I've got a question about the card format for all you technically adept perverts. Has anyone documented the structure of the character metadata used in HS2 cards? Or can anyone confirm whether it operates within the EXIF standard so that a tool like, say, the Python3 "pillow" library can read it? I could just start digging into character cards from my collection and see what I find, of course, but if somebody out there has already mapped that territory, I'd rather not waste a bunch of time duplicating work that's already been done.
My end goal is to write a little command-line program that can extract all the relevant metadata from a chara.png file, convert it to a text-based format like JSON, store that in a separate sidecar file, and conversely replace all the character metadata in a chara.png with the version found in the JSON sidecar file. Then I could use git (with the appropriate hooks) to do convenient, efficient version control of the actual values of all the character data. I do a lot of going back and tweaking, and sometimes I just change my mind... and sometimes a normal little tweak leaves you with a corrupt card because Illusion's code is kinda garbage. So it would be really nice to have an efficient, reliable way to roll back to an earlier version of a card.
I do know about the card image replacer program that's already out there (by ManlyMarco, I think?), but for this purpose pulling a binary dump of the character data from one png to another doesn't really help.
If I actually get this idea working, the code will be released for free under an open source license.
Thanks for any tips or pointers to resources!