Hex Madness: Custom Difficulty, etc.

Saracoth on 29/8/2005 at 00:57

Wow, I have been out of the loop. Kudos to the minimalist project :)

I'm not promising anything, but I will consider looking into a new version. I have some relatives visiting who won't be gone for another few days, but I might just reinstall TDS and check out the minimalist mod sometime this week. Maybe use md5 checksums to pick the right offsets to use. If it looks simple enough, I might just incorporate a dynamic mode (eg, find the text identifying such and such a spot, move forward X bytes, and there you are). It'd be slower since it involves searching through the file for each of the several offsets, but at least it'd be a *potential* fix for any other alterations, present and (for the most part) future :)

Saracoth on 6/9/2005 at 05:03

A little update/word of warning: if you want to use the newer version of the gamesys tweaker, you'll need the (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp) Java runtime files (I'm not installing Visual Studios.Net for this ;) ). The .Net runtime will no longer be required (praise God!). I'm designing with Java 1.4.2 compilance in Eclipse, but I'm actually using 5.0 (if you have java 1.4.2 runtimes it should work). If you're on dialup and you don't have any Java\jre1.5.0 folders in Program Files, you might want to start (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp) the up to 15 MB download from sun.com. Be sure to get the JRE (runtime), not the JDK (development kit), unless you plan to start programming yourself. It says JRE Update 4, but it's actually the full install, not a patch.

It's 90% functional already, or I wouldn't just tell you to download crap. When It's finished I'll probably start a new thread in this forum, since this tool is a whole different animal in a lot of ways. Plus, if people create new gamesys version files, they'll have a convenient place to share them with the world (hosting not included :) ).

I mostly need to make it user friendly and finish implementing starting equipment (prices, maximums, and difficulty are done). There's some interesting possibilities with starting equipment that I need to test, but expect new things....

The best part is that, aside from backend code, is that a LOT of the system is controlled through different configurable text files. This means it should be easy to add changed offsets for different versions of the gamesys (meaning that even if ninjas break into my house and sell me into white slavery someone can still make the gamesys tweaker work with new versions of the gamesys as needed). Even adding some new value types is possible without any programming. The downside to this is that the interface is a little uglier (all the controls are added in one area and you just scroll around if there's too many), but conversely it's also more user-friendly (none of that "double click to enable/disable" crap because I didn't want to add and program another 32 checkboxes).

I was going to make something that would just parse and allow changing of the whole gamesys (a 0.02 MB program and potential 15 MB runtime download is a lot better than a 300+ MB editor download ;) ), but I came across a stumbling block in the form of what looks like a 16-bit checksum in the header area of the file. If I knew the kind of checksum and what it was using to generate it, then the rest is academic. Maybe a 300-level college coarse scope of academic, but academic nonetheless. Otherwise, there are three values that seem related to the size of the gamesys, but even changing them all to the appropriate values doesn't help (crash on startup).

Now if you don't mind, I need to go to sleep then get up to go to work in 6.5 hours, so... :bored:

bartouze on 6/9/2005 at 16:15

I've been checking everyday for an update -don't have time to play at the moment anyway-
Happy to see you haven't given up and it could be coming soon :cool:

TheJoe on 8/3/2009 at 21:55

All the links are dead... :angel: