Document .dat specification

Required skills: Reading code

Difficulty: Easy

The Age of Empires .dat format is AoE's messy way of storing game data and unit stats. There is currently no official specification made available which makes writing and testing parsers very difficult. The format also changes with every game or expansion (and even some DE2 updates). It is not a great situation overall.

We should therefore create an unofficial specification of the several .dat file version that are floating around with added descriptions and comments if available. Our converter code already includes descriptions for some of the entries. More information about the differences between the versions can be found in the genieutils repository.

The specification document could be created as a table that looks roughly like this:

Extra: If we want to go further, we could also add a nice HTML doc generated from the markdown. The agescx format doc is a good example for how this could look.

Further Reading

• openage datfile reader

Start by reading the converter code and the linked openage datfile reader, then compare version differences in the genieutils repository. The specification should document the relevant .dat versions in tables with entry names, data types, and descriptions; an HTML document is optional.