Somewhat OT - Anyone here familiar with Zlib compression?

[Drawde]

This is somewhat OT since it isn't EQ-related, but this seems to be the forum most frequented
by programmers/tool developers.
Anyway, I'm interested in creating a .pak file viewer/file extractor for the MMORPG Neocron. (.pak
files are the file storage archives for Neocron, equivalent of EQ .s3d). Being able to extract files
from the .paks should open up all sorts of possibilities including offline zone exploration. However the
archives are compressed, using the zlib compression format (freeware, libraries and source can be downloaded
from www.zlib.org)
I don't really have the programming knowledge to do this (I am a programmer but don't have any experience with
complex binary file I/O, the most complex binary files I can deal with are uncompressed BMPS ), but someone
with more experience of this type of coding, and particularly zlib, would probably find it very little trouble.

Anyway, does anyone want to help? I'll post a small Neocron .pak file (from the demo version, so not "warez"; the
full version is downloadable from the official site anyway) if anyone who's interested doesn't have the game. Viewing
it with a hex editor would probably give you all the information you need; the files contained in the archive are listed
at the start of the file (unlike some archive formats where even the file list is compressed)

The developers have already said on the forums that they don't mind what people do with the client (as long as they don't do
any server hacking) so there shouldn't be any legal problems with this. A couple of other players have apparently
written .pak extractors but so far have refused to release them to the public (not sure of their reasons, since the
devs don't mind)