Red Alert 2 Multiplayer

[XTF]

Ares developers appear to have great knowledge about the game's internals. Are you only working on Yuri's Revenge or is Red Alert 2 included as well?
For multiplayer, a number of modifications would be very interesting.

[Blade]

Apart from a very few minor things, YR can be made to play exactly like RA2. You can disable all the new YR units and set unit stats back to their RA2 values. The only things that you can't do (by default) IIRC is to remove a country completely (YuriCountry) and get grinding infantry working on the cloning vats without making it a grinder. Once you have it to that point you can then make your changes.

[XTF]

The idea is to have an updated executable that works as a drop-in replacement for the original.

[DCoder]

I'm afraid a parallel project for RA2 is just too time-consuming for us. If someone starts up such a project, we'll be glad to assist in explaining the code and possibly even project hosting, but actually developing it would require far more time than I personally can afford (not to mention the angry YR modders would form a mob outside our houses).

[XTF]

Hmm, understable. Is the YR project open source?

[DCoder]

Yes. http://modenc.renegadeprojects.com/Contributing_to_Ares explains how to get the source and necessary toolchain, what you need beyond that is a disassembled game.exe, ASM knowledge and a few years of spare time

[XTF]

That much spare time is better spend writing a clone.

[XTF]

Is it possible to put the code directly into the game exe such that a launcher isn't necessary?

[DCoder]

That's how RockPatch was made... but we're not going back to writing changes in raw ASM.

I suppose we could turn Syringe into a DLL, trick the game into loading it, at which point it would patch the game and load our code... but that's a great big headache. Have you considered changing the ra2md.lcf to launch Syringe instead of gamemd? That might work.

[XTF]

I'm not using the original launcher. I didn't mean to write asm code, I meant to compile C++ code and link/patch it directly into the exe. Then also have Syringe do whatever it does so it's not needed when running the game.

[DCoder]

It would be a big architectural change to make it work that way. I don't think it's impossible, just somewhat more limiting and more work. Impersonate a DLL that the game loads by default, find and patch all hooks in DllMain, and that should be all without any need for a separate Syringe application to launch.

[Marshall]

The current way is better - no modifying my EXEs!
XTF, have you tried using Launch Base?

[XTF]

Not yet