[Scummvm-devel] Resource problems

[David Given]

On Tuesday 20 November 2001 19:32, you wrote:
[...]
> 1) you have .lfl, .lec, .000, .001, .la0, .la1, etc files (I call them
> resource files - but that's what we need to agree upon) 2) very old .lfl
> files don't have any 'easy understandable' format. somewhere along the line
> of monkey island 1 they 'started' with a chunk based format. there are
> several 'chunk formats': repeated <SIZE_LE><ID2><DATA>, repeated
> <ID4><SIZE_BE><DATA> 3) chunks have an ID (ie LFLF, LOFF, ROOM, RO, BX,
> etc). for the room/costumes chunks it could be that some games have the
> 'same' format, despite different IDs (a RO/ROOM from MI1/MI2 could have the
> same format - I don't know)
> 4) chunk formats evolve (RO, ROOM), (CO, COST, AKOS, etc)

Mmf. I'd managed to decipher most of that from the ScummVM source, but I 
wasn't aware of all the different versions.

Last night I put together an initial version of Skim. This is intended to be 
a C++ library for manipulating SCUMM files. Unlike the one built in to 
ScummVM, this is intended to be both brain-dead simple and also read/write; 
the idea is that you should be able to build up a resource tree in memory and 
dump it out onto disk, as well as loading an existing resource tree from disk 
and manipulate that.

It currently looks like:

	SArchive (deals with a complete SCUMM file or file set)
	  SRoom (deals with an individual room in an archive)
	    SResource (deals with a resource in a room)

...and it's got to the stage of loading the resource and successfully 
creating all the SRoom objects. I didn't know about the LFLF chunks, so I'll 
have to add another layer there. Also, my terminology may need changing --- I 
was thinking 'archive' for the entire file, and 'resource' for an entity in 
that file. And I can't think of a good way of making it work on all format of 
files --- parsing the chunk structure is easy enough, but I don't know enough 
about the innards of each resource. (For example, is a V5 SOUN resource the 
same format as a V, er, 3 SO resource? I doubt it.)

> does anyone have a preference what (tool) we use for generating
> documentation (I think it would at least have to be able to produce
> html/pdf files)

Docbook, of course. It can be processed and turned into any format you care 
to name.

http://docbook.sourceforge.net/

-- 
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