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Game Constants

As Bethesda games are released, headers are modified slightly. They still have a lot in common, but certain things move or the total length changes, or something else that will misalign any common parsing code.

GameConstants is a class containing all the various alignment information specific to a game. Things like:

  • ModHeaderLength
  • HeaderIncludedInLength
  • LengthLength (amount of bytes the 'length' section is)
  • Etc

GameConstants also has static instances of itself for each Bethesda game, so that users can look up the specific header details for a specific game. There is also a GameCategory enum that can be used to query to get the constants: 

var oblivionHeaderData = GameConstants.Oblivion;
// An alternate way
oblivionHeaderData = GameConstants.Get(GameCategory.Oblivion);
var headerLength = oblivionHeaderData.MajorConstants.HeaderLength;

The usefulness of this "registry" is that code can be written once, while referring to a header meta object to account for differences in the games. Give the code a different meta object to refer to for the appropriate game, and all the alignment works out.