New WC Toolbox Expands WC2 Campaign Support

The WC Toolbox has gotten smarter with another new update. Version 4.2.0 beta 1 expands the program's understanding of Wing Commander 2's campaign and gameflow type data files. While digging deep into the code, Unnamed Character also uncovered some new complexities, but that's all just part of the fun of digital archeology! Grab the program and start poking around in WC1/2 yourself here.

Another update for WC2, added support for the CAMPAIGN, GAMEFLOW, INCIDENT, and SERIES files; all these files are structured the same way. But this time around, there is a complication: these files have bytecode embedded in them.

This means the flow of the game, the cinematic scenes, including all of the dialog, was done using a custom scripting language. Which was then compiled into a custom set of instructions to be executed by the game itself using a custom interpreter. I have never seen any examples of the scripting language used for the game or even any mentions of it. As far as I know, this bytecode is completely unknown, undefined, and undocumented.

The only way to tackle this is to completely reverse engineer it; I don't imagine that to be a small undertaking. In any case, for the time being, I simply export these bytecode chunks as binary files.