Video Game Archaeology with Elixir
The Nerevarine Prophecy was encoded in little-endian floats. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a 24-year-old RPG whose entire world - every quest, NPC, spell, and line of dialogue - is packed into a binary file format designed last century. I've been using Elixir to dig it up: parsing the binary format, modeling the game world with Ash and PostgreSQL, reconstructing quest flows from scattered dialogue conditions and script analysis, and browsing it all with LiveView. This is a talk about what happens when you point Elixir at something it was never designed for, and discover that it's perfect.
Rebecca Le
Rebecca Le is a software developer, member of the Ash core team, and co-author of the Ash Framework book. She is also the creator of the Cinder data table library, with more interesting things to come. When not writing code she watches way too much cricket, does epic cross-stitch, and is a servant of several cats.