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AnmanIndustries
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« on: September 17, 2011, 06:04:32 AM »

Hey people. New and all. I own an original to the game, bought when first came out. Go for a play blitz every year or two.

This time around, I stumbled upon this site and learned of the tools to mod it. Im not making massive mods with a huge theatrical release, Im just playing with balancing and making the base lists more flexible for myself for my own multiplayer games.

A bunch of questions if I may. I have been pouring over the wiki and searching this forum for stuff and may have missed some things, so these may have been answered elsewhere, but it would be sweet if someone could direct me in the right direction.

How do you edit the army book. At least the descriptions.

Experience for units, is it core rules used in the table top game, which gives huge bonuses by level 4, or is it the one from shadow of the horned rat, explained here:
http://forum.dark-omen.org/singleplayer/sothr-game-mechanics-stats-t273.0.html

Leader units in multiplayer. I have read that they dont exist, however, looking at the army lists for single player compared to multi, single player has alternate stats for leaders and the standard multi lists dont. If I was to amend the leader stats in a multi army list, will this allow for the individual leaders to exit? Even if the sprite is the same.

I know there has been difficulty in working out the armour aspect, but is it possible to at least modify the formula for cost of armour?

Im sure I have more, but these are the ones off the top of my head. I imagine I might be hanging around for a bit.
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Darkmancer
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« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2011, 11:32:05 AM »

Hello welcome to the dark omen community.

Theres 3 things to edt an army book, one is the picture found in dark omen\graphics\books\troops.

Second is the desciption which is a bit of a pain as it unfortunatly involves a hex editor (i use HxD, its free), write a part of the current description down you want to edit, use the hex editor to open engrel.exe and use search->string to find the correct section then you can overwrite the current decription.  Note do not change the number of bytes, so you can use the same or less amount of  space as the orignal description, but no more, just fill the extra with bank space if you description is less than the old.

Finally the easiest is the actual stats themselves using Ghabrys excellent editor which you can d/l from this site.

Experiance I tested with olly and multiplayer wise the only difference between level1 and lvl 4 units is the number of items they can hold, using lvl1 vs lvl 4 flaggellant we saw no real combat difference, it was who charged what made the most difference thou there was still some variation (dice rolling).  You can get around this by bumping up the stats yourself, eg lvl 1 merc @ 100gp, lvl 2 @ 200gp but and extra wound or whatever.

Yes leaders exist and yes they can have seperate stats and/or sprites if you wish.  I think your confusing with a fudge in the dark omen engine.  Dark Omen ignores all hits against the leader until he is the last unit in a squad.

Armour cost is max unit size * x, x = (10,30,60,100,150), x is the armour level, so to increase a squad with 10 units in it from lvl 3 to 4 = 10 * 100 = 1000gp.  and yes it is a silly system Smiley, there is no way to change the formula but for multiplayer there is the same work around i described for experiance (ie have multiple versions of the same unit, different armour, different cost)
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AnmanIndustries
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« Reply #2 on: September 17, 2011, 02:39:25 PM »

Thanks for all of that. Exactly what I was after.

It seems most of the things Im after are in the engreg. It isnt even that big of a file. Is it possible to use the space in the engreg to call a string from another file to increase the size of descriptions for the book? My progaming experience is elsewhere in web scripts so this is new to me.

Ive downloaded practically everything from this site. It is a very good editor and has allowed me to do the bulk of my customising. Which is practically just cost balancing and allowing every unit to be purchased at 1-4 levels.

In that case, I am going to have to say experience is the SOTHR method. And I am going to have to go in faith in this, because I dont want to hard code level ups with regiment costs as I want the regiments to be able to gain experience and continue on to the next game. Such as a campaign tournament. Dont want people who bought their units at level 4, to actually have stronger units than a trained level 4.

Leaders, Shit yeah!

I don't suppose I could hex the armour formula to say, 8,25,40,60,100?
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Darkmancer
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« Reply #3 on: September 17, 2011, 08:30:05 PM »


Re Description changes, not in the way you mean no. 

Also we are unable to change the armour formula.

We have a mini campaigntornament tomorrow which lasts 4 turns i suggest you join if you can (begins at 5pm GMT and uses the fair omen mod).

The join up page & info is here:
http://forum.dark-omen.org/empty-t1046.0.html;msg10612#new


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Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay:
The worst is death, and death will have his day.

[23:04:33] <*Ghabry> The internal design of Darkmancer is just strange
AnmanIndustries
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« Reply #4 on: September 18, 2011, 12:36:19 AM »

Haha yeah, that puts the tournament at 3am on a monday morning. No chance for me to show.
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Jeronimo
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« Reply #5 on: September 18, 2011, 03:25:16 AM »

HELLO AnmanIndustries. Weird nick yours Smiley

Its a pity you cant join us in the Tournament this Sunday... Hope we meet someday to play.
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AnmanIndustries
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« Reply #6 on: September 18, 2011, 04:54:44 AM »

Since Im in Australia, it makes things a little hard to keep up with you guys.

My nick has a history dating ... well, before Dark Omen existed.

Jeronimo, youve tested a fair few things, what sort of gold cost do you think the standard steam tank should have?
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Darkmancer
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« Reply #7 on: September 18, 2011, 03:03:33 PM »

You need to remove the steam tanks ability to run over people before you include it in multiplayer or you get random crashes. 

You can use it as a mobile cannon however, thou obviously it stops firing as soon as its engages in melee so will need to be given some melee attacks.
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olly
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« Reply #8 on: September 18, 2011, 03:57:38 PM »

Hi and welcome AnmanIndustries i will look forward to your mod, as you know already, it's a great time to join ->

http://forum.dark-omen.org/introduction/great-time-to-join-t696.0.html

Smiley
« Last Edit: September 18, 2011, 04:15:11 PM by olly » Logged

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AnmanIndustries
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« Reply #9 on: September 19, 2011, 05:31:07 AM »

Quote
You need to remove the steam tanks ability to run over people before you include it in multiplaye

Ahh, thank you very much for that.

You know Olly, you really like saying that.. (:
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Ghabry
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« Reply #10 on: September 19, 2011, 08:53:54 PM »

It seems most of the things Im after are in the engreg. It isnt even that big of a file. Is it possible to use the space in the engreg to call a string from another file to increase the size of descriptions for the book? My progaming experience is elsewhere in web scripts so this is new to me.


A technical question Smiley. Guess it's my job to answer this.
General information: The table containing the unit names and description starts at location 0xE0640.
There are two ways to achieve this:

The first is called a DLL injection. Basicly you load a library into the Engrel-Application and overwrite the pointer table from it so the table points to the strings in your DLL. Because of some rebasing stuff in the Header of the Engrel-Exe you have to add 0x402000 to the adress, so the target adress would be 0x4E2640.

The second way is using empty space in the Engrel-File to place the description texts there. You have to change the pointer table with a hex editor in that case.
Example: Open Engrel.exe and go to adress 0xE0640. Thats the start of the pointer table. Because a pointer has 4 byte the first value is 0x30 26 4E 00. The x86 architecture is little endian that means you have to read the bytes from right to left. That means the correct adress is 0x00 4E 26 30. Now substract the rebase value (0x402000) and you get 0x00E0630 and if you scroll to this value in the hex editor you will see the char "Not used" there.
The first pointer for the descriptions is btw at 0xE0784. The first pointer value is 0xAC 1F 4E 00 thats swapped and rebased 0x0DFFAC which is the start of the Bretonnian Knights description.
So as a summary to repoint a value: Write the new string at an empty location of the Engrel file. Write down the Hex-Location of the first char. Go to the pointer table. Change the value of the 4-byte-pointer by adding 0x402000 to your Hex-Location (and applying little-endian, that means 0x01 02 03 04 becomes 0x04 03 02 01).

I don't suppose I could hex the armour formula to say, 8,25,40,60,100?

Should be possible but I can't remember the adress and if I remember correctly the table was also mixed with some other values so I guess changing it will also affect other stuff.
The formulas to calculate troop replacement and armor costs (in pseudocode) can be found in this topic.
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AnmanIndustries
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« Reply #11 on: September 20, 2011, 01:13:15 AM »

Hah! Top stuff! I will give the second shot a try. It seems a little more in reach with my abilities. I understood 90% of what you explained. Im at work so I cant try it yet, but using this method, would you be able to add new book entries? Assuming graphics and ect are added also. Or is each base unit hardcoded into the file, so there is no index or what is where?

I saw that code there for the armour before. But I did not figure there was a way to use it to override the game itself.
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Ghabry
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« Reply #12 on: September 20, 2011, 12:23:27 PM »

Hah! Top stuff! I will give the second shot a try. It seems a little more in reach with my abilities. I understood 90% of what you explained. Im at work so I cant try it yet, but using this method, would you be able to add new book entries? Assuming graphics and ect are added also. Or is each base unit hardcoded into the file, so there is no index or what is where?
Adding new book entries should be possible in theory. Please wait until the weekend then I will have time to take a look at it. Smiley
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AnmanIndustries
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« Reply #13 on: September 21, 2011, 03:18:35 AM »

Dont go the extra step unless you really want to. The information provided is already good and is enough for my basic needs.
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