Posted January 28, 2018
Hi folks,
I purchased the game some days ago to run Airline Tycoon also on Linux. I already have the "Evolution" on Windows and as the game for Linux was very cheap I took the opportunity to get the "Deluxe" version.
I noticed that the deluxe edition comes with additional airports and thus also has more routes to offer. However, I am not too satisfied with having a city like "Atlantis" as new option and thought of removing it somehow. Looking in the game data files I found that the cities seem to be stored in city.csv file in the data directory. Unfortunately this file is not a real comma separated value file, it is kind of encrypted.
To check the encryption I took a look into the game sources but it seems as the read/write code is somehow done within TeakLib which not part of sources zip (making compilation of the game impossible afaik). So I did a test and copied the city.csv and routen.csv from my Evolution installation which causes the Deluxe version to use Evolution cities and routes.
I became curious on how the csv is encrypted. First of all I thought of a disguised archive (zip, gz, ...) but looking at the csv sizes this did not seem to be the case. After that I started to count the bytes of the csv file and found out that 1 byte is used very offen here. As "builds.csv" is a plain csv file which uses ";" as a delimiter I thought that the most used byte in a csv file should somehow match ";" being either rotated or XORed. After XORing each byte of city.csv and routen.csv with 165 i got a rather readable version of the data files. German umlauts are available as soon as I use the correct code page in the editor. There are still some bytes in the beginning (most likely some TeakLib specific file headers) and in some lines (if two equals chars follow directly like in "Dallas" -> "Da??-as") of the file but at least most of the information is readable.
I will continue to look for decryption of these files but I am not sure how fast I can make progress here. Maybe some of you with a bit of programming skills can give a hint on how to proceed. I would like to see a possibility for editing the cities, routes, names and planes of Airline Tycoon and from what I can see it seems to be just about changing the CSV files.
I thought sharing my findings may give someone other a rather simple start in proceeding here. Maybe we find a way to decrypt the csv files so that cities, routes, planes, etc. can be customized.
Best regards,
Felix
I purchased the game some days ago to run Airline Tycoon also on Linux. I already have the "Evolution" on Windows and as the game for Linux was very cheap I took the opportunity to get the "Deluxe" version.
I noticed that the deluxe edition comes with additional airports and thus also has more routes to offer. However, I am not too satisfied with having a city like "Atlantis" as new option and thought of removing it somehow. Looking in the game data files I found that the cities seem to be stored in city.csv file in the data directory. Unfortunately this file is not a real comma separated value file, it is kind of encrypted.
To check the encryption I took a look into the game sources but it seems as the read/write code is somehow done within TeakLib which not part of sources zip (making compilation of the game impossible afaik). So I did a test and copied the city.csv and routen.csv from my Evolution installation which causes the Deluxe version to use Evolution cities and routes.
I became curious on how the csv is encrypted. First of all I thought of a disguised archive (zip, gz, ...) but looking at the csv sizes this did not seem to be the case. After that I started to count the bytes of the csv file and found out that 1 byte is used very offen here. As "builds.csv" is a plain csv file which uses ";" as a delimiter I thought that the most used byte in a csv file should somehow match ";" being either rotated or XORed. After XORing each byte of city.csv and routen.csv with 165 i got a rather readable version of the data files. German umlauts are available as soon as I use the correct code page in the editor. There are still some bytes in the beginning (most likely some TeakLib specific file headers) and in some lines (if two equals chars follow directly like in "Dallas" -> "Da??-as") of the file but at least most of the information is readable.
I will continue to look for decryption of these files but I am not sure how fast I can make progress here. Maybe some of you with a bit of programming skills can give a hint on how to proceed. I would like to see a possibility for editing the cities, routes, names and planes of Airline Tycoon and from what I can see it seems to be just about changing the CSV files.
I thought sharing my findings may give someone other a rather simple start in proceeding here. Maybe we find a way to decrypt the csv files so that cities, routes, planes, etc. can be customized.
Best regards,
Felix
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