XeNTaX

Nothing?
Ah well, I suppose I was already pushing everyone's patience by even bringing this up again.

Anyway, HUGE thanks to everyone for all their contributions. Without all your help we would still be stuck using borky 3D rippers, and look where we are now.

That's it for models/textures I suppose, but there's still plenty of other stuff. I recently discovered that the game CAN in fact run without archives, and even created the very first mod.
However, it's all pointless without an updated .BIG extractor, and the only person working on it quit a year ago.
Plus there's also the game's .skoo-bin script files, which can open up a whole world of possibilities if they can be decompressed.

But anyhow, thanks again guys. Hopefully people will actually care about this game when Triad Wars comes out.

Are you sure you can run the game unpacked?

Last year I did the same thing that guy in your link claims to have discovered
viewtopic.php?p=86951#p86951
I extracted only vehicles.big in \SleepingDogs\Data\ and deleted vehilces.big/bix. The game indeed started and worked for a while, but as soon as it had to load certain cars it crashed.

Yup, you were right.

I'm not quite sure what happens with Vehicles, but for all the other .BIGs it seems that the game was crashing because it was trying to load these files, but couldn't find them since the unpacker didn't assign them a filename.

Try the same thing with CharactersHD or Animation, works flawlessly. All the others have unknown files and crash instantly.

Although for Vehicles, I think that may be, again, a problem with the unpacker. If you look at some of the police vehicles they seem to have corrupted textures.

Come on now, I know practically nobody is interested in this, but is there at least ONE person out there who can wrap this up?

For the weapons and junk I can redo the UVs manually, but it's impossible with buildings. So much has already been done, but that one tiny detail is ruining a huge part of it.

due to a request of SJ concerning the crowbar here's the H2O files:

0x250 276
Vb1
12 99
0x550 114
020101
0xB80 8

0x1150 352
Vb1
12 99
0x14E0 129
020101
0x1BC0 8

copy each of the above 6 lines block into empty text files and rename them to crowbar_0.h2o resp. crowbar_1.h2o

Use hex2obj (view link in my sig) to load both, the CROWBAR001.perm.bin and one of the H2O files. btw: I don't know why my SleepingDogs_MeshExtractor nor Mariusz blender script get these UVs and I won't bother examining it.