What do we know about save game format (.sav)?

[taw]

What do we know about Medieval 2 (and Rome etc.) save game format .sav?

Empire's save game format is ESF, which is fully decoded, with converters to XML and back.

Viewing some .sav files in hex editor I can see it's not compressed or encrypted, and there are familiar ASCII strings, Unicode strings, 32-bit integers etc., and it even has string tables fairly similar to ESFs.

Unfortunately I don't see any obvious offsets / record sizes / type information etc. which would really help parsing the file, and a lot of areas look really weird.

Before I waste my time trying to figure it out, do we already know anything at all about .sav format?

I'm not really hoping for full spec like one I wrote for ESF, but is there anything that would help me?

Googling fails me here.

Do we have any information or any save game editors with source code?

Huge thanks

[danny X]

Dont know if this helps http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=68328

[Kiliç Alì]

http://extension.nirsoft.net/sav

this is the best I found till now.

I tried to open it with notepad++ and got lost, then with windows' notepad.
Interesting thing, it seems in the .sav is saved the entire campaign_script, also with comments. Wich could mean that if we make a proper tool for .sav editing, all scripting modification can become save-compatible.

[taw]

Dont know if this helps http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=68328

That seems to be M2 version of RomeSage, which is a really really basic RTW savegame editor, it seems to only edit static headers, nothing inside.

http://extension.nirsoft.net/sav

this is the best I found till now.

I tried to open it with notepad++ and got lost, then with windows' notepad.
Interesting thing, it seems in the .sav is saved the entire campaign_script, also with comments. Wich could mean that if we make a proper tool for .sav editing, all scripting modification can become save-compatible.

That's some completely different file formats with .sav extension, it's pretty common.

[taw]

I now have some extremely vague idea what's inside.

First, there's header containing possibly global settings, and some random numbers.

There are sections within .sav file which start with [uint32 current offset, uint32 section size].

There's one top level section.

Different sections contain different data, like strings, arrays of integers, or other sections.

I don't know yet how the game knows which section contains what kind of data.
It might be coming from the headers or in extra uint16s often located just before sections.