Why is profiles.dat a binary file?

[slyone]

I did a hexdump of profiles.dat and see a bunch of nulls in addition to the name of each of my profiles as well as a couple of the settings I chose for the profile.

Why is profiles.dat a binary file?

[Boydon]

Right now I don't have the code to look at it, but by heart I can tell you that profiles are internally handled as records and those records are serialized when they need to be saved and de-serialized when Stelath need to load them.

Serializing is much more easy than to define your custom file format and the write code to handle it.

[Crome969]

Quote of the Headdeveloper :

21 Oktober bei 7:58 :
because read&write of fixed-size records from binary file directly to structures is fastest))

[Boydon]

Quote of the Headdeveloper :

21 Oktober bei 7:58 :
because read&write of fixed-size records from binary file directly to structures is fastest))

This is what I said, isn't it?

[Crome969]

Quote of the Headdeveloper :

21 Oktober bei 7:58 :
because read&write of fixed-size records from binary file directly to structures is fastest))

This is what I said, isn't it?

And i asked Vizit0r to verify it

[slyone]

Thanks for the info!  Now, unless you can reveal this record, time to get to work on reverse engineering what the record looks like...

[Boydon]

Problem is you'd then have to reverse the standard Delphi serialization algorithm.

[dxrom]

Thanks for the info!  Now, unless you can reveal this record, time to get to work on reverse engineering what the record looks like...

It looks like this:

slyone's Credit History: <value>
slyone's Credit Card Information: <array of values>
slyone's USA SSN: <value>
slyone's UO account history: <array of values>
slyone's emails: <array of values>
slyone's personal information: <array of values>