An open-source, portable library for reading XCOM Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within save files, plus some small utilities to convert an XCOM save to and from a somewhat readable JSON format. The utility supports both EU and EW and has also been tested with the Android version of the game.

Currently only strategy (geoscape) saves are supported. Tactical saves have a slightly different format that cannot be completely parsed yet. I don't have exhaustive save samples for most languages, but I have used to this to successfully read and write English, German, and Russian saves. If you encounter errors reading or writing a save with another language please let me know.

The xcom2json and json2xcom tools convert from XCOM binary format to a JSON representation of the save file (and vice-versa). No real processing is done on the save, it's almost entirely a 1:1 translation from the binary format into a JSON representation. This makes it easy to map the .json file contents to the classes found in the XComGame.upk and XComStrategyGame.upk package files, but some fields are non-obvious.

Binary versions of the utilities are provided for Windows in the "Releases" tab. For other platforms, please build from source.

Information on how to use the tools can be found in USAGE, which should be read alongside the information on known entities found in KNOWN.

The json utilities are built on top of a portable library xcomsave that does all the actual reading and writing of the xcom save. Developers looking to build save reading or modifying utilities can use this tool to handle the dirty work of managing the save file format. Please clone the library to build the xcomsave library for your platform. It's been tested to work on Windows and Linux. Mac support should be straightforward to add if it doesn't work out-of-the-box.

CMake is needed for all platforms. Run it on the provided CMakeLists.txt file to build the project/build files for your platform. I recommend running it from a subdirectory (e.g. build) so it doesn't pollute the main repo with build artifacts.

Use git clone --recursive to obtain the source otherwise the required json11 and zlib submodules will not be populated and will need to be manually updated after cloning.

Windows builds require Visual Studio 2017. Community Edition is free and will work fine, but older versions of Visual Studio will not.

Requires GCC (or Clang), libiconv, and GNU make. Tested on Debian 8.

The C++ compilers bundled with Xcode as of version 9.2 are too old to build this project. A more recent build of GCC or Clang is required, for example from Homebrew.

• tracktwo, who created it;
• shaygover, who added install instructions;
• skywalkerytx, who fixed date problems;
• golinski, who made the Enemy Unknown version;
• Anders1232, who merged the Enemy Unknown version;