Firstly, I want to thank everyone who helps me: Soliton and other Wesnoth developers at official Wesnoth Discord channel.
- Sharing of my pain
- Wesnoth devs could not properly parse own WML too
- Farewell words about SavefileWML
Creating this app was really (I meant it - REALLY) harsh experience. My expectation was like "It's easy task: I know what information I need from replay file - so I would just find it in a file and take it! Easy-peasy. 2 days max!" I spent A LOT OF time only for researching replay file structure in reality. Because this structure is VERY VARIABLE and could have a lot of variants depending of many things.
My modest efforts are here:
Upd.: No, I just must make official statement: Wesnoth replay file structure are almost randomly generated! :) It's a joke of course, but only a little part there is a joke. You could open 5 replays and each could have different structure - tags could be or could not be, same tag could contain some info or could not and so on! And addons literally add mess!
I was really tired. Even got headache. It's hard to do things if you could not understand LOGIC of what and why happening. I created series of replays with different options while trying to understand structure. If I know all of this before - I would never start to implement this app...
It's amazing, but even Wesnoth developers could not properly parse own replays. Same reasons - it's pure chaos territory :)
Screenshots from 1.14.11 Wesnoth client, "Load" dialogue:
Example#1:
- no both players nicknames
- no leaders
- no sides colors
- no turns number displayed
Example#2 (it's savegame):
- nicknames identical - it's because parser got nicknames from the end of game, not from start; and there is second player already left game - so, no his nickname displayed
Example#3:
- seems good overall: there are nicknames, leaders, colors.
_2021-06-01 update: suddenly I discovered that in this replay my parser showing not all chat lines! After researching this text appears:_
My farewell words for anybody who is going to work with SavefileWML (at least server generated SavefileWML): Beware! Think twice before starting to work with SavefileWML - it's a pure mess.
And I am personally would NEVER EVER again touch SavefileWML. No way.
Here are my statements:
- SavefileWML is a mess.
- It's mess by design.
There is officially could be situation when in SavefileWML would be 2 (two) instances of same (SAME!) top-level tag [replay]. It's pure insane! Imagine situation, when W3C allow to insert in HTML two times <body> tag! Nonsence! But in SavefileWML - it's totally OKAY.
And this is by design, according to commit ac9628e. Comment from that commit:
"This can result in having 2 [replay] at toplevel since level_ can contain one already. But the client can handle this (simply merges them)."
