Currently every FFXIV library that wants to parse skeleton and animation data (I have no interest in animation but it's worth mentioning) has to somehow deal with these pakfiles. They are a proprietary Havok format, and FFXIV specifically uses the 2012 version of the Havok SDK (which makes sense).

Currently, no one has been able to crack the 2012 format specifically, but there is a bunch of open source projects that claim that they can parse 2014, 2015, etc. Right now everyone is simply using AssetCC.exe which comes from the SDK to manually convert the packfile binary to XML, but it would be huge if we could crack the format wide open and remove the need for that for good.

I have tried to parse this binary format for a while and haven't been able to make any progress, this ticket is just for tracking my discoveries as I come across them.