TL;DR

This is a endianess-aware binary reader and writer for Typescript. You can use it to read arbitrary binary files in browser. You can see the live demo here and a simple example here.

Origins

C#’s BinaryReader and BinaryWriter are one of my favorite IO interface. They are simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use. I have had the chance to develop some interesting tools using these two classes, for instance, S4PE for The Sims 4. Maxis used their own serialization protocols to parse and un-parse their data files. As a result, you have to parse the files by hand, that it, specifying where and when to read an int, float, etc.

Yet web technology is catching up and there is a trend to move desktop applications to the web. One big issue with Sims 4 modding is that modders have to stick to Windows platform because most of the tools are targeted to it. This phenomenon also applies to many games.

What if, let’s just image, all the modding can be done in the browser? Does that mean users are free of any platform limitations as long as they are using an updated browser? My answer to that is yes, and here is my implementation to the binary package.

Usage

There are several ways to load the library. The current setup is to use require.js to load the necessary package. Here is a example of how to read a Sims DBPF file.

private readHeader(data: Blob | Uint8Array): number {
    
    var r = new IO.BinaryReader(data);
    var fourcc = r.readString(4);

    this.Major = r.readInt32();
    this.Minor = r.readInt32();
}

Due to the limitation of Jacascript, Uint64 cannot be represented perfectly in browser. The library uses a simple Uint64 to support big number reading and writing. Currently there is no implementation for Int64. Users can use other big number library when needed.

Below is the list of implemented interfaces for BinaryReader.

• readInt8(): number
• readUInt8(): number
• readInt16(): number
• readUInt16(): number
• readInt32(): number
• readUInt32(): number
• readUInt64(): Uint64
• readFloat(): number
• readDouble(): number
• readBytes(size): Uint8Array
• readChar(): string
• readString(length): string
• seek(pos): void
• position(): number

BinaryWrter has similar interface as BinaryReader.

To make handling IO easier, the IO library also has a BitConverter as in C#. Here is a list of its interface.

• toUInt16(data: Uint8Array | Blob, offset: number): number
• toInt16(data: Uint8Array | Blob, offset: number): number
• toUInt32(data: Uint8Array | Blob, offset: number): number
• toInt32(data: Uint8Array | Blob, offset: number): number

How to install

For now it’s part of the ts-sims4 library. The easiest way to use is to copy the io.ts file to your working directory and use it in your Typescript project. I will make a npm package in the future.

Demo

Go to live demo here and upload a simple Sims 4 CAS item containing meshes for a pair of shoes (download here). You can see the screenshot below.