davidlallen Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 I have tried to trace back the history of fnvedit and got back to 2007 with tes4edit. But I cannot find the answer to my question. I am an experienced programmer interested in writing other programs which read/write the esp files like fnvedit does. For example, I am designing a text file format which would make entering of complex dialog trees much easier. Is the source code for fnvedit available? Since fnvedit has a long history and wide usage, I feel sure it does not infringe on any intellectual property of bethsoft or other developer companies. If the fnvedit development team wants to keep their work private, that is certainly their right. I think that the mod community could benefit from additional programs besides geck and fnvedit, to make creating mods easier. It may be that fnvedit is private but it is based on other public subroutine libraries for esp read/write; any information about that would be helpful also. As a last resort, any information about the file format of esp would be a starting point, but probably I would not pursue my own parser for this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quetzlsacatanango Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 (edited) I'm almost certain fnv/fo3edit is released under GPL so I would expect it to be available on sourceforge or something analogous. Maybe I'm thinking of FOMM though... Edited January 18, 2011 by Quetzlsacatanango Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidlallen Posted January 18, 2011 Author Share Posted January 18, 2011 Searching "fallout" or "oblivion" at sourceforge doesn't find anything directly. There are a bunch of projects such as "oblivion works" which appears to be a GUI around wrye bash. I may look into wrye bash but fnvedit seems to have a lot more users. I have pm'd elminsterau also, of course. I found an interview he did on the Bethesda blog site which is interesting but does not discuss source code status. The old base file format is documented here, but I did not trace around to see if there is an update which describes fo3 or fnv specific records. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ElminsterAU Posted January 19, 2011 Share Posted January 19, 2011 The full source of xEdit has not been released publicly. Neither under GPL nor any other license. Technically it is "Copyright by <me>. All rights reserved.". I did release the source for the core engine responsible for load/saving modules and representing/modifying them in memory under the MPL in the past with TES4Dump and FO3Dump. There hasn't been any noticeable interest in that source. Even if I would release the full source of xEdit, nobody would be easily able to compile it because it contains dependencies on a number of commercial components which I obviously can't redistribute in source. Furthermore, it is written in Delphi (XE by now) and most people are not familiar with that. I'm happy to make the full xEdit source (minus any commercial components which I can't redistribute) privately available on request on the condition that the source is not redistributed and have done so a number of times in the past. If anyone is interested in the source, please send me a PM with a description of what you intend to do with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidlallen Posted January 19, 2011 Author Share Posted January 19, 2011 Thanks for the info. One more reply in the forum rather than PM, in case others may be interested. If I understand correctly, the read/write engine is separate, and you could release that without including any commercial components. Does this produce an in-memory data model with an API that an experienced programmer could build upon? What language is this part implemented in? In general I am poking around at the idea of a text file based interface to quickly create dialog topics. I find this very time consuming in the geck gui because you can only see one small piece at a time. The conversation editor is slightly better but not much. I feel this may be one reason that many published quest mods rely on fights, or notes, rather than dialog. So I would define the text format, build and check a data model, and then use the write part of the API to write out an esp file. Or if it is better, read an existing esp file, add the dialog data, and then write out a new esp file. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ElminsterAU Posted January 19, 2011 Share Posted January 19, 2011 Yes, the read/write engine produces an in-memory data model with a usable API and it does not have any dependencies on commercial components. But I have not spend any time documenting it. As everything else, that core engine is written in Delphi. It's possible that it can be compiled with FPC (free pascal), but I've not attempted that. Using that core engine it should be relatively simple to write a program that loads and esp, makes modifications to it, and saves the esp again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidlallen Posted January 19, 2011 Author Share Posted January 19, 2011 Hmm. (google/wikipedia lookup on delphi). So, it happens I programmed a lot in Turbo Pascal back in 1985-1987, but I probably don't remember any of it. Let me look around a little more before I request your sources. Thanks very much for updating this where others can search for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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