Castle Paradox

NeoSpade · Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 4:30 am Post subject: Externally Reading the .SAV files

(First of all hey I'm back after not having a (real) computer for over 3 months ^_^)

Right, so I've recently been thinking of making some interesting programs that revolve around reading the OHRs .SAV files, thing is even though it's just reading them; what is safe to touch in there, what's just garbage, and what is the actual useful stuff.

I've been reading through the wiki article on the .SAV format, but I'm still a bit confused as to what I can externally read for much use.

The tags (2636-2762) are the only part I (vaguely) understand, however; I have no idea how to read whether they are ON or OFF.

Are the Globals (20013-21037) the user define Globals, the Pre-define ones, or both, and again is there anyway I can read of the Globals value or state externally?

I know that the current .SAV format is on its way out, but for now I'd just like to see if I can read this stuff off, any explaination would be greatly appreciated.

Bob the Hamster

Rimudora · Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 11:05 am Post subject:

To start off you'd need to get a hex viewer. I used XVI32 for the examples here.

This is what you see right away when you open up the .sav file. (I'm using a Vikings of Midgard save here.) The numbers in each box is a byte, but each INT (the numbers used in the SAV wiki article) is made up of two bytes. So if the wiki article says the integer offset of something is 2636, for example, you'd have to skip ahead to byte 5272, which would bring you here where the tag information is stored.

This part might be a little confusing. The values WITHIN each byte are in the right order (left to right), but you have to read the values in adjacent bytes from right to left. So here at INT 2636, the numbers they're giving you are E0-FD, but you should flip it around and read it as FDE0. If you feed it into a hexadecimal calculator, you see that the decimal value is 74992 and the binary value is:

1111110111100000

If you read this backwards (right to left), it tells you the on/off values of the first 16 tag values. So tags 0-4 are off, tags 5-8 are on, tag 9 is off, and tags 10-15 are on.

I'm sort of an amateur at this, so someone speak up if I'm getting any of this wrong.

TMC · Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 6:28 am Post subject:

Sephy's walkthrough looks correct.

Global variables are stored in a really messy way. They are split into 4 blocks. The easiest way to load them is to adapt the loadglobalvars function in moresubs.bas. This function loads a specified range of globals, so should be easy to modify to load either all, or a single, global. If you don't understand our FB code very well, I could translate it into psuedo code or something else.
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