I don't know if I'm weird or if it's just normal to get random reverse engineering urges.
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the RLE compression seems to only affect the first 256 bytes of the file (after the 6-byte chunks). fucking weird. But I wrote some code that does the same, and it matches.
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this compresses the file from 2.36 kilobytes down to an amazing 2.25 kilobytes
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I tried to glitch up the map to see what it meant, but I accidentally glitched it too hard and got stuck in an infinite divide by zero glitch
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it keeps crashing when I modify it. I think I found the font routine, though, which'll help hack more
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Awesome New Year Robotreplied to Foone🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@foone can you figure out what the bug was? I assume they intended to compress everything but some bug prevented it but they didn't pay too close attention. But what bug would that be? Is there an obvious if or mask in the "correct" implementation that would cause this?
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Foone🏳️⚧️replied to Awesome New Year Robot last edited by
@StompyRobot I hope to find out but I have no idea so far. This seems to not be a bug but a deliberate choice, and I have no idea why yet.
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I think the map format might be tile-based rather than wireframes. You see (on the map) how the rocks in the sector to the bottom-left are the same as the ones in the top-right? That'd make sense if it's just a single value selecting what set of 3D geometry to stuff in the square
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also based on the scale this game says it functions at, your one-man fighter jet/spaceship is approximately 500 meters (1640') long
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I'm gonna have to expand my patching system to let me patch PNGs into EXEs as binary data
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So the game has an alien language that's written on lots of artifacts, right?
You can see some of it here, on this mining probe I picked up
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But like most alien languages in games, it's just a alternate alphabet on english.
So I found the alphabet in the EXE and overwrote it with one of the other two fonts, and now it's plain english:
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okay I think that 6-byte-chunks thing at the top of the file is items. I went and sat on top of an item, then edited the file so instead of 5-chunks it had 0, then reloaded the area (by hyperspacing out and then back in ) and suddenly the item is gone
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which does mean I can figure out how many items are in each area, easily. Read the 3rd byte of every area file!
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I have done so. The Area you start in is the only one with zero items.
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yeah I narrowed down the item I'm floating over to one specific chunk.
I set the last short in the chunk to 4312 and the item changed Z coord to (approx) 4761.The value was original 4615 and it was at Z coord 6794. ugh.
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WHY ARE THE SCALES DIFFERENT
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I'm gonna need a spreadsheet for this
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yeah this makes no sense.
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the first byte seems to be which icon to use. I can adjust it, and the thing still picks up as the mining probe, but it looks different in the preview
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next byte seems to be what it is.
I set it to 08 and got a Data Storage Laser Disk [sic]I think this guy was murdered, I found out from looking at the files that there's a dead body you can find somewhere, and I think it's mr. Allen
