Patching extra functionality into <gamemd.exe>

[~Guest~]

LOL, you should make a scripts.dll for RA2, jonwil.

[jonwil]

RA2 has a totally different architecture to Renegade so what you suggest wouldnt work.
But, there is no reason why I cant put my skills alongside those of our friend PaD and help to improve RA2 for the good of everyone.

[~Guest~]

PD, Why are my ChronoBeams GREEN???

you said your radbeam patch wouldn't interfear with chronobeams...

you need to make sure that if there is no new colour tag on temperol weapons that instead of defaulting to green, they default to blue...

[jonwil]

FYI, I got the same crash as before (same address), same place when loading, only difference is that this time it was when loading soviet mission 02 (i.e. finished the time machine one, loading the next one, crash on loadscreen)
patch this time is 1.04c
OS is Windows XP SP2

[Marshall]

Ack! Another IE, pd:

Nothing of particular relevance was going on (to my knowledge)

Both my opponent and I had the error, with two different addresses...

[pd]

Spyplane... hmmm...
The problem is that my data stock couldn't be initialized... but that should have raised an error before :huh:

Hm...
jonwil's last error had something to do with my data thingy as well.
I'll check that one (whereas I'm still wondering why the hell I don't get any errors)

[Marshall]

According to my opponent, the Spy Plane had already been used once, but somewhere about the time he tried to use it a second time the IE ocurred.

[jonwil]

Hopefully you can fix it, it would be good to be able to play the single player campaign without crashing

Also, PaD, what time are you usually online? (I am in perth, australia which I think is GMT-8, where in the world are you located?)

[Renegade]

Notice the "From:" field

[C00L DuDe]

@jonwil

PaD

Advanced Member


Group: Members
Posts: 142
Joined: 24-January 05
From: Datteln, Germany
Member No.: 17

[~Guest~]

its GMT+1

at mid-day where you are, it'll be 9PM where he is, and he is usually on after school till midnight, so thats like 3 - 11 PM GMT, GMT-8 about 9am - 3PM... unless you can use MSN at school, you stuck.

[Renegade]

That is not entirely correct. CET is GMT+1. CEST is GMT+2.
So the amount of time difference depends on whether your country/state uses daylight saving time or not.

[jonwil]

I have just spent some time talking to PaD, he gave me lots of reverse engineering notes and stuff.
I gave him lots of usefull tidbits on MS Runtime Type Information.
And on COM/OLE classes.
And on DynamicVectorClass and VectorClass (basicly, a way to store stuff that is used by both Renegade and RA2 and also Generals and such)

A few notable things came out of the reverse engineering work we did tonight (my time), the most usefull of which is that we finally found out why the game doesnt recognize more than 3 BaseUnits for the purposes of ShortGame=.
The reason is because that bit of code only cheks the first 3 entries in the BaseUnits list.
There is also other code that is similarly limited not to check the entire list.
Now that we found the various relavent pieces of code, it should be possible for PaD to rewrite it as a loop to check the entire array instead of just the first elements.

Other news is that we both looked at IsSensor (i.e. Sensor Array) and the concensus is that the code that actually makes it "sense" simply was removed from RA2 (makes sense, they knew they werent going to be using sensor array logic in RA2 so why have "dead" code in there. Although we couold be wrong

Also, I have taken a look at Ice1Set, Ice2Set, IceShoreSet and TrainBridgeSet.
The game doesnt read them at all.
No clue about the Ice stuff but I am sure that if the bridge logic was reverse engineered, it would be possible to have not just one but multiple extra bridge types per tileset. Although one would need to add a new overlay too which is where things get kinda tricky... (last I looked adding a new overlay to RA2 wasnt something that you could actually do)

Anyhow, this is a start and depending on how much time I have etc, I hope this wont be the last you hear from me as far as reverse engineering RA2 goes.

Let me know what I should have a look into next.

Note that I wont actually be doing any patching or coding (thats PaDs job), just studying stuff to find out how it works

[Bobingabout]

great news, 4th(+5th-7th) base units are pretty important to our mod. also important is the sensor code on buildings, so if you can do both, thats brilliant.

but still, you've got to find and fix all the bugs first...

and although i don't want to push it, maybe next you could expand to more 4 sides stuff, maybe 100 units bug too?

[Renegade]

OK, important discovery(?) here:
It seems like infantry actually can reload ammo given to it ? it just needs to be in "red" condition (read DeeZire for the testing series/confirmation by death3464).

This means, there is a fully working reloading-engine for infantry. It's just limited to low health. Shouldn't it be relatively easy to extend this to all health conditions?