flint (Freelancer Intel) is a platform-independent parser and ORM for the data files of Freelancer, a 2003 space sim for Windows developed by Digital Anvil.
Freelancer is interesting in that the game world can be entirely defined in INI files, a format more usually used to hold simple configuration data. Additional content (e.g. text, icons and models) are stored in a variety of binary formats.
flint implements a parser for Freelancer-style INIs, as well as platform-independent reader implementations for every binary file format used by Freelancer - BINI, resource DLL, and UTF. All these implementations can be found in flint/formats. Additionally, resource string handling incorporates RDL (Freelancer's markup language) to HTML translation and some of the maths surrounding Freelancer's navmap has been implemented.
Taken together, this yields a simple yet powerful API that can be used to explore the game world, dump data or act as a foundation for Freelancer-related applications.
flint explicitly supports vanilla Freelancer and Discovery Freelancer, but in principle should (though it's not yet) be implemented robustly enough to work with any valid mod, no matter how esoteric.
Install the latest stable version from PyPI with pip:
pip install fl-flintOr install the latest development version straight from this repository:
pip install https://github.com/biqqles/flint/archive/master.zip -UBuilt wheels are also available under Releases, as is a changelog.
flint requires Python >= 3.6.
The documentation has been moved to the wiki.
Zone typesmbases.iniinfocardmap.iniThanks to the admins, members and supporters of The Starport for hosting an invaluable source of information about modding Freelancer.
In addition, particular thanks goes to: