Castles II: Siege and Conquest Cluster Format
| Format type | Text |
|---|---|
| Text purpose | Story |
| Line endings | |
| Character set | |
| Games |
The Castles II: Siege and Conquest Cluster Format is used to store the plotlines and plot text for Castles II: Siege and Conquest. This format describes the LIB.CLU file. The name stands for "cluster library".
Bytes 0 to 3999 (from 0x0000 to 0x0F9F) are all 0. Then bytes 4000 to 12803 (from 0x0FA0 to 0x3203) contain the byte location of each cluster entry, in 4-byte little endian format. However, each entry from 12064 to 12803 simply point to byte 1253323 (0x131FCB), which is the end of the file, so they are basically unused. Also, many entries point to the same location as the previous entry, so they basically point to "virtual" clusters of 0 bytes long, as a "null" entry. There are 359 non-"null" entries.
Each cluster has some header information and can be divided 3 subclusters after the header information. The header information contains things like the location of each node within that cluster. Each cluster has up to 10 nodes, each node being a plot branch. The first subcluster is the plot instructions for that cluster's nodes. The second subcluster is the index for each line of text. The third subcluster is the text itself.
The overall structure of LIB.CLU is as follows:
| Location | DataType | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 3999 (0x0000 to 0x0F9F) | UINT32LE | All values are 00 |
| 4000 to 12803 (0x0FA0 to 0x3203) | UINT32LE | Byte location for the start of each cluster |
| 12804 to 1253322 (0x3204 to 0x131FCA) (rest of file) | variable | Cluster data |
The overall structure of each cluster is as follows:
| Length | DataType | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | UINT16LE | Cluster ID |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Unknown (values vary from 0 to 9) |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Starting byte location (within cluster) of first subcluster (all values are 40 because header is 40 bytes long) |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Number of plot instructions in cluster (note each instruction is 6 bytes long) |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Number of (non-virtual) nodes in cluster |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Starting byte location (within cluster) of second subcluster |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Number of plot text lines in cluster (note each plot text line index is 2 bytes long) |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Starting byte location (within cluster) of third subcluster |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Number of bytes of third subcluster |
| 2 | UINT16LE | Total length of cluster (or last byte of third subcluster) |
| 20 | UINT16LE | Byte locations of nodes 0 to 9 (2 bytes each) |
| variable * 6 | UINT16LE | Plot instructions (each is 6 bytes long, consisting of 3 little-endian 2-bytes) |
| variable * 2 | UINT16LE | Location of each plot text line (each location is 2 bytes long) |
| variable | ASCII (encrypted) | Plot text lines; plain ASCII text but encrypted by bit-wise XOR with the first byte of the header (i.e. the first byte of the cluster ID) |
Credits
This file format was reverse engineered by Vanshilar. If you find this information helpful in a project you're working on, please give credit where credit is due. (A link back to this wiki would be nice too!)