Now why do I get the feeling everyone who wants an XC DE save editor is staring at me right now?
The idea has been in the back of my head recently, and I do have interest in making one...
BUT!
There are 4 major issues stopping me from doing so.
They are:
- The save file data format for XC DE has not been reverse engineered yet, and is simply not understood. @zestiva has done some work and identified a few sections of the save file, and posted the results in this thread, but that is only a start, as the file obviously contains heaps more data that is still unidentified. I think we need a community effort to figure out the data format and what each and every bit of it is for. We can only safely edit what we know after all. Anything else is just random guessing.
- A lot has changed over the last 2 years since I made the XC2 save editor. It was written in C# and using the "WinForms" UI toolkit to build the UI, which is very easy to make GUI applications with, but Windows -only. But now my computers don't use Windows as their main OS (instead using Linux). Therefore, any app I make would need to be cross-platform, which means using WinForms is ruled out (either that or force all non windows users, myself included, to run them using "wine" compatibility layer). I can still program in C# in my current setup, but I would need to take time to find a C# UI toolkit that is cross platform, and learn and practise how to program with it, which is doable, but would take time.
- I have other personal projects that I am in the middle of, they need to be finished first before I jump to a new one.
- When I am not working on the aforementioned projects, I am spending all my free time by... actually playing XC DE
So, to answer your question, short answer is "MAYYYYYYYYYYYYYBE". Points No. 2,3, and 4 are ones that I can obviously handle alone, but the main showstopper is Point No. 1. To get a save editor off the ground, we need to know how to actually edit the bloody thing. But file format reverse engineering is something I do not know how to do.
Only way I can do it is:
- Load up game
- Make single in-game chance of 1 thing (and ONLY 1 thing)
- Save game in different slot and exit game
- Extract both save files from console and compare the differences
- Manually edit 1 of those differences (and ONLY 1 of them) on PC
- Inject altered save back into console
- Load up game
- See if your manual change has had the desired effect in-game.
- Rinse and repeat... FOR.EVERY.SINGLE.PLAYER.RELATED.THING.IN.THE.GAME.
This would obviously be extremely tedious and horrifically slow, especially for only 1 person. And I am only 1 person last I checked.
A much faster way would be to reverse engineer the game executable itself, and learn how the game itself handles the save file.but I do not know how to do such reverse engineering, so if someone were to try this, it would not be me unfortunately. I would have to do it by the super slow manual method described earlier.
...
So to sum things up, the main big thing that people need to do is actually figure out the save file itself before any decent save editor could be made. If people the community can come together and figure out the save data format and publicly document it, then awesome. Otherwise... not so awesome. The more that is figured out about the save file, the closer we get to having an XC DE save editor. Also, it will take a while.
Now, if you will please excuse me, I have a certain glowy clairvoyant sword-swinging, killer robot smashing, mass sidequest-grinding, epic world-saving, home-portable hybrid entertainment console-exclusive game of the video kind to go waste the rest of my current free time playing.