Temple Tools

Info

This is a repository collecting some custom tools for working with data files for the Temple of Elemental Evil PC game. I expect most of the tools won't be very large, so don't really need separate repositories.

The repository is structured as a Haskell project using Cabal for the build tools. The whole repo is set up as one project that allows building all the tools from the main directory if so desired (since that will be how I work most of the time).

Tools

• craft-dat

  This tool extracts/creates Troika DAT archives, which are used to hold most of the data files. This is necessary if you want to see most of the individual files from the original game.

  The format isn't complicated, but the extractors I know of are Windows executables, so require emulation to run on other systems. This tool should work on any system that GHC and the Haskell zlib package support.

• transmute-tab-to-text

  This tool translates between ToEE .tab files and a more human readable textual representation. This allows editing the latter representation with relative ease in a normal text editor and then transforming back into a format understood by the game.

  At the moment, only help tables are supported.

  Note: the transformation process may not perfectly preserve the original files. In the case of the textual representation, some parts are order insensitive, and the tool will reorder those parts into a canonical ordering. In the case of .tab files, actual ToEE files contain some lines that aren't understood by the tool, and those will be discarded. Most of these are nonsense lines, but it's possible some legitimate ones have been missed.

  So, it is advisable to not run this tool on the original ToEE files with the expectation of recreating the original with some edits. A better methodology would be to use this tool to build your own override .tab files. Then you just need to ensure your own entries are understood by the tool, rather than any oddball ToEE ones.

• polymorph-mob

  This tool is used to manipulate ToEE .mob files. These are the files that specify all the actual objects/creatures/etc. that occur in modules. Such things are basically specified in two steps

  1. A prototype for the relevant type of object is defined in protos.tab. This defines a bunch of object fields that are used for 'prototypical' such objects, and many individual occurrences of that prototype may occur in game (including being generated dynamically).

  2. A mob file refers to a prototype, but optionally overrides some of its fields, and specifies certain other fields that only make sense for a particular object in the game, like an actual location.

  The mob files are a binary format, which makes them even less convenient to work with than the prototype table. The intention of polymorph-mob is to allow converting between more readable formats, like JSON, and the binary format, so that the mobs can be edited using ordinary tools like text editors (though the right information to put in one might require a specialized tool, like the game itself).

Notes

The executables here are built with a command line parser that supports completion for bash, zsh and fish. To have a tool generate a completion script, run a command like

polymorph-mob --bash-completion-script `which polymorph-mob`

then put the output in an appropriate location. For other shells, replace bash with zsh or fish.