INF — Aircraft Tech Sheet (.INF)

.INF files contain the technical information sheet for an aircraft, displayed in-game on the aircraft selection screen and in the mission planner. One .INF per aircraft; not all aircraft have one. FA_3.LIB (Disc 2) carries 269 of them, DCL-compressed (flags=4).

Tools

fx

fx inf dump <file.INF>     # parsed directive/body listing

Extract via fx lib unpack first. Edit in any plain text editor, re-pack into a custom LIB, and configure FA to load it.

fxs

Opening an .INF record shows a Styled tab — each directive section rendered with its in-game alignment and title/body weight, editable per section (text, alignment, title/body style, insert/delete) — and a Source tab with the raw dot-command text. Edited sections are recomposed through fx::inf_rebuild_section; untouched sections keep their exact source bytes. See gui.md.

File Layout

Plain text; no binary fields.

Custom dot-command markup — plain text, not RTF. Lines beginning with . are formatting directives; all other lines are body text.

.body .right
Jane's All The World's Aircraft

.title .center
A-10 THUNDERBOLT II
.body .left

TITLE:
FAIRCHILD REPUBLIC THUNDERBOLT II
...

Known Directives

Directive	Effect
.body .right	Body text, right-aligned (used for the "Jane's" header)
.body .left	Body text, left-aligned (main content)
.title .center	Title text, centred (aircraft name)

The renderer is the in-game text display, not a standard RTF or HTML control. Only the directives listed above have been observed.

Content Structure

All observed .INF files follow the same layout (sourced from Jane's All The World's Aircraft):

1. Header: "Jane's All The World's Aircraft" right-aligned
2. Title: Aircraft designation, centred
3. Body sections: TITLE, TYPE, PROGRAMME, DESIGN FEATURES, FLYING CONTROLS, STRUCTURE, LANDING GEAR, POWER PLANT, ACCOMMODATION, ARMAMENT, DIMENSIONS: EXTERNAL, WEIGHTS AND LOADINGS, PERFORMANCE
4. Structured footer (machine-readable performance data): LENGTH (m): 16.26 HEIGHT (m): 4.47 WINGSPAN (m): 17.53 MAX T.O. WEIGHT (kg): 21,500 MAX WING LOAD (kg/m/2): 449.88 T.O. RUN (m): 1372 LANDING RUN (m): 762 MAX RATE CLIMB (m/min): 1828 These key-value pairs are likely parsed by the engine to populate the stat display.

Round-Trip Notes

inf_parse keeps each section's exact source bytes (InfSection::raw); inf_serialize concatenates them, so parse → serialize is byte-identical by construction — line endings, blank-line runs, stat-footer separators (both : and space formats), and unterminated or DOS-EOF tails all survive. tests/test_inf.cpp asserts it on synthetic samples; verified across all 269/269 .INF entries in FA_3.LIB (Disc 2). The stats map is a derived view — extraction no longer removes footer lines from section text.

Open Questions

1. Directive set and footer consumption

Only three directives (.body .right, .body .left, .title .center) have been observed across the corpus, and the structured footer is inferred to be engine-parsed for the stat display; the renderer and its directive dispatch in The game executable have not been traced.

Status: open — re-static (#54)

Related

Formats: BRF — .PT aircraft flight model records paired with each .INF; PIC — aircraft skin textures also in FA_3.LIB; LIB — the container (FA_3.LIB, DCL-compressed entries).