A library for Neverwinter Nights 1/2 resource files

This package provides a library for reading, changing, and writing common file formats that are found with NWN, a Bioware game.

They should work with NWN2 just as well, since the file format specifications did not change.

There are various things included in this distribution:

• some binaries under bin/ (see BINARIES)

• the actual library under lib/nwn

Attention Unicode/UTF-users

ruby 1.8 does not support character sets natively, and as such nwn-gff-irb will FAIL to encode non-standard characters properly on non-latin1 shells. This will be worked around in a future release until the release of ruby 1.9, which will provide native charset support.

Quickstart

It is easiest to just use the gem, which is available through rubyforge (sudo gem install nwn-lib).

As an alternative, fetch the latest development files with git.

require 'rubygems'
require 'nwn/gff'

# Read a GFF file
o = NWN::Gff::Reader.read(IO.read('/tmp/test-creature.gff'))

# Do some modifications to it
o['/Tag'] = 'testtag'

# And write it somewhere else
bytes = NWN::Gff::Writer.dump(o)

File.open('/tmp/test-creature-2.gff', 'w') {|f| f.write(bytes) }

Modification API is fairly limited, for now, but will improve soon.

GFF data structures: Quick Intro

Ruby GFF data structures are nearly a 1:1 wrapper around the known format.

Each GFF object has a root structure with a struct_id of 0.

Label

A Label is a string of up to 16 bytes, and occurs as keys in Structs.

Struct

A struct is a hash. It is a unordered collection of key => value pairs. Keys are Labels, values are either:

• Structs

• Lists

• Elements

List

A list is an ordered array of Structs.

Element

A Element is a distinct value of a given type. For all possible types, see the Types hash in the NWN::Gff module.