[Youden]

I don't know of any straightforward tools, most people I've seen reverse engineer a format do it with a hex editor and writing custom scripts. It's not directly relevant but the best I've seen is this presentation about reverse engineering the protocol used to communicate within a car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkgxFplsTnM

It uses some techniques that might be relevant, like monitoring different parts of a file as you make different changes (like accelerating or decelerating). In your case it might be possible to compare between different material definitions for example.

[ggcdn]

Ok thanks, I'll take a look. It's possible for me to generate these files for each of the various material settings so I can manually 'diff' them, simillar to what you're describing

[velosol]

It sounds like you might eventually be able to write a kaitai struct [0] for the resulting format which would make it fairly easy to use the format in your language of choice.

[0]: https://kaitai.io/

[hnick]

If there are massive differences with minor changes that can be a clue that the data is compressed or encrypted in some manner.

A good test would be if you can name/tag/comment items in the file, you can search for these strings.

[ggcdn]

I don’t think there’s compression or encryption. I can search and find the hex representation of text and values that I expect to be there. I guess I need to bite the bullet and spend some time tagging the parameters I know, then figuring out the pattern of padding that is in between.