I'm looking for a way to edit an OBJD *other than* the grid view in s3pe. Ideally, what I would like to be able to do is export the whole OBJD in text form so that I can diff/edit/search+replace and so on in a text editor.

What I already tried:

- the "Value" view in s3pe: from this I can copy, but I don't know of a way to get any changes back into the file. Is this possible somehow?

- the hex view in s3pe: this seems to be just for viewing

- Postal: here I can export and import in Hex view, but I haven't succeeded in exporting anything human readable from an OBJD. This does work with other types of resource (after "zapping gremlins" and converting to Unicode), so I don't know if this is expected or not .. it may be either something to do with the structure or content of the file, or an encoding problem, or perfectly normal.

- exporting from Postal and using a hex viewer: I tried with 0xED and HexFiend (both of them old versions I guess), but I don't know how I can tell where the thing I want to edit starts and ends. I'm able to find and edit strings since those are rather obvious, but the rest is a bit of a mystery to me.


Since I'm mainly working on OS X I might not be aware of already existing tools for this, so I'd be grateful for any pointers. I'd prefer something non-Windows (I have a VM installed so Linux or whatever would be fine), but I have an XP box too that I can use if it has to be.

I use BBEdit 8.7.1/OS X for text editing which I believe is pretty capable of dealing with all sorts of encoding and formatting ("Zap Gremlins" is a function in BBEdit that removes/converts/replaces control characters and non-ASCII). It is also scriptable.


Any ideas on how to go about this?

Someone needs to write an OBJD editor. It's not an attractive task, as the format is hellishly complex.

I could probably write something pretty quickly to export the OBJD into a text-editor-friendly format (probably xml, since all the catalog formats are deeply nested and don't play well in plain text). Importing it again and successfully writing it out as an actual OBJD file is a fair way more involved though...

Echo, seeing as I can already get it out (but not back in) by copying from the "Value" view, I'm not sure if it's worth spending any time on that .. I was mainly wanting to know whether there's already a utility or a way to do it that I'm not aware of, or that just doesn't work under OS X due to encoding issues or somesuch.

e: it also seems to become apparent that the issue I was trying to fix would affect the other object too, so, moot point for now (cf the various chairfootprint threads).