Libespm

A free software library for reading and writing .esp and .esm plugin files.

WHAT THIS IS?

A fork of libespm by WrinklyNinja, based on most recent commit (2014-Dec-28).

I have rolled back some unnecessary changes made by author which prevented libespm from being compiled on VS2010, therefore also prevented from using Windows XP as developer platform (VS2012 requires Windows 7 SP1)..

Original libespm was changed to use C++ 11 Range-Based For Loop in multiple places during 2 commits (2014-Jun-21):

• First set of C++11 changes
• Another batch of C++11 changes..

Those changes were just for convenience placing artifical limit on usage..

So this forked version can now be used in VS2010 - using Windows XP development platform.
Though it (likelly) will not compile in older versions like VS2008, due other C++ 11 changes..

Introduction

Libespm can currently read data from plugins for the following games:

• TES III: Morrowind
• TES IV: Oblivion
• TES V: Skyrim
• Fallout 3
• Fallout: New Vegas

Libespm was first created by deaths_soul (AKA MCP), then forked by myself (WrinklyNinja) and pretty much rewritten, though the structure of the library has only changed a little.

Libespm requires the following Boost libraries:

• Filesystem (built)
• Iostreams
• String Algorithms
• Lexical Cast

At the moment the libespm itself is header-only, so just make sure that those libraries are accessible in your project build settings.

Support for compressed record fields requires zlib to be accessible in your project build settings, and the USING_ZLIB preprocessor definition.

Design Notes

The general idea is of a generic backend that's used to parse (and write) the files, with more specialised structures to interpret the data. Everything gets namespaced according to its specificity, so:

• Generic stuff is found at espm.
• Game stuff is found at espm::tes3, espm::tes4, espm::tes5, espm::fo3, espm::fonv for Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas respectively.
• Specific record and field structures would be found in sub-namespaces of each game's namespace, so Skyrim's TES4 record interface would be the structure espm::tes5::TES4::Record while the record's ONAM interface would be the structure espm::tes5::TES4::ONAM.

The reasoning is that different records contain different fields for different purposes, and they also contain fields with matching names but different data (eg. for Skyrim, ONAM in TES4 is not the same as ONAM in LCSR). Records also differ between games, eg. the TES4 record has no ONAM field in Oblivion, but does in Skyrim. Field specialisations therefore need to be defined per-record, and records need to be defined per-game. Hence the namespace structure used.

Of course, although there are quite a lot of differences between games and records, there are also quite a lot of similarities, so to prevent code duplication stuff gets imported across namespaces. For example, the MAST fields for the TES4 record in Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim are identical, so they are defined in espm::tes4::TES4 and the other namespaces just import from there using using espm::tes4::TES4::MAST;.