Unlocking RomeTW Hardcoded Limits - Memory Editing

[Grimbold]

If you were to risk throwing a date out there, as to when anything would be ready to implement and playable, what time frame would you suggest?

[2-D Ron]

This would be a pretty epic hack. I can think of a few ways how this could be done, but it's going to require complete reverse engineering of the soldier rendering functions. All I can say is: perhaps, if gods deem us worthy.


Increasing EDU and DMB slots is also on the "todo" list, so no worries there


We have permission from CA and TWC admins, so no worries there.

Exciting times!!

Hope it doesn't effect the game it terms of 32-Bit or 64-Bit capacity?

[jroy1117]

Gentlemen, I have one thing to say about this.



You guys are amazing! I hope and pray you guys are able to completely remold the entire system into something truly wonderful. I would love to help however I only have a masters degree in history and have no knowledge of code. So I guess I shall provide moral support then.

[tungri_centurio]

c'mon CA give those guys also the sourcecode and everything they need.show yourselfs from your good side

[Causeless]

So in basic English

You are literally going to make a game out of this engine aren't you, you're modders, yet if you manage to break most of the hard coded areas, you will effectively become indie game developers?

I might be wrong but I am sure that if you're going to these extents......yeah Sega wouldn't catch you out, because Rome was under Activision, and Activison no longer owns CA, they have expressed no interest in the great game they made( I'm looking at you CA for the failure of Rome 2) so yeah you guys are pretty safe. Its only now CA realises that if they let modders like you try to gain more access in the current engines, they will die. If modders one day break the code engine or something, consider it the end of the pc gaming industry.

I might be wrong but these are just guesses.

PS. If China is added, you guys RULE!

Whoever owns it right now doesn't matter. It was illegal to modify the .exe file, meaning modders couldn't do it, but now this method instead modifies the .exe in RAM - which is perfectly legal and is almost identical to the former except you need to run the game using a launcher. On top of that, CA has confirmed it's legal.

No, CA won't die if modders get more access to current engines. That's a silly stupid assumption, because CA are doing a lot of the hard work. They are making the engine, creating the AI (and yes, it gets flak, but all AI mods are based around CA's AI with different weights), they make the physics engine stuff, and all. The point is, nobody is going to give Rome 1 multicore support, or any huge changes. It's a lot of work, especially because nobody has access to the source code.

And if by "If modders one day break the code engine or something, consider it the end of the pc gaming industry." you mean, "Modders crack the source code from the game", they can't do that. The only way modders can get the source code is by CA giving it to them. And if they did... it's not exactly the end of CA or computer gaming...

And although what the modders are doing is amazing, I wouldn't say it makes them indie game developers. They are still working around the limitations of the Rome 1 engine, and although many can be fixed, there's no doubt that many of the limitations are so ingrained deep into the engine that they cannot be fixed without so much effort it'd be easier to start over!

[Extradaemon]

This may be stupid of me to ask, but what are DMB/EDU limits? I'm not good with abbreviations.

[Bercor]

DMB - desc_model_battle; EDU - export_desc_unit. Located in your data folder, this is where you put your units entries in order to them appear in-game.

[makanyane]

Great news on this, well done on all the work so far!

Features built into the RTR Launcher:

[LIST][*]Descr_Geography.db auto-generation

If you're activating a CA inbuilt game function to do that it'd be worth checking how well it works... the one included with M2 sucks slightly! (hogs texture memory and deletes all the RGB distance colours)
for the amount of people that actually need that as a function just using Squid's db editor might be safer!

[RedFox]

If you're activating a CA inbuilt game function to do that it'd be worth checking how well it works... the one included with M2 sucks slightly! (hogs texture memory and deletes all the RGB distance colours)
for the amount of people that actually need that as a function just using Squid's db editor might be safer!

The descr_geography.db generator is written from scratch as a C++ module for the launcher. I got around the RGB color issue by introducing custom syntax to descr_geography.txt:

;;        ground_type  texture_path  R  G  B
texture rock ../RTR/data/terrain/battle/test_climate/winter/rock.tga 135 120 97

It works rather nice and the conversion can be done both ways descr_geography.db <-> descr_geography.txt. I can release the tool as a separate utility right now if needed.

[Garensterz]

So, is it now possible to implement Germanicu's Really Bad AI Battle System to Rome Total War? Or maybe mod the Battle AI in RTW like Germanicu did?

[_Tartaros_]

I´m not 100% sure, but i think i remember resef trying to implant real bad ai to CaTW . didn´t know if he was successful

[makanyane]

The descr_geography.db generator is written from scratch as a C++ module for the launcher. I got around the RGB color issue by introducing custom syntax to descr_geography.txt:

;;        ground_type  texture_path  R  G  B
texture rock ../RTR/data/terrain/battle/test_climate/winter/rock.tga 135 120 97

It works rather nice and the conversion can be done both ways descr_geography.db <-> descr_geography.txt. I can release the tool as a separate utility right now if needed.

that sounds cool - separate might be good - modders might find it useful elsewhere before/without the launcher, but I don't want to encourage you to get side tracked onto spending time on that
(I'm only involved with M2 now, and the .db for that is slightly different, IWTE can edit it, which means we can avoid CA's re-builder)

[Aradan]

Ah, this awesome achievement finally goes public. Congrats to RedFox and Co and good luck with this gargantuan task!

[=Vastator=]

It would be cool (and i think not too difficult, it should be a problem of digging and searching for the right variables) to have these changes:
*Increasing the maximum and minimum camera zoom, both on strat, but especially on the battle map (the actual camera, especially if compared with newer games, is pretty limited). It would be cool zooming in or out more.
*Editing the squallor and distance from capital effects (they are hard coded). For example editing their max and how the distance from capital is affected by the actual tile distance.

[Brusilov]

Well done.

Congratulations on this part as well (hopefully TWC members won't miss that bit and stop reporting the thread......)

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.

[Legatus Legionarii]

This is an earthquake in the modding scene!!

Congratulations for your incredible work and I hope that all what you are aiming for will be realized!

[High Fist]

People are reporting this? Jesus.

[Brusilov]

People are reporting this? Jesus.

Modding the exe (any discussion) is one of those things that is forbidden on this forum.

[High Fist]

I know, but they say several times that they have permission to do so, in this way at least.

[Brusilov]

I know, but they say several times that they have permission to do so, in this way at least.

See my previous post - 3 posts prior to the one before you're post.....