Windowing matches

Now while that will work fine for simple things, sometimes you might not want to change every appearance of a key with its substitution. This is where the special window object on the patch becomes important.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

{
    "_meta": {
        // removed for brevity
    },
    "FilePatches": {
        "ProjectWingman/Content/ProjectWingman/Blueprints/Data/AircraftData/DB_Aircraft.uexp": [
            {
                "name": "Prez Unlock",
                "patches": [
                    {
                        "description": "Set Pilot count to 2",
                        "template": "00 00 00 00 1C 01",
                        "substitution": "02 00 00 00 1C 01",
                        "type": "inPlace",
                        "window": {
                            "after": "text:PW-Mk.I",
                            "before": "text:MG-21"
                        }
                    }
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

In short, the window object is a method of narrowing down what values should be replaced in a file. In the example above, we want to replace 00 00 00 00 1C 01 with 02 00 00 00 1C 01, but only for the PW Mk.I. To do that, we add a window object and specify that we only want to match occurrences of 00 00 00 00 1C 01 if they come after an appearance of the text “PW-Mk.I” and before an appearance of the text “MG-21”. This will narrow the search down to only the PW Mk.I’s part of the blueprint, ensuring we only change the PilotCount (i.e. 00 00 00 1C 01) for that one plane.

Sicario will automatically substitute a string value for its binary/hex representation if it starts with the special text: prefix. So you could add text:F/E-4 and Sicario will automatically change that to 46 2F 45 2D 34 for you.

Note that you can also omit the before key and only use an after to narrow down the search, but the reverse is not true! If you use a before, you must have an after to make a window.