Chunk View / Edit tool

[mateofio]

We need a chunk editing tool.

This is very minimal application which loads a single LDB, LMT, LMU, or LSD file. It would only let you view chunks, and write chunks.

It would display the chunks of the file in a single tree view widget. The entire treeview code would be pretty simple to generate from liblcf csv files in python.

I put it here as this makes sense as a standalone simple Qt application. It could also be ncurses, or both.

This would be very useful for gamedevs as a low level tool to test out new functionality and perform game debugging.

This would also be great for EasyRPG to debug problems. Because of all of the size counters, its not convenient to directly edit files in a hex editor like Beyond Compare. Something that had knowledge of chunk structure could.

The UI for this could also be reused to build a frame by frame recording of LSD data and do event tracing.

This should be pretty simple to implement, since there will only be one main widget.

[carstene1ns]

Why not add this issue to tools repository?

[Ghabry]

You can use lcf2xml for editing.

To give it some editor context:
I had a similiar idea but I wanted to split it per Database tab., so for each Actor you have an Advanced button, then for each class, each chipset, etc...

[mateofio]

I put this here as maybe we don't want a Qt dependency in Tools. If we want this in tools that's fine for me too.

This functionality should be present in editor (maybe reusing same widgets) but it should also be standalone.

For example someone could send me a savegame file and I should be able to just easily open it in the tool and view/edit the chunks. I don't want to have to download the entire game and load it in editor just to do quick debugging.

Not a fan of using XML for this purpose. It's hard to read, slow to edit, and for big games xml gen is slow.

[Ghabry]

@fmatthew5876
We ❤️ visitor patterns now.

So this depends on ForEachField. With such an Api it will be very easy to on-the-fly emit the UI here.

(Though this won't replace the Database UI, is just a nice-to-have extra feature)