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hex editors

So i needed a hex editor. (for war3 modding stuffz) (modding is modifying). but i didn't know that. see, someone had the bright idea of naming it a hex editor. hex means six. hex editors, i knew, had something to do with hexidecimal (base 16). i wanted to edit raw data. ya know, 1s and 0s. aka binary, not hex.

once you use one, the name does make sense. 1s and 0s are generally arranged into blocks of 8 with 256 possible values. you can write 256 possible values in 2 digits of hexidecimal. so displaying binary files in hex makes sense (they show the binary versions too) (and the ASCII aka text version too) (and various other versions like what integer the selected bit would be, if it was representing an integer).

anyway, hex editors are cool. cause now i can, for example, open a war3map.w3e file and find the integer near the start saying how many tiles the map has (which is written as a string of 32 1s and 0s), and change it to 16 (well, the 1s and 0s that mean 16). this could not be done with a text editor. this means i can do something really important to my map without using someone else's buggy program that i'm very afraid might break other stuff.

oh hey, wanna see specs on war3 files? no? well, here they are.

PS there's quite a lack of ez to find hex tutorials on google. feh


Elliot Temple on January 11, 2004

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