Author Topic: Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?  (Read 6986 times)

B_L_Angel

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Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?
« on: September 04, 2012, 04:08:30 PM »
Hi

I had a thought this morning, to maybe try and make a hero simulator for my heroes and was wondering if there were any documentation for the format of the export chunk or the text files Mid's uses?

GuyPerfect

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Re: Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?
« Reply #1 on: September 04, 2012, 04:57:36 PM »
It's not public, though depending on how events play out, it might be provided. Even knowing how the data is encoded, though, the contents of the files are still somewhat cryptic because of all the ID strings that don't match what you're used to seeing in-game.

B_L_Angel

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Re: Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?
« Reply #2 on: September 05, 2012, 03:14:22 PM »
Appreciated.

Hopefully this will keep my enthusiasm going and maybe other people's


Codewalker

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Re: Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?
« Reply #3 on: September 05, 2012, 03:17:14 PM »
If you're specifically asking about the Mids chunk format, IIRC it uses numeric indexes that require you to have the Mids database handy in order to look up what they mean. So it's not really usable without it.

I *think* the text dump contains all the same information that the data chunk does, but I'm not 100% sure.

B_L_Angel

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Re: Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?
« Reply #4 on: September 05, 2012, 06:57:25 PM »
I thought about writing a parser to read those in and it didn't look too bad. I would still need to read the database to calculate enhancement levels for the powers. I know it might be easier to just buckle down and start doing data entry but its a personality quirk. I would rather do almost anything else than replicate work that had already been done.

Diellan

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Re: Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?
« Reply #5 on: September 05, 2012, 08:28:52 PM »
The text dump and the code should be identical, since I haven't touched them much at all in a very long time.

As for the Mids' DB itself, that's a bit more complicated. One of my super-secret side projects was to create a Mids API layer that anybody would be able to use, so that people could write their own programs that would be able to interact with both the Mids' DB and any Mids' character build. Anybody who has been paying attention will have noticed the creation of a few extra dlls (Base.dll and MidsControls.dll) that are the beginnings of that project. It's actually quite close to ready... the Base.dll has everything needed to load up and interact with the Mids DB, but the character stuff is still split between Base.dll and the Mids exe file.

B_L_Angel

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Re: Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?
« Reply #6 on: September 05, 2012, 09:48:20 PM »
Hmm any docs on the DLL ? I know that is usually the last thing to get done but figured I would ask.

I think it would be in the doable zone to parse that then do lookups to the db then populate the character description.

Diellan

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Re: Is there any public documentation of the file formats ?
« Reply #7 on: September 06, 2012, 03:43:57 PM »
Not yet, as it isn't even in a ready state (e.g. I could change the names and functionality at any moment).