Entry 12

Game data tables, decoded through their DWARF types

2026-09-22battlecontenttooling

Filestools/tables.pytools/test_tables.pydocs/content/game-data.md

The game's balance data - enemies, skills, items, equipment, bosses, party characters, level-up growth - is compiled into the overlays as C arrays of structs, and the DWARF (6) describes every one of them down to the field names. Rather than write a dumper per table, tools/tables.py dump decodes any global through its DWARF type: it walks the element struct member by member, reads char * and char[] as Shift-JIS text, shows other pointers as the symbol they point at, flattens nested structs (param.elm.battleAbility.pAtk), extracts bit fields (counting from the least significant bit, as CodeWarrior does), and runs the overlay's constructors first with tools/eemu.py (9) so start-up patches are included. Arrays declared without a length (ccEnemyTable enemyTbl[]) take it from the ELF symbol's size. tables.py list shows every struct array in an overlay.

What came out

All from INF gcmn.prg except charTbl (demo.prg):

Every enemy row carries its name, CCS model file, type, level, experience, gold, collision height and width, HP/SP, physical and magical attack, defence, hit and evasion, six elemental attributes (soil, water, fire, wind, thunder, dark), two tolerances, drain/critical flags and more - 137 columns. The first three are Razine (E1X1, level 0, 50 HP), Swordmanoid (E1F1) and Gladiator (E1FA). The model names are the DATA.BIN file names of 5, so every enemy links to its model. 279 distinct names over 303 rows; the three highest-level rows (level 95-99) are named San=Hi/, AAAAAAA and DDDDDDD - placeholders or deliberately corrupted monsters, not yet told apart.

charTbl is the party: Kite (ctu1body, level 1, 63 HP), Mia, Orca (level 50, 1,050 HP), Marlo, Sanjuro, Nuke Usagimaru, Balmung, Moonstone, Piros, Wiseman, Elk, Natsume, Rachel, Gardenia, Terajima Ryoko, BlackRose, Mistral, Helba - 18, as LevelUpParamTbl and spcAIParam also have 18 rows. skillTbl opens NOTHING, ATTACK, Data Drain, Drain Arc, 2128 Drain; itemTblD holds the spell scrolls (Raining Rocks, Gaia's Spell, Meteor Strike); weapon table 1 is the twin blades (Amateur Blades, model cwdhsw02).

bossTbl has 49 entries: the eight Phases (Skeith, Inis, Magus, Fidhell, Gorre, Macha, Tarvos, Corbenik), Corbenik's later forms, Cubia and its cores, four Gomoras four times over, and nine entries at the end whose names were never translated (タルボス, コルベニクシード, ヘルシーカー, コルベニク２ ...). Like the mail (9) and the story areas (11), the Infection disc carries data for all four volumes.

The dumps are TSV files under work/infection/tables/ (not committed); tools/test_tables.py pins the item count, the first party member and the first three enemies.