unciv: An Uncivilized File Extractor for Civilization: Call to Power

unciv is an extractor for some proprietary data archives from the 1999 Civilization spin-off Civilization: Call to Power..

You can read more, or download precompiled binaries on unciv's website: https://davidgow.net/hacks/unciv.html

In particular, it extracts the game's zfs archives, which contain the majority of the miscellaneous graphics (everything except tiles, sprites, and a few things like mouse cursors), as well as the sounds.

unciv can also convert the game's rim graphics format to PNG, including both the 555 and 565 variants.

Usage

Simply run

cargo run <path to .zfs file>

The contents of the .zfs file will be extracted into the current directory.

To convert .rim files to .png, you will need the png crate, and to enable the png feature, with:

cargo run --features png <path to .zfs file>

Any file in the archive with the extension rim will then be converted to a .png when extracted.

If you wish for the original timestamps to be preserved, and you're running Rust v1.75 or newer (or a nightly build of Rust with the file_set_times feature supported), you can use

cargo run --features set-timestamps <path to .zfs file>

The png and set-timestamps features can be combined.

Usage as a Library

unciv can also be used as a Rust library to parse and read .zfs files, and the rim files within them.

To load a .zfs file, you'll need to use the ZfsFile::from_stream() function. The resulting ZfsFile struct has a Vec of ZfsEntry structs, upon which either read_data() can be called to retrieve the contents of the file, or read_rim_image() to retrieve it in the form of a RimImage struct.

The RimImage struct contains information like the width and height, as well as the raw data. Alternatively, the to_rgba_bytes() function can be used to convert the data to 32-bit RGBA format.

You can get the library's documentation using cargo doc, or you can look at src/main.rs — the source code for the command-line utility — which serves as a good example of the API.

Building

unciv depends on the png (v0.15) crate. Note that png has an absolute boatload of dependencies of its own, so you'll need to get those via cargo or some other means.

It's possible to build unciv with the rustc version included with Debian, just install

sudo apt install rustc cargo librust-png+deflate-dev

You can use Debian's packaged crates by following the Debian Wiki.

Note, however, that version 0.15 of png is only available in Debian bullseye. This does mean that building unciv on newer versions of Debian requires updating the png dependency to version 0.17 (even if the png feature is disabled, as the generation of Cargo.lock apparently requires the version to exist in the repository even if it isn't used). This can be done by just changing the version in Cargo.toml, and replacing RGBA with Rgba in src/main.rs, which is the only change required.

Have fun! — David