!!Con 2021 - Let me at my data! Pulling pictures out of an undocumented file format by Alex Pounds

Let me at my data! Pulling pictures out of an undocumented file format by Alex Pounds RTS games have a concept called “fog of war”, where the map is hidden until your units explore it. For years I’ve used an app that brings that to the real world. I wanted to transform my unfogging data into wall art, but it’s a small indie app with no export function. Could I, a web developer who’s never reverse-engineered a binary format before, figure it out? I could! Kind of! This is a detective story and a science story: a story of making guesses, figuring out how to test them, and piecing together the puzzle so I could generate my own images outside of the app. Alex is a web developer and photographer who lives in Toronto, Canada. He’s particularly interested in social software and human-centred product design. When not coding for work he likes to code for fun, practice piano, and get out into nature. You can find out more about him at https://alexpounds.com/.