Insufficient documentation

[Swarkin]

Why are there no docs on how to use this crate?

• How do I get a value out of a Property?
• How do I iterate trough an ArrayProperty?
• How do I convert a gvas file to structs?

[scottanderson]

Crate docs are available at https://docs.rs/gvas/latest/gvas/, but they might be incomplete.

[Swarkin]

Can you create a documentation page on how to convert gvas into my own structs? Its very hard to work with the GvasFile directly and I do not understand how accessing data works.

I want to make a save editor. Could you explain how to modify the data inside rust?
gvas.txt

[localcc]

Not sure what you mean by convert into your own structs, but if you wanna access and edit data you can look for examples in the tests folder, here's one of them

[scottanderson]

The GvasFile struct is a wrapper around all of the the things that are needed to recreate the original binary file. For a save editor, you will be primarily interested in looking at the properties map, which is where the game's persisted data is stored.

pub struct GvasFile {
    pub deserialized_game_version: DeserializedGameVersion,
    pub header: GvasHeader,
    pub properties: IndexMap<String, Property>,
}

[Swarkin]

@scottanderson The problem im facing is I dont understand how to navigate the properties. There are nested lists, structs and objects and idk how to extract information? In json I would just do json["foo"]["bar"] etc. but what do I do here?

I sent my gvasfile above for reference.

[scottanderson]

Understanding how to navigate the properties map can be challenging due to its variability across different games. Each game may store data differently; some use simple arrays while others employ custom structs. This library accommodates these variations with a flexible structure.

The structure of each property is a Property enum wrapper around a specific property type. For example, if you wanted to store a simple string in a GVAS file, you would actually need to wrap that string in all of the following layers to store it:

1. An Option, to give the string nullability.
2. A StrProperty to represent the UE type of the string.
3. A Property enum to act as a common property type that rust can store in a map.

The result is an object that looks like:

Property::StrProperty(
    StrProperty {
        value: Some(String::from("Hello, world!"))
    }
)

Some properties are themselves also enums, especially the container types (array, map, etc.). This is primarily done to make the serde serialized output flatter, more readable and concise.

If you prefer to work in JSON, you can use serde to convert a GvasFile to another format. There's also a cli wrapper for this that you may be interested in, which doesn't require you to write any code at all. See gvas2json.