Add-on programs can write their own information into utilX.dat files. The contents of your information are completely arbitrary, you can define your own record types as you see fit. To avoid collisions, you can have a range of record types assigned to you; contact the PHost group to get one. Currently, the following ranges are allocated:
Record Type Range | Assigned To |
---|---|
0 - 16383 (0x0000-0x3FFF) | PHost |
16384 - 16399 (0x4000-0x400F) | Torsten Czerny |
16400 - 16431 (0x4010-0x402F) | Jens Hofbauer |
16432 - 16447 (0x4030-0x403F) | Rafael Alvarez |
16448 - 16479 (0x4040-0x405F) | Sven Bursch |
16480 - 16511 (0x4060-0x407F) | Ingo Korb |
16512 - 16639 (0x4080-0x40FF) | Stefan Reuther |
16512 - 32767 (0x4100-0x7FFF) | available |
32768 - 65535 (0x8000-0xFFFF) | reserved -- not available |
To include data into a utilX.dat file, simply write your data to a utilX.ext file. PHost will concatenate the existing utilX.dat contents with utilX.ext to form the new utilX.dat file. This happens in Phase 3 of PHost (during utilX.dat generation). For example, PHost will copy the contents of the util1.ext file (if it exists in the game directory) to the end of the util1.dat file after the latter has been written. PHost will then remove the util1.ext file.
Note that it is completely up to you to achieve platform-independence (data field size, endianness) in writing utilX.ext files. To not confuse clients, do not write records larger than 32k, and do not re-use PHost's record numbers for things they're not intended for. ► Note: PHost will not validate the contents of utilX.ext files in any way.