MassExport into json

[snowinmars-debug]

Hi. Thanks for the amazing project.

Six monthes ago I started a reimplementation of the Planescape:Torment on RenPy. Just for fun educational purposes.

I used NearInfinity MassExported as an entry point for my pipeline: I generate .dlg files with it, parse them into abstract tree, serialize the tree into rpy and apply manual fixes.

Now, as the PoC works, I am planning to start from scratch, but to produce not a pirate version of the game, but to create a legal way to convert steam binaries into custom game engine files. I may work as is, but I have an idea.

To write the pipe in a clean way, I need NearInfinity MassExproter to have an 'export to json/yaml' cli functionality. I read the NearInfinity sources, and I am pretty sure, that it is possible to implement.

The question

Does the 'export to json/yaml' functionality required in the main repo - or is it better to leave it in my fork?

[Argent77]

NI isn't really well-equipped for automation.

For that kind of operation WeiDU would be much more suitable. It provides command line options to list available game resources or mass export them based on regexps.

Examples:

# Print list of all STO files to stdout
weidu --biff-type sto --biff-str ""

# Export all DLG files to the "dialogs" subfolder
mkdir dialogs && weidu --biff-get "^.+\.dlg$" --out "dialogs"

For more complex operations you could also write WeiDU scripts to patch files or generate file information.