question about turn files
 

I'm interested in making a utility that requires the player's current commanders and their magic paths as input. I'd like to read this info from the saved game files but I don't know anything about their layout. Is this possible to do? I'm assuming the files are encrypted since you're required to give a password but I'm hoping there is a way to access this info, whether it requires a password or not.

I'm not sure if it matters but I'm on Linux, although ideally I'd like my utility to run on all platforms.

Re: question about turn files
 

There is a utility that reads the .2h files for pretender info. And utilities that read data from the game logs. But Im not sure of any that tries to read the turn data.

Re: question about turn files
 

Would the info I'm looking for be in the game logs? I'd assume not since I'm guessing they correspond to the "messages" the player receives at the end of every turn and don't include any state info beyond that.

If the .2h file contains the pretender info and the .trn file contains the data for the previous turn (I'm assuming) what does the ftherlnd file contain?

Re: question about turn files
 

.trn is "turn" file (host to player)
.2h is "to host" (player to host)
ftherlnd is "fatherland" and mostly holds the game data such as the map info, ai, independents, etc

The game log is a debug log and contains much of the games thinking when it processes the turn. It does have commander info and might have magic paths.

Re: question about turn files
 

Well, it's theoretically possible. But you probably wouldn't want to invest the time that it takes to reverse-engineer the file structure. The catgod utility to display Pretender files has been created this way, but those files are relatively small and easily generated and checked against expected data. What you want to do is on a whole other scale.