I really don't care how it looks, as long as it can be cross-platform and it can be forked into an editor for Saga Frontier.
A lot of what we're doing can't, I'm afraid. It's FF7-specific.
*Recognize different disc image formats.
This is something some open libraries can already support, at least to an extent.
*Edit static data tables in game files (note that I'm not changing the size of any files).
*The last one is kinda difficult to describe. I have data for enemies inside of 256 different files. The files can be any size, but you can find the enemy data block by using the pointers at the beginning of every enemy file. So I need something which will open every enemy file, navigate via pointers to the data block, and then paste the modified info to that block.
Again, these are going to be FF7-specific. Sithlord's project is probably going to handle something like this.
*Info on the smartest way to create a patch format. So far, the data is nothing but static data tables. I'd really like patches from older versions of the editor to be backwards compatible, so they need some kind of meta data identifying what each block of data is.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. You mean circulating patches in a non-binary format with appropriate metadata? I suggested something similar
here, where I proposed libraries for transforming native binary data into parseable XML.
@All you guys:
Why not host all the FF7 tools that are Open Source on a single git or mercurial repository? Not because you need to, but because it could give random coders who appear the chance to contribute something, or to take what they need for their own projects.
We don't really have the server resources. It might be easier to use a third party like Sourceforge.
It's a good idea to make it as easy as possible for anyone, of any skill level, to contribute. Otherwise, why even share at all - just write your own tool from scratch, tell everyone how it's better than all other tools, and then never respond to bug reports or feature requests, ever.
Creating a library of tools for efficiently manipulating native data reduces the barrier to entry and allows competition between frontends and their workflows. That's a good thing.
