mission.dat file

[GogglesPizanno]

M25 mentioned to me that stumpy (or someone else perhaps) may have decoded the mission.dat format at some point. Any truth to this rumor and if so is it documented somewhere?

** Stumpy, how can I ask you these questions when your inbox is full   

[stumpy]

Oops. I keep forgetting to check that and I guess the board doesn't post a notification that my inbox is full. It should be uncluttered now.

I never wrote up any documentation specifically for the mission.dat parser in the datfiles module, other than the datfiles documentation that either comes with FFX (I forget if we included it) or is available as part of a recent version of the datfiles distro (I see the last one I uploaded was v0.255 here).

I'm kind of in the middle of getting some RL garbage out the door right now (taxes, pfeh!). But, if this is related to your level.txt-importing-templates issue in the other thread, I was planning on looking at this if I get time.

It should be doable to get something that takes two (or three) file names (the mission's mission.dat, the mod's objects.dat, and maybe the game's art.ff) and helps in two steps. First, it can create a list of all the templates that correspond to the given NIFs (some will have more than one template using a NIF). Then it will read through the list (in which the modder might have re-ordered or deleted multiple template matches) and use the first match to flesh out the mission.dat with template names so that FFEdit can use it in level edit mode.

Let me know if that would be helpful and, if so, I will give it a go later this week.