Two quick questions about the WAGame format:
1. Is it documented? Can I download the specs anywhere?
2. If not, is it legal to, ah, 'reverse engineer' it?

I would appreciate any info on this.

This info might be interesting for you:

http://wiki.thecybershadow.net/Replay_file

Of course, hex editing replays messes with the periodic checksums and the special speed-cheat detection. You'd have to do some pretty bizarre stuff to compensate for that.

Actually, I tried randomly changing a replay file and it seemed to still work, which was surprising. It was quite interesting changing the terrain while leaving everything else the same.

PS. Are all the numbers here in little-endian format? That is, will (hexadecimal) $A0E7 be stored as $E7 $A0?

They probably are :)

PS. Are all the numbers here in little-endian format? That is, will (hexadecimal) $A0E7 be stored as $E7 $A0?


I'm far from sure. Most of the info about the actions taken (messages) are stored Bytewise, not Word-wise, so it would not really make sense.

Squiddle, can you give an example of a word-long piece of data you found in a replay file? The only one I could find was the replay version number at 0x03, and it seems to be in big endian format, but that's assuming that it's actually a word rather than a byte.

Well, there's the length of the map file. I'm sure that's either a word or a double word. I think it's little-endian, so I it's likely that everything else will be too.