*.mnu

These files appear to be the UI definitions for Chaos Gate. Some relate to system menus, other to in-game menus. Their names are hardcoded into the WH40K.exe binary. Each has a .obj file associated with it.

It's an ASCII-formatted text file with a 12-line header, followed by a number of descriptor records.

Here's the top of MainGame.mnu:

MainGame.obj
BACKGROUND COLOR 0..255..-1 trans : 0
HYPERTEXT COLOR 0..255            : 120
FONT TYPE 0..5                    : 10
wh40k_12
basfnt12
wh40k_47
wh40k_12_red
wh40k_12_blue
wh40k_12_green
wh40k_12_yellow
NULL

The first line of the header is a .obj file containing sprites we want to display on-screen. We see entries further down have a SPRITEID, which must reference entries in that file.

In SaveGame.mnu, we can see multiple .obj files can be referenced.

There are then 3 lines that seem to be fixed descriptor names with values that vary. Is this font colour, perhaps? Unsure.

Next is a variable-length list of font names, referencing files in the Fonts directory.

Finally, there's a list of records that specify the menu itself. Truncated contents of SaveGame.mnu:

#rem..........Background
MENUID     : 1
MENUTYPE   : 0
MOVEABLE   : 0
ACTIVE     : 1
SPRITEID   : 0
ACCELERATOR: 0
DRAW TYPE  : 0
SHARE      : -1
X-CORD     : -1
Y-CORD     : -1
DESC       :
*
#rem..........MAIN BACKGROUND
MENUID     : 2
MENUTYPE   : 45
MOVEABLE   : 0
ACTIVE     : 1
SPRITEID   : 0
ACCELERATOR: 0
DRAW TYPE  : 0
SHARE      : -1
X-CORD     : -1
Y-CORD     : -1
DESC       :
#rem.......... MAIN BACKGROUND
        SUBMENUID  : 1
        SUBMENUTYPE: 31
        FONTTYPE   : 20
        ACTIVE     : 0
        SPRITEID   : -1
        ACCELERATOR: 0
        DRAW TYPE  : 0
        SHARE      : 0
        SOUNDTYPE  : 0
        DESC       :
*
#rem..........Chat List Box Menu
MENUID     : 21
MENUTYPE   : 1
MOVEABLE   : 0
ACTIVE     : 1
SPRITEID   : 764
ACCELERATOR: 0
DRAW TYPE  : 0
SHARE      : -1
X-CORD     : -1
Y-CORD     : -1
DESC       :
[...]
*
~

We start processing these as soon as we see MENUID, I suppose. Each toplevel item is *-delimited, and the list is terminated with ~.

Each menu has a list of parameters:

Name	Examples	Purpose
`MENUID`	`1`, `2`, `3`	Maybe linking between menus?
`MENUTYPE`	`0`, `1`, `2`, `3`, `45`, `300`	?
`MOVEABLE`	`0`	Unimplemented functionality?
`ACTIVE`	`0`, `1`	Boolean - whether to show the thing
`SPRITEID`	`-1`, `0`, `123`	Select from `.obj` file
`ACCELERATOR`		?
`DRAW TYPE`		?
`SHARE`		?
`X-CORD`	`-1`, `0`, `200`	X coordinate to draw at
`Y-CORD`	`-1`, `0`, `200`	Y coordinate to draw at
`FONTTYPE`		Choose a font from the above?
`SOUNDTYPE`		?
`DESC`	`CHARACTER SELECT`, `51005`	Text, or reference to `Data/USEng.dta`

Submenus also show a couple of unique values:

Name	Examples	Purpose
`SUBMENUID`	`1`, `2`, `3`	As `MENUID`
`SUBMENUTYPE`	`0`, `1`, `2`	As `MENUTYPE`

It seems .mnu files can also include other files, which have the extension .mni (presumably for "Menu include"). Examples:

*
$GenDialog.mni
$GenLoad.mni

It looks like we just interpolate the named file into the text when we come across one of these lines.

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*.mnu

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