1.9.80 : Combined XML and TDESCs «12...Next Go

SimGuruModSquad

Hi guys,

Please find attached the Combined Binary tuning as XML and TDESCs for today's patch 1.9.80.

Question: Have you guys been able to convert binary XMLs to text XML? I'd like to stop providing the tuning data as XML, but won't do that until you can generate this data on your own. Also, this patch converts all statemachine resources to binary XML so in general it's good for you to have the ability to convert from binary XML to text.

Thanks,
SGMS

Enceladus

Are there release notes on what scripts and XMLs are updated with each patch? It would come in handy in quickly checking to see if a given mod will need to be updated or not.

SimGuruModSquad

Are there release notes on what scripts and XMLs are updated with each patch?

Hey there, no there are not.

JustAnotherSimsFan

Thank you for the combined tuning files. I don't think anyone in the sim community has made a tool yet to convert binary xml to text xml. I take it you can't recommend something that we could use?

ScarletQueenKat

Thank you very much! I, myself haven't found a way to convert them and I don't think anyone else in the community has either (at least none that are sharing lol). I'd love to know how though so we don't have to keep pestering you for these lol

pbox

Finally a version number one can remember! XD Can we stick with that for a while, please?

Also, thank you.

--

@Enceladus, perhaps try TS4 XMLCompare (by scumbumbo, at MTS). That might make things easier.

Scumbumbo

@SimGuruModSquad - Thanks for once again providing the XML and TDESCs so quickly, we modders REALLY appreciate this!

egureh

Wow, this is fast. Thank you! :D

jtravers88

I remember in the beginning how the talk was about how we would get soooo much help from the devs with modding. I'm a bit concerned that you now talk of not wanting to help as much anymore. It would seem to me that your devs develop with text xml and then convert it to binary for implementation. So you have the text xml correct? I'm just wondering what 'extra step' you have to take or why you would be converting the binary xml to text for us. So if you are indeed doing a conversion for us, what is the harm in telling us what you use for conversion and then we'll use it so you don't have to?

The modders extend the lifespan of the franchise by about 1000 percent while your devs continue to crank out new stuff without fixing the old.

pbox

They didn’t say they “don’t want to help as much anymore”. They were simply asking if what they were doing still makes sense, which is a totally understandable question – it would be a bit much to ask that they should keep up to date on the status of every modding tool that people develop somewhere.

Your whining about stuff not being fixed is completely OT here. If you come across game issues, report them in Bugs or here.

jtravers88

"this patch converts all statemachine resources to binary XML so in general it's good for you to have the ability to convert from binary XML to text."

that is not a question. and I'm not reporting a bug.

SimGuruModSquad

Hello! Just to be clear, we will continue to supply these files until tools are available to decode them.

jtravers88

thank you very much for the clarity. I've been searching and haven't found much googling. I really don't want to try tackling it in visual studio. It might not be all that bad, binary to varchar but I'd rather not think about it.

SimGuruModSquad

Yeah, it's sort of our own custom format so there is nothing off the shelf that will do it. Likely I'll need to provide more information or a utility that just does it. I know some people out there got close to decoding it based off the provided .bt file, so was just wondering if anyone had got it working.

JustAnotherSimsFan

Providing a tool sounds like the better option because the simmers working on tools for The Sims 4 probably have their hands full and since it's not only creating the tool that takes time it's supporting it too.

IngeJones

I am sure it would be far quicker for the people who already know how the conversion is done to do it than a 3rd party toolmaker who is partly in the dark; it shouldn't be forgotten that many of our modders and toolmakers are students who risk getting lower grades if they spend too long with Sims-related stuff. I hope this is not coming out wrong, but *if* an EA person can fit it into his paid time without something else slipping and getting him into trouble, it would be the better option I think.

Scumbumbo

I've started working on this last night. Been putting it off for a while, but it shouldn't be too bad. Hope to have it done in a week or two, but no promises on that! Will inquire if I run into any problems.

IngeJones

Good luck!

DarkWalker

> @Scumbumbo said:
> I've started working on this last night. Been putting it off for a while, but it shouldn't be too bad. Hope to have it done in a week or two, but no promises on that! Will inquire if I run into any problems.

Velocitygrass's Data File Tool does open those files, we can even see that the data is there, and it's open source (GPL3); it can't currently extract anything useful, but tweaking it to dump the XML file might not be hard.

Starting from scratch using the BT files should be easier if you aren't making it into a Qt Creator-based C++ program, though.

ScarletQueenKat

Scumbumbo wrote: »

I've started working on this last night. Been putting it off for a while, but it shouldn't be too bad. Hope to have it done in a week or two, but no promises on that! Will inquire if I run into any problems.

That would be wonderful @Scumbumbo good luck, looking forward to it! No rush though, take the time you need

SimGuruModSquad

Text XML tuning added for Spa Day (aka GP02).

Scumbumbo

@SimGuruModSquad - OK, I'm definitely going to need some more documentation on this. I did manage to read in the binary file using the template provided earlier, including all the schemas and table data. But now that I'm ready to start trying to put it all together, I'm not sure where to go. For instance, for the PackedXmlDocument (table 0), I end up with this output, which checks out with the values in 010 Editor, but I don't know what these offsets actually point to. They don't seem to point to a table/row/value, nor do they seem to point to anything valuable as an offset to the file itself.

This is from the smallest binary tuning file I have, the FP01 (values are decimal):

Element count = 905
First element offset = 1616
Top element offset = 12460
String table offset = 28132
String table count = 457

ETA - OK, I did figure out the string table offset. That points to Table 5 which has more offsets (and 457 rows, coincidence? I think not!)... YAY! And those offsets end up pointing to real strings like "combined" and "g" and "s". I'm getting somewhere, slow but sure.

ETA 2 - OK, so the offsets above now totally make sense.

Table 0 points to rows in Table 1 - got that
Table 1 points to rows in Tables 3 & 4
Table 3 points back to rows in Table 1 again
Table 4 points to rows in Table 2
Table 5 points to the strings in Table 6
Table 2 must point to Table 5 somehow... not sure yet - all I know is that the schema says the values are "value, name"

My brain hurts enough for the night. Still hoping for a post from EA to really pull this together to make sense.

Scumbumbo

OK, I'm pretty sure I'm at 100% comprehension of how this all fits together now. I was confused by the fact I was starting from the first_element. When I tried starting from the top_element everything started to come together. I get "combined" and then "g" with an attribute name,value of "s", "merged".

It's all in my notepad notes, so now it's just a matter of coding it, which should be a "breeze." I just need to store more offsets in my structures so that I can do the pointer math into the file after I've read it all in. If that winds up being too slow I may optimize it to load up the combined XML directly rather than loading all of the data file first per the binary template, but that would be more difficult for someone to update the code if the data file format ever changes.

pbox

Thanks so much for doing that =D

Scumbumbo

The binary tuning file converter has been added to the XML Extractor and is available on MTS: http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=556292

Thanks @SimGuruModSquad for the assistance, I was having a problem with some empty XML tags that would produce invalid results until I looked at some of the stuff you sent me. What would've been probably another couple of hours of confusion turned into a quick 5 minutes.

SimGuruModSquad

Awesome!