savegame format

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lgromanowski
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savegame format

Post by lgromanowski »

john.moonsugar wrote: Greetings, while I'm not involved with OpenMW, I look on with interest and wish you folks the best.

I'm working on a little tool (tes3cmd) that does various things with plugins. I've figured out some of the fields in the savegame that I haven't found published descriptions of anywhere, but there's more to be done. I was just wondering if you guys had reverse engineered it all yet, of if we could help each other out.

One of my motivations is that eventually I'd like tes3cmd to do a nice job of savegame cleaning. Most people who complain of "corrupted" saves are actually dealing with data values that cause MW to barf, while the actual TES3 record format in the save is fine.
Zini wrote: We haven't done any work on savegames at all yet. My position on the original format is to simply scrap it and to come up with a solution of our own. While we are not adding new features before OpenMW 1.0 some of the "drive-by"-improvements we made or will make very soon, might be incompatible with the original format already.
We probably could use a savegame importer for the original format, so people can keep their saves when moving from original Morrowind to OpenMW (and this might indeed offer some opportunities for your project and OpenMW to cooperate). Anything beyond that I would consider a waste of time.
john.moonsugar wrote:
Zini wrote:We probably could use a savegame importer for the original format, so people can keep their saves when moving from original Morrowind to OpenMW
You're position on making improvements to the format is quite understandable, the current format certainly has flaws. But I'm sure people will appreciate some kind of backwards compatibility, they often get very attached to their characters, so it's good to hear you are thinking of that. I'll keep noodling around, and if I do make progress reverse engineering the saves, I'll try to make it obvious enough in tes3cmd so people can take advantage of that experience.
nicolay wrote: Sorry I've been away for a little while, but I for one am VERY interested in what you've got on ESM and ESS data. Our ESM/ESP record info is more or less complete (with a few exceptions), but the savegames contains stuff I don't understand. Helping each other out seems like a great idea.

Importing savegames (sometime in the future) seems like a must to me, although I doubt we will be exporting them.
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