's about as far into his lecture I got before I fell alseep from boredom, which caused him to hit me with a stick, thus ending our MK conversation.

well.....can anyone atleast help me read the files from the game? a program I can use perhaps? i can check to see if there are .pak files. If not, I'm downloading the ps2 version of the game using torrents and I'll probably try to screw around with that.

Thanx for explaining that in a little detail.
I kinda figured stuff could be hidden in such a fashion.
Hopefully, stuff is. Good stuff at that.

I have experience with pak files due to editing and modding for Quake 3 Arena and Doom 3. Tto my knowledge they work like .zip files. You can open and extract or view their contents by copying them and renaming them as .zip files. However, since it's on an X-Box disc I'm not sure you can copy them. You could probably use a program like XWE to open and look at them from the source itself.

yeah, you don't nessecarily need a special program to open all pak files. as mentioned above, regarding quake etc, they have pak files, and winzip opens them without question. paks are just zips,

I made scads of PS2 DVDs trying to do something interesting with MKD. You can't write to the original DVD but you sure as hell can write to a DVD-/+R. I never could do much beyond getting it to load the wrong images on the select screen and change some text.
As far as reading the pak file goes. The pack file can be anything they need it to be. It could be compressed, but it doesn't have to be. All it needs to do is hold all the game data so people cant read it. As far as compression goes most file types have some form of bult in compression of thier own. So if they used any common file types there isn't much point in trying to recompress something that is compressed. Try ziping a 1gig movie file. You end up saving 1-3 Megs. There would be a lot of game unique data stored.
Quake paks may have been zips but the MKDA pak isn't . They can save the information any way they want and put ".pak" at the end of it. The file extension really means nothing. Its just for refrence. There can be 18,000 different types of pak files none which are even remotly alike. From the looks of the MKDA.pak(MKD uses a file called MKDA) file they don't seam to actualy use file names much. The information looks like its referenced in some other way or stored in a few big chunks. Like the mko, sec files.
The actual character data could also be spread in anyway so its not like there is any way to go "Hey that is a lot of info. It must be a character!" There are several aspects of a character that all look to be broken down by the game into respective parts. First you need the model. The model has 2 parts. The 3D shape then the 2D images for texureing wich may or maynot be stored together. Then you have the motion scripts that tell the model how to move. It looks like MKD has seperate unique scripts for each style. As well as seperate entries for fatalites. MKD also apears to have seperate entries for the specal moves for each character or at least the effects that those moves use. Like for fire or ice. The Gore effects are loaded as a seperate thing as well. Then you have the game code that tell the system how to load and use all these things together.
Where am I going with all this? There is a forumula you see repeated for every single character in the game. There are two variants. One for the playable characters and one for the characters you can fight but cannot play with. Shang Tsun, sonya, Quan, ect. There are also entries for Nitara, Frost, Drahmin, and blaze that follow the NON-Playable formula. What this means is unless they created an entirely different loading, saving, control method to hide some character then there are NOmore people in the game. From a programing stand point that would be almost impossible. They MUST follow their own rules in order for the game to run. To save an entire character in a way that dosen't follow the basic formula would require going way out of thier way and risk all kinds of problems. There could be other things but people I have to say would be 99.9% not going to happen.

FINALLY ... some actual knowledge! the original poster is an idiot and has no clue what the hell he is talking about. nice post FireMonksPain.

Of course you can wright to a copy you made, thats pretty obvious, man. All I was pointing out was that this guy doesn't have to worry about having his game ruined by someone hacking it. Corruption is impossible because wrighting is impossible.
And as for the pak files... again, pretty obvious. An extension is nothing more than part of the file name. Don't even need to have an extension. If I wanted to I could go and change every jpg file on my machine to read xyz.pak. What I was talking about was on average... Usually, in my experience .pak files are in a sense zip files. I've not even bothered looking at Deception(Or DA for that matter) on my computer so I don't claim to know anything about Deception, or DA's files. But I've never once ran into a .pak file that wasn't basicly a zip.
And to the, "the original poster has no idea what he's talking about" fellow, I hope you wheren't talking about me as this guy didn't do much else but say what I did in more detail. Well until he started getting into the way DA's 'engine' works.

The pak file extracters I've tried on MKD's pak file haven't worked. I don't think they follow any standardized form like zip files. I wish they did. I would like to get into the files more than the game code.
And I wasn't clowning on anyone's post. After spending a lot of time with the MKD files I'm just saying I don't think there is any way they could be stashing extra characters. It would have been cool but I just don't see how. There is still hope for some other things like puzzle combat fighting perhaps or fighting those other characters on the disk like Drahmin and Frost. I was real bumed when I found out Frost and Nitara wouldn't be on the game. Then to find out they actualy are but arn't at the same time was a sucky taunt of a thing to do.

purbeast why not contribute something to the conversation or shut the hell up. You little 12 year old flamer.
It's obveous that the VD has presented an intelegent enough piece of information to have people who are familiar w/ game design and file compression/hiding come out of the woodworks to answer his posts.

99% sure you will not find anything that will decompress or view the packs. It was most likely crated from an internal tool authored by Midway. This is what we do where I work.
Also having worked on the same engine (renderware) as MK:D they most likely put directories into the pak files due to the directories being too deep and having too many files. The renderware engine has a limitation on how many files it can handle. Originally it was around 800 but then they gave us a new irx file that upped it to 1200, which was still not enough. This is what forces you to use pak files. .