INI

Overview

Freelancer INI files come in two forms: plain-text and binary (BINI).

When reading INI, text or binary, few key aspects are:

• Sections and properties within them are treated as sequence of instructions rather than serialized property lists.
• Properties can have duplicate names in a section and multiple sections can have duplicate names.
• Maintaining order of sections and properties is essential.
• A section property can have up to 256 values separated by comma in text format and explicitly counted in binary.
• Individual values are primitive types: boolean, integers, floats and strings.
• In text format properties within a section without any values are treated as a boolean with value of true.
• Care must be taken when dealing with values from text format - cast them into desired type when queried.

Property named "comment" can be used for comments since BINI does not contain regular INI comments.

Binary INI (BINI)

Little-endian byte order.

Header

Name	Type	Description
singnature	uint32	Must be 0x494E4942 ("BINI").
version	uint32	Format version (0x1).
namesOffset	uint32	Offset to dictionary block.
sections	varying
names	varying

• Dictionary is a concatenated collection of ASCIIz strings (NUL-terminated ASCII strings).
• Best keep section and property names before string values in dictionary.
• After header read sections until namesOffset.

Section

Name	Type	Description
nameOffset	uint16	Section name offset in dictionary.
propertyCount	uint16	Number of properties as follow.
properties	varying

Property

Name	Type	Description
nameOffset	uint16	Property name offset in dictionary.
valueCount	uint8	Number of property values.
values	varying

Value

Name	Type	Description
type	uint8	Property type.
value	byte[4]	Property value.

• Binary format limits number of values per property to 256 so it is best not to exceed that in text format.
• Interpret value four bytes based on preceding type:

Type	Value	Description
Boolean	0x0	Most significant bit in value is boolean.
Integer	0x1	Value is signed 32-bit integer number.
Float	0x2	Value is 32-bit float point number.
String	0x3	Value is unsigned 32-bit integer number as offset to string in dictionary block.