Announcing catgod, a pretender file viewer

[Evil Dave]

Catgod is a command-line program to display Dom3's pretender god files. For example:

>catgod /Users/evil/dominions3/savedgames/newlords/early_arcoscephale_0.2h 

Fred, the Earth Monster, Lord of Courage, God of Mountains

Arcoscephale, Early Era

Cyclops (Body 156, 91 hits)

Magic:  Earth 9

Dominion 5

Scales:  Order 1  Productivity 1  Fortune 1  Magic 1

Dormant

Catgod understands wildcards like you'd expect:

>catgod /Users/evil/dominions3/savedgames/newlords/early_arcoscephale_?.2h



----/Users/evil/dominions3/savedgames/newlords/early_arcoscephale_0.2h----



Fred, the Earth Monster, Lord of Courage, God of Mountains

Arcoscephale, Early Era

Cyclops (Body 156, 91 hits)

Magic:  Earth 9

Dominion 5

Scales:  Order 1  Productivity 1  Fortune 1  Magic 1

Dormant



----/Users/evil/dominions3/savedgames/newlords/early_arcoscephale_1.2h----



Jane, Mother of Fishes, Goddess of Rivers

Arcoscephale, Early Era

Mother of Rivers (Body 1342, 95 hits)

Magic:  Water 9

Dominion 5

Scales:  Order 2  Productivity 2  Fortune 2  Magic 1

Imprisoned

Binaries are available for Linux/Intel and Macintosh OS X/PPC.

Download catgod for Linux/Intel.

Download catgod for Macintosh OS X/PPC.

(If you click one of those links and your browser shows a page of random characters, back up, and download it with right-click "Save as...", or whatever your browser uses.)

I don't have the tools or the inclination to port catgod to Windows. If somebody wants to, send me a PM. Porting it shouldn't be hard; it's a short C program. Likewise if somebody wants to recompile it for Mac OS/Intel.

---

Installation and Usage Example

Download catgod into any convenient directory. Start a shell (Terminal in Mac OS), cd to that directory, and

chmod +x catgod

in case it didn't download as executable. If you used the default Dominions installation, your pretender files will be in

/your home directory/dominions3/savedgames/newlords

so,

./catgod /your home directory/dominions3/savedgames/newlords/*.2h

will display all your pretenders. If this doesn't make sense to you, ask your local computer geek for help.

A copy of this documentation (such as it is) lives at http://www.omskivar.org/evil/dom3/catgod.html, the catgod home page.

---

Thanks to Gandalf Parker for testing catgod.

[llamabeast]

This sounds like quite an impressive project. I'll have to take a look.

Can it look at pretenders that are password protected? If so, it could be used for evil. Wouldn't want that.

[Dedas]

Excellent!

But it seems that your links all leads to 404 at the moment.

[mathusalem]

really good idea !

And a version for Mac, thanks !

[Gandalf Parker]

Was that old dom2 code for dumpgod.c useful in the beginning?

You should rename it. Not everyone knows that "cat" is the linux command for dumping text output to the screen. Maybe printgod.

Now if you could get catgod to kick out the points left over. Then we can do nation-bidding games based on creation points. Does anyone have a table for point costs?

[thejeff]

Yeah, I keep seeing this thread and thinking "Bast?"

And I'm a linux geek so I know where the name comes from...

[Evil Dave]

General reply to all comments:

If you tried to download catgod and couldn't get thru (bad links, etc), please give it another try. A storm that came thru here Monday morning not only knocked out power to my servers, but also messed up the 'net but good. Even when the power came back, access beyond my ISP was in yo-yo mode.

If somebody can think of a better name for catgod, I'm all ears. I'll take "printgod" if I have to, but I'd like something more clever. And I was thinking of just calling it Bast, in the long tradition of obscure Unix command names.

Catgod can read password-protected pretenders. You'd need to have access to the file to read it, tho. If this is a problem for MP, the host machine should change the file protections on uploaded pretenders so that only the game server and each pretender's player can read the files.

Oh, I didn't know there was a dumpgod. Programming catgod took only 10-11 hours, about half of which was figuring out the file format.

[Gandalf Parker]

How about GodDump
GodGuts? CatScan? Atheism?
Or how about something befitting "seeing the gods"
Babel? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_babel

[PDF]

Hi, nice idea, I'd just need a Windows version to be able to use it ...

[mathusalem]

where did you find how to parse .2h files ?

can we have source code, just for seeing how it's work ?


Thanks ^^