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Decompiling FS files

RED COOL

RED COOL

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579
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france
Hello
We have a great community that spent time analysing FS files and could after countless time of hard work, reverse engineer those files like BGL MDL....ect
They have provided their work to the community via the FSdev file format wiki which I find really interesting.

I would like to be able to decompile or read a file to be used by my add-ons, for example read a BGL file to extract some essential data like runway position or taxiway point position, but in order to do that I have to open a BGL file using a program that I would have developed according to the file structure wiki that is provided in the website, unfortunately I have never learned how to do that even with years of programming experience.

Would you guys please show me a course or a website that would teach how to read a certain file format knowing it's binary structure using any language form C++ to C#? I don't know what to look for I spent hours on Google trying with no success

It would be much appreciated so thnx in advance
Redouane.
 
Bgl formats differ by version so the format for FS9, FSX. P3D (all versions) and MSFS can be different. What version(s) are you working with? In the FS world the file formats are proprietary MS/LM and so on do not publish the format and, in theory, reverse engineering them is breaking copyright. To my knowledge no one has ever been charged with such an offense. So much of the work is reverse engineering the bytes of the file to reflect what you expect to be in it.

There are some tools already created which will decompile the bgl files to say XML which you can then use in your code. Also some that will read the format into a viewer. There are also some documents describing the formats but not much updated since FSX.

So I guess a question is - do you actually need to write your own decompiler or can you use one that already exists?
 
I would like to read those files on run time so I can use some information about the sceneries for some add-ons, for example: reading coordinates of a specific parking position and render it in an external window.
I just want to learn how to read binary files knowing their structure, there seem to be no decent tutorial on the internet so I figured I would ask the community that did it the best
 
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