SE4 Savegame format? - for developers

[csebal]

Well, as a newcomer, let me introduce myself. I'm a developer from Hungary, playing all kinds of strategy games, with a special love for 4x space strategy (the kind of game moo / se4 is)

At the moment, i'm working on a SE4 Multiplayer tool with a friend of mine, which is supposed to make multiplayer games really fast.

When i first started to use it, i realized that transmitting savegames trough the net is kinda slow.

See, im on a DSL, and the other player (the host) is on a DSL as well. It has a rather limited, 16k/s upload bandwith, so transmitting 1000k savegames can take quite some time.

A while ago, i discovered an old tool, called rsync. It is basically a filecopy tool, with a very smart algorythm, that only copies the differences between files.

Whoa, i tought, this is what i need, after all, there cant be so big differences between the savegame files of turns compared to the previous turn's savegame file.

Before i started to implement the above mentioned algorythm, i ran a few tests, and guess what i've found.

THERE IS NOT A SINGLE BYTE IN THE WHOLE SAVEGAME FILE, THAT MATCHES THE PREVIOUS SAVE.

Well, as there must be others, who develop tools for SE4, i tought i could as well ask it here:

Does anyone know why exactly that is? Its obviously some kind of compression or encoding, i just wonder if there is a way to tell se4 not to do it.

Does anyone have an idea?

Thanks in advance,
csebal

[ August 06, 2004, 12:10: Message edited by: csebal ]