By now the project has grown large enough (8879 lines of code) that I think it might be a useful lookup tool for some modders/contributors or some other data nerds that really need to know the exact muzzle velocity and setup time differences between weapons
.
Stuff it currently does quite nicely:
- Gather kit information. List can be filtered using regex search strings
- Gather weapon information. List can be filtered using regex search strings
- Gather information about maps
- Generate minimaps showing the AAS routes (not yet completed)
- Gather information about projectiles and materials (data parsing is done, but no GUI yet to access this in a fancy way). I plan to add a "damage calculator" sort of thing, allowing the user to see the exact damage a specific weapon/projectile will do on hitting a specific material/armor.
- Compiles xml-based DBs for quick data access
- Can decompile the menuatlas files
- Can read DDS files
I also aim to reconstruct vehicles (engine, armor, weapons, mobility) as well at some point, but that's for a more distant future version.
--- FOR PROGRAMMERS ---
For my own convenience I already have been using Bitbucket for this project for some time, and this is one of the ways you can access it:
https://bitbucket.org/WGP_Senshi/wikiparser
The tool uses SWT for native-OS-lookalike GUIs, and I'm on Win64bit, so that's the version it'll run on out of the box. But if you pull it and simply replace the referenced SWT with the SWT of your OS in the classpath, everything will work fine again. But I just assume most modders use win64bit anyway.
The bitbucket repo is basically a 1:1 copy of my local Eclipse project workspace, so if you use Eclipse and eGit as well, you can easily clone the entire repository as a new local project.
I never learned to program in a professional sense, and this has been my "startup" project, so if you have computer science experience, expect to cringe at my horrible code hackjobs
. Which is another reason I'm opening this up, it's getting difficult to learn auto-didactically and I'm always eager to learn about optimizing processes.However: Most data parsing works quite nicely already, which might make this a valid base to branch off for your own needs. The tool is entirely geared towards my wiki use, so most output it generates is in the wiki format I need for my wiki templates. The underlying data objects usually contain many more attributes (=all) that I do not need or use, you just need to rewrite the output formatters to get those as well.
To be clear: I invite you to create forks and if you got something cool, make pull requests, I'm very eager to see what you come up with! I'm very open to integrating pull requests into the master branch.
--- FOR NON-PROGRAMMERS ---
I also offer the current in-dev version as a direct download here for you to play around with. Be advised that this compiled version will only run on Windows 64bit.
Consider this very alpha. The non-programmer version will be updated sporadically when I feel essential features have been completed or a number of bugs have been fixed. If interest is high enough, I'll also put in some auto-updater code I already have lying around to facilitate updating.
--- Note to BOTH ---
The tool currently is very bad at exception handling, and I absolutely expect the tool to run into exceptions causing fatal crashes upon selecting maps/weapons/kits.
If that happens, please tell me exactly how to reproduce it and/or provide the error message given. Usually it's very easy to catch those exceptions once I know where they pop up.
PLEASE add bug reports on the bitbucket issue tracker of the project. It makes it much easier to keep track of bugs and fixes for you and me and keeps this thread here open for general feedback.
If the app crashes and you don't know why, execute it from a local command window (cmd) with the java -jar Parser.jar command. That way you'll get the console output in the cmd window which will include the crash message you then can use to either debug yourself or raise an issue on the issue tracker above.
--- HOW TO RUN ---
I strongly suggest to store this tool in a separate folder. It will create some files for its internal db and persistent settings stored.
The tool is not able to look inside the mod's zip files so it needs everything in an EXTRACTED form.
Modders already should be familiar with this, using the recommended approach to clone the pr folder into a "pr_edit" one. Inside this, all zips should be extracted (maps, objects etc.). After that, the original zips can be deleted or left sitting around, the tool doesn't care.
It requires an up-to-date Java 7.
Double-click the Parser.jar to launch it. If that doesn't work, open a command prompt on the same folder and use "java -jar Parser.jar" to run it.
Once the app launches, it asks to be directed to the mod's localization folder (mods\pr_edit\localization)
After that, before doing anything else, you should head to the Settings Tab and use the buttons to generate the DB (a one time thing that speeds up tool responsiveness later a lot). Order is currently irrelevant, EXCEPT: ALWAYS build the HANDHELDS before the KITS, or you'll get error messages.
Minimap building is not necessary, I just included that to compile a handy set of all the map loading screens (those which show the gamemode, AAS routes and vehicle numbers).
Once all that is done, you can switch through the tabs and finally analyze the data yourself
