I don't know if I'm weird or if it's just normal to get random reverse engineering urges.
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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
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ahh. I think it's (effectively) using big endian numbers. See, the coordinates aren't linear X/Y, they're "which sector" and then (maybe) "where within the sector".
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which I think means it has a positional resolution of like 35 meters, given that each sector is 10km across
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fuck me these are nibble addresses
I entered "87", which is hex 0x57, and it's in sector E07
E is the 5th letter of the alphabet. so it's sector E07. -
so if I change it to 71 (hex 0x47) it should move to sector D07
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hey look there it is.
