Bully File Editor *beta testing thread*

[MadmaN]

hehe yup 

[Rise]

Editing the trigger.img file is easy. All you do is extract all the files inside trigger.img to a directory named however you want. Then you can use my bully editor im working on to edit the files. Atm most the files show up as a unknown format for bully since I am currently decoding the file formats and constructing the proper code to detect them properly. But they can still be edited. The ide files should be edited with a text editor like notepad++ until I get that file format working correct since atm you cant save a ide file since its not detected right.

madman add me on xfire my name is tuffjtags

[bullseye1001]

did you get any progress with the idb files? Im assuming its abbreviated from the old gta files "Item definition" to "Item definition binary" ? GTASA also uses binary files for speed in loading but unsure if that's the case.

add me to your beta testers, if you need another. i have plenty of exp. doing beta reports for homebrew applications.

[Red Blaster]

Hey bullseye, welcome aboard B-B.

[MadmaN]

I will add you to the testers list as soon as I finish up with the next build...and yes you are correct that the .idb files are .ide aka item definition files encoded in a format that is not quite binary...but not quite text either...its a format that kinda eludes me on identifying it since I can say for a certainty that the .idb files are not compiled versions since you cannot compile a .ide since it is technically not a script in the strictest sense of the word...not like lua or perl...or python...etc it is more of a text file used not much different then a normal text based configuration file and I strongly suspect that the file is just given some kind of custom encoding that is for the moment unknown to me.....since if you compare the contents of the default.idb with default.ide....it has the exact same contents...aside from the fact that .idb files seem to have a good portion of the content encoded so you cannot see everything. If I can figure out how the .idb files are generated....then the .ide files can be used to make replacements...since the ide files that are included with the pc version of bully were actually not meant to be included since they are actually not used directly by the game...they are infact the source files for the .idb files that the game actually uses....and I can say that simply renaming a .ide to .idb and replacing it in the img archive does not work...just crashes the game.

[bullseye1001]

Here's a few things i noticed this morning, first a warm welcome to the boards and an interesting response. Thanks

I'm not by any means a coder - this stuff could've been done by anyone i guess.
If you look at a comparison of default.ide and default.idb in hex things start to make sense:

1. Section names are reversed in .idb version



2. some numeric values, in this case the indexes are converted to  16bit short of the corresponding .ide decimal value





edit....

Simply the idb / ipb formats follow these rules:

1. Strip all comments
2. Reverse the section text ie. "peds" changes to "sdep" (pc version)
3. Leave all text inside a section unchanged - including item names that use numbers. ie "special17"
4. Convert all carriage returns 0D0A to a single null byte 00
5. With the exception above convert all numbers in 4-byte sequence to 32-bit float or 16bit short (far as ive seen) The portions with a decimal place are in the IDE 2dfx section and more generally in the ipb's, these parts are 32-bit float. Just how the interpreter distinguishes these different formats of numbers is unk for now.
6. IDK about all other files in this type, the "end" declaration is not present in default.idb like in default.ide. Instead it repeats twice the last index value (10905)
7. Padded to be dividable by 512 2048 bytes ?

Thats all i can do without learning a programming language and coding something to deal with these rules.

over to you Madman..

[MadmaN]

heh....I came to the very same conclusions myself so good work on that. there are a few other things that are different which is some light binary code as well which leads me to still conclude that the file is simply encoded to a different format other then plain jane text that notepad can edit.....notepad++ can open the file but you will see NULL and other things where the whitespace is so I think it is just a matter of locating the proper encoding it is....unless I am just missing my guess entirely and it is in fact somehow compiled into a semi binary format the game understands. I have been looking at some clues in the default.ide near the bottom but they dont tell a huge amount.

[DrgoonStormer]

I could test.

[MadmaN]

It will be a while yet before I get around to getting a new version for testing ready since I have been concentrating on other things as of late....but still plan to do more work with the file editor soon enough.

[Shrimp]

Is this even alive? If so, I'd love to try this boy out. Probably old and abandoned, I like roaming the abandoned room's of B-B. Hehe.

Anyway, is this still alive? I would really love trying this out. Although it's 2 year's old.

[MadmaN]

I may update it and redo it sometime but for now consider it a final beta. The language it is written in is pretty old and very outdated. This was a leftover gta modding tool of mine from back in the day and I converted it for bully use.