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|                        The Privateer 1 TRE Format                          |
|                           By Mario "HCl" Brito                             |
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                                 Introduction

This is the simplest TRE format used by any Wing Commander game, as no
compression routine is used. Due to the growth of the Wing Commander Editing
community, i felt useful to document this TRE format. An interesting note is
that Privateer 1 and Armada are *by far* the most dynamic games of all the
WC games i've seen (when it comes to TRE management) since you can make the
game load a new TRE (which can be a patch, i've done it before) only by adding
it to the CFG file: the Righteous Fire add-on is little more than a TRE patch
to Privateer 1!




                                   The info

First of all, i'll give some info on the data types i'll use, so there's no
confusion:

byte  = 1 byte 
word  = 2 bytes
dword = 4 bytes
string = A space meant to hold a sequence of characters with a null (or \0)
         at the end. It's size is constant (pretty much like an array).


Like most TRE files, this one is divided in 2: the Header and the Data
section. The Data section will not be covered since it'll be raw file data
referenced by the header.


-> The Header

   data type    |     size      |       description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   dword        |       4       |  Number of files in this TRE. Notice
                |               | that it takes 4 bytes, not 1. This is why
                |               | TRESPLIT only extracts 5 files out of
                |               | PRSO.TRE: it has 261 files = 0x105
----------------|---------------|---------------------------------------------
   dword        |       4       |  A pointer to the start offset of the data
                |               | area (in short, the size of the header).
----------------|---------------|---------------------------------------------

The number of files in the TRE and the length of the header are defined.
The below structure must be repeated for each file in the TRE:


   data type    |     size      |       description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    byte        |       1       |  always 0x1, it's meaning is not fully
                |               | understood.
----------------|---------------|---------------------------------------------
    string      |      65       |  The name of the file as the game reads it.
                |               | Privateer's internal file structure demands
                |               | that every file name starts with ..\..
----------------|---------------|---------------------------------------------
    dword       |       4       |  The offset on the TRE where the file starts.
----------------|---------------|---------------------------------------------
    dword       |       4       |  The size of the file.
----------------|---------------|---------------------------------------------




-> Thanks go to Origin Systems INC for creating Privateer, Righteous Fire 
   and Armada

Mario "HCl" Brito
mbrito@student.dei.uc.pt