PlanetsCentral

I was reviewing some data on a turn in one of my games, and I tried to figure out how and where information on enemy ships are transmitted. For the first 50 ships it's obvious in the Targets section of the RST. But for the rest of the ships, it's not obvious to me. As best I can tell, details on them does not exist in either PLAYERx.RST or UTILx.DAT, and those are the only two files transmitted by the host every turn. OK, the RST does contain Ship Coordinates for all ships, with the ShipID, X, Y, Owner, Mass; but it does not contain all the details like HullID, Name, Engines, Beams, Torps.

What am I missing?

use a VPA

If you get Winplan-style result files, your RST file has two sections that can contain targets. The first one is limited to 50 for DOSPLAN compatibility, the second one contains all the rest. A compatible unpacker will extract these to a file KOREx.DAT. The ship names are "encrypted", that's why they're not as obvious in a hex dump as the others.

See here and here.

Using the bigtargets command you can tell PHost to enable the AllowMoreThan50Targets option for you, which means PHost will pack everything into the normal targets section.

The PCCs and VPA will just read everything they can find.

However, one caveat: you write

but it does not contain all the details like HullID, Name, Engines, Beams, Torps

Engines, Beams and Torps are not in a scan, ever. The PCCs (and probably VPA) will merge with all information they can find, e.g. when you see a ship during a fight, you know its weapons; when you see a ship move, you can guess its engine. But this is often guesswork/outdated.

Maybe using the c2export tool from PCC2 (or the Export GUI) can save you some headache in parsing files.

--Stefan

If you get Winplan-style result files, your RST file has two sections that can contain targets.
The first one is limited to 50 for DOSPLAN compatibility, the second one contains all the rest.

Well that's embarrassing.
I was already extracting all the data from the Winplan section, I just wasn't displaying all of it in my output.

Simple fix, works great now. Thanks for the nudge in the right direction Stefan!