A huge selling point for XCOM 2 was their Character Pool system. Using it, characters I had created could naturally appear as if one of their randomly generated characters throughout a campaign. I found great joy in filling a character pool full of people I knew, so that I could be rescuing my brother who is a scientist in one campaign, to seeing myself turn up as a captured prisoner to rescue. This system is not without its flaws however, the UI to create a character for the character pool is full of animations, transitions and other UI features that just slow everything down enough to be a chore for mass character creation. That is where Squaddie comes in.
Squaddie is a library to load the native Character Pool binary format into a C# structure for editing and to compliment this I also added the ability to re-serialize the structure as a JSON file.
Then for ease of use by non-developers, I have provided a simple CLI windows application that can be used to convert from a binary to json, or a json to binary.
A simple command line windows application that can be used to convert from a binary to json, or a json to binary.
| Command | Function |
|---|---|
| -h, --help | List commands and usage instructions. |
| -j, --toJson | Convert from binary input to json output. |
| -b, --toBinary | Convert from json input to binary output. |
| -m, --merge | Merge multiple pools of the same kind into a single pool. You should also specify the type with -b or -j. |
| -p, --pretty | Whether to out JSON as pretty print. |
| -i, --input | Provide the input file filepath. |
| -o, --output | Provide the output file filepath (Will overwrite any existing file). |
Converting from a binary to a JSON file. Also using -p to provide us pretty print (line breaks that aid human readability)
./SquaddieCLI.exe -j -p -i myCoolPool.bin -o myCoolPool.json
Converting from a JSON file to a binary file
./SquaddieCLI.exe -b -i myCoolerPool.json -o woahThisLoadsIntoXCOM.bin
Merge multiple character pool files in a directory into a single character pool (In binary format)
./SquaddieCLI.exe -m -i .\Importable -o Merged.bin -b
Merge multiple character pool files in a directory into a single character pool (In json format)
./SquaddieCLI.exe -m -i .\Importable -o Merged.json -j -p
ICharacterPoolFileBuilder provides the interface for all Character Pool file loaders. The ones included within the library are CharacterPoolJsonBuilder for converting to/from JSON and CharacterPoolBinaryBuilder for converting to/from XCOM 2 Character Pool Binary files.
A CharacterPool represents the collection of Characters and the name of the pool. From this you can access the Characters property to access the collection.
A Character is pretty much a collection of IProperty. These can be viewed as a simple struct contain a Key and a Value.