arcdEx vs AssetRipper

arcdEx is a free Linux tool for listing and extracting files from .arcd archives made by the Defold game engine. It handles compressed files and can decrypt files only when they use Defold's default encryption key. The tool can inspect .texturec resources and extract their contained textures, as well as inspect compiled .luac files and extract Lua source code. To work with an archive, provide the .arcd file; arcdEx guesses paths to the associated .arci index and .dmanifest manifest files. The repository says this version supports manifest version 5, while the README also lists versions 1 through 4. Multiple .arcd files from a Defold web game must be combined before use. The README distinguishes desktop applications, which contain compiled Lua bytecode, from web projects through Defold 1.3.4, which contain Lua source code. It supports command-line and batch extraction, and runs as a Java JAR. The project is licensed under AGPL v3, and its author is credited as Christian Weiske. Archive repacking is not supported.

AssetRipper is an analysis tool for game developers working with Unity game files. It can identify accidentally included dependency assets, broken asset references, and code that could not be inlined or trimmed, as well as convert assets to native Unity format. Unity Project Export creates a project that can be opened in Unity Editor. For viewing content outside Unity, Primary Content Export produces meshes, scenes, and prefabs as GLB models, including for Blender workflows. Supported Unity versions range from 3.5.0 to 6000.4.X, with support quality varying by version. Free stable and nightly builds are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Premium access costs $10 a month while an eligible membership is active, and includes features such as shader decompilation, static mesh separation, prefab outlining, asset path overrides, user-defined package export, and deduplication. Vulkan and OpenGL shaders can be decompiled on any platform, but DirectX shaders are limited to Windows. Traditional Il2Cpp analysis succeeds on about 10% to 20% of methods on x86 games, with lower success on other platforms.