Request Repacking extracted images from rpa files

Although I've never done it myself here are two ways I've found on the net to do it, it's about all the help I can give.

Even after unpacking the archives you can still play the game as if it was still packed, it shouldn't make a difference. As far as I know the rpa just helps to compress everything to make the file size smaller.

wurg said:

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The "problem" being that it need that you install Python and use the command line. But in the same time you're supposed to be able to overwrite a file in the archive (works sometimes, don't works other times).
Another possibility is to use Ren'py SDK (but well, you need to install it), and use an empty project where you put all the images you want to pack. Then, you just need to generate a distribution file for this project, and retrieve the rpa file from the generated archive.

So, both have their cons, choose what seem the easiest for you.

anne O'nymous said:

The "problem" being that it need that you install Python and use the command line. But in the same time you're supposed to be able to overwrite a file in the archive (works sometimes, don't works other times).
Another possibility is to use Ren'py SDK (but well, you need to install it), and use an empty project where you put all the images you want to pack. Then, you just need to generate a distribution file for this project, and retrieve the rpa file from the generated archive.

So, both have their cons, choose what seem the easiest for you.

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Are you saying that when you "build distributions" a project with Renpy it automatically generates a .rpa file? I don't know that much about the Renpy software and wanted a clarification if you could, I'm trying to learn more.

wurg said:

Are you saying that when you "build distributions" a project with Renpy it automatically generates a .rpa file?

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It's a little (really a little) more complicated, but yes. You , then when you build the distribution, it make the archives for you.

anne O'nymous said:

It's a little (really a little) more complicated, but yes. You

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, then when you build the distribution, it make the archives for you.

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Thank you for clarifying that for me.

wurg said:

...
Even after unpacking the archives you can still play the game as if it was still packed, it shouldn't make a difference. As far as I know the rpa just helps to compress everything to make the file size smaller.
...

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The RPA files are only encrypting part of the content and thus not saving any space at all and in the same time making it harder to save space by archiving the game files.

akifai said:

Thanks for replying, and trying to help out. I ended up using the Ren'py SDK method to get the modded rpa files. It would be great if there was a simple application like unren that could just quickly repack the extracted rpa files back to its original format.

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As @wurg mentioned you don't need to repack the files, if you keep the file structure and remove the RPA file the game will work fine.

gue5t said:

[...] and thus not saving any space at all

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That's not totally true. It depend of the format used to organize the hard drive, but whatever it is, none of them use a Byte to Byte count. This mean that a single file can use less space that many small files. This especially since initially Ren'py is for 2D VN and have many features for real time build models (use these eyes, these hair, ...) what lead to a shit ton of really small files.
But still you're not totally wrong either. Games using 3D CG generally take more place if the files are stored into a rpa archive. This because the encryption tend to increase the size of the files. While it's not enough to break the hard drive cluster limit for the really small files I talked about above, it add few of these clusters for the oversized files used by 3D CG games.

This said, there's something more that should be take in count. With a rpa file, the hard drive cache (and eventually the one of the OS) make it faster to load a picture. But with modern computer, I'm not sure that the difference can really be noticed.