ToT saved/scenario file format

[Subliminal]

I'm sure most of you (if not all) have seen or used those programs which edit the scenario file allowing you to change important aspects in your mod. CivCity I think is one but theres more. I've read

All common knowledge about
HEX-EDITING
and more
by Allard Höfelt

but that doesnt give the offsets for ToT infact it was written for Fantastic World (I belive) and therefore isnt much good to me. Does anyone know of a doc or a site that contains information about the ToT saved file format or can anyone post a reply telling me of the variouse aspects of the file.

[techumseh]

I don't. But since the hex editing programs of Carl Fritz, Mercator and others work on both, there must be quite a bit in common between the two formats. In fact CF and Merc would probably be in the best position to respond.

[Mercator]

Allard's document is really the best thing to start with. The entire structure is pretty much the same... You should be able to get pretty far with that and a good hexeditor.
I think the best person to talk to would be Angelo Scotto. He once sent me some info on the ToT file formats, I must have them lying around somewhere... For MapEdit and CivStack I only need to be able to find the map data and have nothing to do with anything else, so I don't know too many ToT specific things.

Such documents are nice, but I was wondering if it were possible to make some sort of a universal Civ2 savegame structure, possibly, say, as a DLL, a dynamic C struct, an object or some sort of a Civ2 specific hexeditor.

[Subliminal]

Ok I'll try and get in touch with Angelo. Is he on this forum and should I pm him? If you could find the files I'd be very grateful.
I'll try and see about a dll like that, such thing is a good idea but to be able to support all civ save games it would have to be able to tell wht version of civ they're from.
How would I go about contacting Calr Fritz I've used his programs and they work well with multiple versions of civ.

[Mercator]

I think you can PM both Angelo Scotto (his full name is also his Apolyton member name) and Carl Fritz (is Gothmog).

Being able to tell what version the file is is trivial. All savegames/scenarios start with a null-terminated string "CIVILIZE" after that comes a short integer version number (the number doesn't exactly correspond to the "real" version number, but that doesn't matter because all you need to know is the 5+ numbers for the civ versions).

By the way, you needn't know the savegame format to make a sprite editor.

[Subliminal]

Ok I'll see about contacting them, thanks.
Like I said in the e-mail I'm new to hex-editing and that type of programming so I assumed the text would be a good place to start :-/ maybe I was wrong, anyhow I'm still at a loss reading the text file you sent me, I cant find the offsets and without them I'm clueless also the code looks good but I'm not entirely sure what does what even though it is well documented.
Here is were I hope Angelo can help as he does C++