Unlocking RomeTW Hardcoded Limits - Memory Editing
For the past month, we in the RTR team have been working on something new, something exciting - something for everyone in the RTW community. For us, this is known as The RTR Project and its goal is to break hard-coded limits imposed by the old RomeTW engine and thus revitalize the modding scene.
The current list of unlocked features from the RomeTW engine:
- Most BI features available in RomeTW-ALX
- All ALX features available in RomeTW-BI
- Unit size limit increased to 300 (planned to unlock 1200 next)
- Regions limit raised from 200 to 1000
- Extensive developer-only debug logs enabled
- Built-In EDB,DMB,UI image validators unlocked - a serious contender for the old Zeus Validator
- Clouds and terrain textures are modfoldered
Features built into the RTR Launcher:
- Minimalistic User Interface with available configuration options
- Descr_Geography.db auto-generation
- Extensive debug logging to catch any possible errors from RomeTW
- Auto-generated background script
- Enabled developer debugging with Visual Studio JIT debugger
- DLL injector and patcher
Planned features to unlock/change in RomeTW engine:
- Add more faction slots - 60+
- Enable Loyalty for RomeTW-ALX
- Increase EDU slots
Planned features for the RTR Launcher:
- Implement custom EDU scripts (30% done) to allow unit templates
- Allow complicated Mods of Mods - to be able to extend an already existing mod's units or redefine their stats without modifying the original mod or copying all their units.
- Implement basic error checking for descr_strat.txt
The RTR Launcher is designed to work for any mod and is not restricted to The RTR Project. Once we've implemented enough features (and done enough testing) to warrant a release, we will make the launcher available to the modding community. Current projected date is end of June.
How does this all work?
In order to unlock features in RomeTW, we first launch RomeTW-ALX/BI.exe and then inject our custom GameEngine.dll into the process. This means all the modifications are done during run-time, when RomeTW is launched. Once the game is closed, all the changes will be lost and the executable itself is never modified. This is also the only legal way to do something like this and luckily we received express permission from both TWC and CA to do what we must.
The Launcher is a crucial part in the whole process of unlocking hard-coded features. During this initialization step, we add ALX features to BI and change several machine code instructions, structure references and data references.
Why can't you release it today?
Unfortunately something of this scale requires very experienced C/C++ programmers and is extremely time consuming to achieve. It has taken around 1 month just to unlock more regions and unlock hidden features of RomeTW engine. However, with more people able to help, this can be achieved much faster - especially some of the Launcher specific features such as Mods-of-Mods. If you love RomeTW or just TW and are an avid C/C++ programmer we will be extremely grateful if you lent us your skills.
Where's the limit?
With a competent team of programmers, nothing is impossible to extend or unlock. The only limiting factor is time, which is determined by the skill of the team and amount of programmers. A good balance would be a few hardcore reverse engineers and a large number of just programmers. So if you know how to write code, you can definitely help us out.
This is just not them..
