Modifying and Hex editing MOO2

[AvA_Majestic]

Hey guys.
Found this forum through google, looking for information on how to mod MOO2.

I've found all the lbx editors, OCL, etc, and that lets me change some things.

The defensive anti blitz mod had a change via the hex editor that changed the number of space units for missile bases. I've had little experience (read: none) with hex editors. I understand what hexadecimal is, etc, but how would the creator of the mod found out that those values were the ones for the size of the missile base. It could not be trial and error, since the number of addresses is huge.

I'd like to be able to add a few new weapons/techs, increase the lifespan of the game a bit

Anyone have any experience with this kind of thing? I've read the other threads here, but thought we could use a newer one.


Peace
Majestic

[Whoha]

He likely found them by trial and error, thats how you find stuff unless you have some more tools at your disposal.

There wouldn't be all that many 300 values in the executable, since its 2 bytes, but get a strange enough number, and it cuts down on the guess and testing that you'd have to do. In his case its the 6th occurence of 2C 01 in the executable, so if he did guess and test, then he got lucky, I counted a bunch of them.

[AvA_Majestic]

Perhaps I know less about hex than I thought (and I didn't think I knew much) but how does one identify 2C 01 as 300?
By direct conversion you get 11,000 roughly.
Converting it to decimal characters as two separate ones you get 44 and 1?

Sorry for my lack of understanding. The only editing i've done in past games has been in languages I could make sense of, rather than actually trying to understand the exe file

[Whoha]

300 is a number in base 10, its coresponding number in base 16 is 12C, however this is stored in multiple bytes. Depending on how its being read it can be in the form 2C 01 or 01 2C, most of the time the least significant bits are the first to be read. Its all in the interpretation. The first byte is 44, but the second byte is 256, not 1.

[Leonidas]

Interesting information

[AvA_Majestic]

ok, that makes a little more sense, thanks.

[AvA_Majestic]

Trying to find the value for space units in a ground battery. He must be a very patient guy as there are literally hundreds of that 2 byte pair

[AvA_Majestic]

Well there are exactly 161 incidences of that value
I think i've tested about 50 with no luck, going to keep trying though.

Also, in a similar vein, what are the function of the .lbx file types? Are they simply archives with all the sound and graphical data? There is no actual game mechanics stuff in an of the LBX files, is that correct?

[Whoha]

they have data for ship space/hit points apparently, they do have game mechanics stuff in them, but some thing were hard coded for some reason. According to the anti-blitz mod its changed even the ground installation hitpoints without editing the executable.

[AvA_Majestic]

using the OCL editor you can edit weapon values, ship values, tech values etc. You cannot however create new weapons, techs, etc. Thats what I was hoping to do, but it really does not look good.

[Whoha]

yea, that doesn't look like it will be possible. What kind of weapons were you thinking of adding?

[Whoha]

adding a new weapon to the game would probably require the lbx file format,the format of the files contained within, and the source code to the game.

[muxec]

Really modable game must be based on open source DLLs.