XI Tinkerer

Tool for decoding and encoding FFXI DAT files.

It can export DATs into human-readable files (YAML), which can then be edited and re-encoded into DAT files. One DAT file is converted 1:1 with exactly one editable file.

Currently, it only supports conversion of the English DATs, but the plan is to eventually support the other languages as well, once the conversion tables and unique control-structures for those are figured out. See plans for future work below.

Planned Work

It is planned to eventually support handling of most DAT-related things, like:

• All languages:
  • English text in DATs
  • Japanese text in DATs
  • French text in DATs
  • German text in DATs
• All DAT formats (non-exhaustive list):
  • Dialog
  • Entity names
  • Status info
  • Item info (most are supported)
  • d_msg (most are supported)
  • XISTRING (partially done)
  • Spell info
  • Ability info
  • Quest info
  • Events/cutscenes (likely based on info from XiEvents)
• GUI editor for complex DATs, i.e.:
  • Items
  • DATs with images
  • Events/cutscenes joined with the used dialog text strings and entities

Breaking changes

There will most likely be breaking changes as new versions of this tool gets updated, since various fields can be added/removed/renamed.

For example, there are currently still unknown fields included in the human-readable files. These fields are necessary data for it to properly generate usable DAT files again, so they have to be included. As understanding of the DAT files progresses, and the meaning of these fields are determined, the field names/content will be changed/renamed. This will currently cause the tool to not be backwards-compatible with the previous versions of human-readable files (since their fields/formats have changed), in which case they will have to re-exported from DATs to be able to generate DATs again.

Development setup

The project is built using Rust utilizing the tauri toolkit for building the application. The frontend UI is built using the solidjs framework.

Prerequisites

The following software is required to develop and build the application:

• Rust (and cargo) for the backend
• Prerequisites for building tauri applications
• NodeJS for the frontend
• pnpm as the NodeJS package manager

Developing

The backend rust crates can be built/tested/etc with the regular cargo build, cargo test, etc.

To develop on the frontend, navigate to the client directory and install the necessary dependencies with pnpm install.

Once they're installed, you can develop the frontend application using the following command, which will provide automatic (hot-)reloading whenever the frontend or tauri-backend crate changes:

pnpm tauri dev

Credits

The starting point for the binary structure of some of the DAT formats, which are used in this project, were partially derived from the POLUtils project code, so credit goes to them for their work in reversing these. Their work is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 with the following copyright:

Copyright © 2004-2014 Tim Van Holder, Nevin Stepan, Windower Team

This project also uses encoding conversion table files, which were originally from the POLUtils project, but some have been modified to allow them being used in reverse to allow encoding back to the original symbols. The full license file and copyright text have been included in the folder that these reside in.