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FS2004 Querying BGL

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sfrenchie

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It seems programs like DOF (Duplicate Object Finder) read objects ID directly from the BGL.

Is this done with homemade code, a DLL, a wrapper class, an offset to read, some program I missed from the SDK, else?
 
sfrenchie said:
It seems programs like DOF (Duplicate Object Finder) read objects ID directly from the BGL.

Is this done with homemade code, a DLL, a wrapper class, an offset to read, some program I missed from the SDK, else?
Click to expand...

Since that is my program I will answer.

MS does not provide any official way to decompile the bgl format. This is because it is proprietary and copy right the original developer. I have asked that perhaps they would provide an official decompiler for Flight - whatever the format for the files in there might be I have no idea however.

So all code to unpack the contents of a Bgl file is community made. Several people have done work on unpacking the format of the files. Winfried Orthman is probably the most important in this area. His analysis of the file structure is publicly available on the Wiki. Many of us have extended that knowledge and a number of people have written decompilers. Mine is used in all my programs. If you want to look at the structure of a Bgl file then you might try my SDE Test App. This displays a file in a number of formats including the way it looks in hex etc.

My decompiler is in a dll file written in C# and based on the information gathered by the community over the years and my own findings. If you need to read a bgl file then you have a couple of choices:

Use an existing decompiler to generate source XML and then process it - there is a command line version of Bgl2Xml that can be called as a process and return xml. Ther are other command line decompilers but I am not aware of any being as up to date as ours.

Write your own decompiler based on the file format information that is published. Depending on what you want out of the file this could take a few hours up to a few months ;)
 
Thank you Jon for your explanations. You confirmed what I originally thought.
A while back I created a decompiler for AFCAD files so I'll just modify the code a bit to adapt it to scenery objects.
 
Unfortunately I won't be able to use SDE. Apparently it requires SimConnect and spits a big error message as soon as I launch the app.
 
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