The .exp files are the format in which creatures are exported or imported from and to the game.
Obviously, they contain about anything one could need to know about a given Norn, and exploiting them for writing custom tools might allow for a lot of interesting options such as exporting a critically ill norn, performing offline surgery on the file, and reimporting it into the game.
This would allow curing a couple otherwise fatal issues since the ingame mechanics don't provide any means of removing a given chemical from a creature bloodstream or reinvigorating degraded C2 organs.
(See the case of C2 grendels being oversensitive to cyanide poisoning because they lack the chemical reaction genes that would allow them to lower their cyanide levels)
In this series of articles, I will describe the process of reverse engineering the C1 (and later C2) .exp file format so any programmer out there can use the information to implement .exp file manipulating programs.
The first articles of the series will show the process followed so more people can learn "how it's done" and maybe later take on reversing other undocumented game file formats.
Hopefully, if enough information can be gathered about the format, a final article will sum everything up into the cleanest and most complete description possible.
For this first article, we will analyse the general file layout, and learn how to extract a working genome file from an .exp file.
Let's dive into binary DNA !
