Overview

Format

Key Table and Resource References

Many resources in Sims 3 packages refer to other resources. Resources are identified by a 16 byte value made up of:

DWORD Resource type	// T
DWORD Resource group	// G
QWORD Instance		// I

These are known as the resource key. Generally they appear in the order shown above and the canonical reference format you may see is "TGI" or a string of numbers like 00000000-00000000-0000000000000000 or key:00000000:00000000:0000000000000000.

Where one resource contains many references to others, there is frequently a table listing the TGI values. Within the resource, the location of this table is given by a value known as the key table:

DWORD TGI_offset	// from after this DWORD
DWORD TGI_size		// 4 + tgiCount * 16

At TGI_offset will be the list of resource references.

DWORD tgiCount
--repetition tgiCount:
	DWORD TID
	DWORD GID
	QWORD I64

Lists of resource references in other formats (TIG, ITG, etc) do occur but these are not key tables per se.