Well, I'm enjoying the current discussion about file editing tools. At its 10th birthday Caesar 3 seems to receive more attention from file format analysts and graphics modders than ever before. Scenario designers have an interest in editing saved games to go beyond the possiblities of the official editor and not all details of the file format that could be useful seem to have been uncovered yet.
I gathered some insight to Caesar 3's saved game file format when I programmed the Mac-PC-Converter and a little tool for scenario designers, which I called 'C3 Game Explorer', some years ago. C3GameExplorer was beta-tested by Caesar Philon and posted in 2004 in the 'Designer' sub-forum ofCBC. I don't have access to that specific sub-forum anymore and don't know if it's still there. The download link has never been posted anywhere else. The predominant opinion at that time was that such a tool should not be made publicly available because it could be used for cheating in contests.
Seeing all the efforts being made to program editing tools and post format specifications, I think the cheating argument doesn't hold anymore. Maybe this little tool can still be useful for some scenario design purposes or even for the ongoing projects, so here is the download link:
http://www.geocities.com/caesar_jan/c3gameexplorer.html
It works fine with Windows XP (and likely with Vista, too, I guess). The webpage is from 2004 and the link to Dragon2's tools is misleading nowadays. If there's interest, I can also post a few more details I found out about the Caesar 3 saved game file format, in addition to what Pecunia posted on herwebsite.
Quoted from the 'About' text file (2004):
What can you do with C3GameExplorer?
====================================
* Edit saved games
- specify local raw materials
- disable trade routes
- edit the costs to open trade routes
- edit buyer and seller prices
- edit the present values of the four ratings (culture, favor, etc.)
- edit personal savings
* Report
Display a couple of scenario settings.
* Convert saved games between PC and Mac
C3GameExplorer incorporates the functionality of my Macintosh tool C3Converter.
* Save and load uncompressed saved games
This is only useful if you want to do low-level editing with a hex editor. If you are familiar with hex editing I can mail you a list with hex offsets.
Some clarifying usage information (2008):
To start, you open a Caesar 3 saved game via File->Open. The 'Open' and 'Save As' dialogs behave in a non-standard way (I was more a Mac guy at that time). When you want to load a game, you must first choose the file type that matches your saved game from the popup at the bottom: 'PC Saved Games (*.sav)', 'Mac Saved Games (*.sav)' or 'Uncompressed Saved Games (*.c3u)'. The default is PC saved game. After you loaded the game. you can use the options from the 'Tools' menu to edit some game data. Finally, to save the modified game, you choose the file format that you want your game to be saved in from the popup.
Uncompressed saved games (i.e. without PKWare (PC) or Zip (Mac) compression) are most useful to study the file format specifictions or to make changes with a hex editor. The procedure would be to open a PC saved game in C3GameExplorer, save it as uncompressed saved game, edit it with your favorite hex editor, open the modified uncompressed saved game in C3GameExplorer and save it as a PC saved game again. The size of an uncompressed PC saved game is always exactly 1.255.013 bytes and offsets to specific values of interest are the same in every saved game.
I gathered some insight to Caesar 3's saved game file format when I programmed the Mac-PC-Converter and a little tool for scenario designers, which I called 'C3 Game Explorer', some years ago. C3GameExplorer was beta-tested by Caesar Philon and posted in 2004 in the 'Designer' sub-forum of
Seeing all the efforts being made to program editing tools and post format specifications, I think the cheating argument doesn't hold anymore. Maybe this little tool can still be useful for some scenario design purposes or even for the ongoing projects, so here is the download link:
It works fine with Windows XP (and likely with Vista, too, I guess). The webpage is from 2004 and the link to Dragon2's tools is misleading nowadays. If there's interest, I can also post a few more details I found out about the Caesar 3 saved game file format, in addition to what Pecunia posted on her
Quoted from the 'About' text file (2004):
What can you do with C3GameExplorer?
====================================
* Edit saved games
- specify local raw materials
- disable trade routes
- edit the costs to open trade routes
- edit buyer and seller prices
- edit the present values of the four ratings (culture, favor, etc.)
- edit personal savings
* Report
Display a couple of scenario settings.
* Convert saved games between PC and Mac
C3GameExplorer incorporates the functionality of my Macintosh tool C3Converter.
* Save and load uncompressed saved games
This is only useful if you want to do low-level editing with a hex editor. If you are familiar with hex editing I can mail you a list with hex offsets.
Some clarifying usage information (2008):
To start, you open a Caesar 3 saved game via File->
Uncompressed saved games (i.e. without PKWare (PC) or Zip (Mac) compression) are most useful to study the file format specifictions or to make changes with a hex editor. The procedure would be to open a PC saved game in C3GameExplorer, save it as uncompressed saved game, edit it with your favorite hex editor, open the modified uncompressed saved game in C3GameExplorer and save it as a PC saved game again. The size of an uncompressed PC saved game is always exactly 1.255.013 bytes and offsets to specific values of interest are the same in every saved game.
[This message has been edited by Caesar Jan (edited 07-11-2008 @ 11:11 PM).]