Whats the purpose of this conversion tool? When would somebody use it?

It feels very AI-ish, barely any comments and large methods with hundreds of lines of code.

"This will allow us to edit and revision AI scripts in plain text."

And yes, I very much used Claude on this one, particularly when going from having round trip go from "This is logically the same" to "This is byte for byte identical." Also getting the initial build to compile (needed to include/stub a lot of stuff to keep it living in the game code), and getting it to run without issue (needed to use the debugger and step line by line to find issues). There was a lot of "here's the diff output, explain the likely causes and propose 3 fixes explaining the tradeoffs of each" over and over - it's a grind for sure, but manually getting byte for byte would have taken forever. My goal was to get the tool to work first, which it does, provably so. From here, I'm happy to refactor and improve it however is best.

Here is the standalone version https://github.com/bobtista/GeneralsGameCode/pull/new/bobtista/data-chunk-json-converter-standalone which I know is not the direction we're going in, but it works and may be useful some day.

I'm also thinking we can get 100% automatic syncing on changes (those that wouldn't break existing scbs anyway), by combining the binary and json conversions with templating. We should also be able to get the names instead of numbers when there's mapping in the code, while still keeping things synced. For the key names though, this mapping doesn't exist yet. The binary writer just outputs their values, but we could make the JSON way more readable if we add the field name. We'd make a one time change like

chunkWriter.writeInt(pCondition->m_conditionType);
  to:
chunkWriter.writeInt("conditionType", pCondition->m_conditionType);

Right now we have ~25 of them, and this would be a one time change - in the future if we for some reason add another, we'd just add another line like this with the name as a param. This just makes the json output more human readable.

Ok, here's the latest - this is all 100% byte identical round trip, and inherits any changes automatically from the game. The json output is pretty readable for anyone familiar with scripting - would love feedback at this point, can share the json of skirmish or multiplayer scb files.

Script: "USA Base Expansion Check"

• Runs on: normal and hard difficulty (not easy)
• isOneShot: true (runs once, then disables)
• delayEvaluationSeconds: 7 (waits 7 seconds before checking)

Conditions (OrCondition groups are OR'd, multiple groups are AND'd):

"condition": "PLAYER_HAS_CREDITS"
"_items": ["INT", 7000, "COMPARISON", "GREATER_EQUAL", "SIDE", ""]
→ has ≥ 7000 credits

"condition": "PLAYER_HAS_OBJECT_COMPARISON"
"_items": ["SIDE", "", "COMPARISON", "LESS_EQUAL", "INT", 3, "OBJECT_TYPE", "Supply Lines - Buildings"]
→ has ≤ 3 "Supply Lines - Buildings"

"condition": "COUNTER"
"_items": ["COUNTER", "_ESCALATION", "COMPARISON", "GREATER_EQUAL", "INT", 25]
→ Counter _ESCALATION is ≥ 25

Actions (when conditions pass):

"action": "ENABLE_SCRIPT"
"_items": ["SCRIPT", "USA Base Expand Start-B"]
→ Enable script "USA Base Expand Start-B"

"action": "SET_MILLISECOND_TIMER"
"_items": ["COUNTER", "USA Build Expansion Timer-B", "REAL", 15.0]
→ Set timer "USA Build Expansion Timer-B" to 15 seconds

"action": "CALL_SUBROUTINE"
"_items": ["SCRIPT_SUBROUTINE", "USA Base Expand Start - N"]
→ Call subroutine "USA Base Expand Start - N"

An actual snippet of the json for example:

"_children": [
                      {
                        "_items": [
                          "INT",
                          12000,
                          0.0,
                          "",
                          "COMPARISON",
                          3,
                          0.0,
                          "",
                          "SIDE",
                          0,
                          0.0,
                          "<This Player>"
                        ],
                        "condition": "PLAYER_HAS_CREDITS",
                        "label": "Condition",
                        "version": 4
                      },

made an MVP, going to use it and iterate and add QOL improvements based on feedback, but it's another large change - will close this for now and make a new one later