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View Full Version : OT: Hacking Silly Civvy Mappy Sizes


narf poit chez BOOM
July 7th, 2006, 06:22 PM
Recently, I got the urge to play civilization again. I don't have 3 or 4, but I do have 2, 2:MGE and 2:ToT.

Anyway, the silly little game will only let me make maps up to size 10,000 squares. Enter a little program called XVI...

...The value wasn't hard to find and now I can make maps (In the MGE map editor, anyway), of up to size 32,768...Or maybe 32,767. Now I'm wondering if anyone here might have an idea on how I could tweak things to tweak that tiny little half-a-WORD into, I dunno, a DWORD would be fun...

(Imprecise language used because some people get all upset at the most innocent things, just because they have illegal uses.)

If successfull, I wouldn't distribute any .exe's. That would be illegal. I will simply tell you how I did it, and if you own the program, you can do the stuff yourself.

Anyway, off to the datamines...

Fyron
July 7th, 2006, 08:12 PM
There was a utility for ToT that unlocked the map size limits in such a fashion, but there was a very practical limit on how big maps could be; Only so many cities could be built in total, so you easily ended up with huge empty continents. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif It should be on Apolyton still.

Why would you just play the MGE edition if you have ToT?

Changing what a "variable" is in an exe is likely to not work well, since all of the code instructions are depending on absolute and relative instruction/data locations; changing a variable's size moves everything after it around.

narf poit chez BOOM
July 7th, 2006, 10:36 PM
Yeah, but I couldn't find it and if I remember right, it was a patch that was one patch back.

...Prettier graphics? (Not normally a factor, but ToT is Ugly.)

Thanks. Oh well, worth a shot. And 32,768 is still big.

Fyron
July 7th, 2006, 11:11 PM
You can use the MGE graphics in ToT.

narf poit chez BOOM
July 8th, 2006, 02:03 AM
*Blink* *Blink* That makes sense.

narf poit chez BOOM
July 8th, 2006, 02:40 AM
Oh, right. Info. For MGE, just take your favorite base-sixteen editor, find the first 10 27 and replace it with 00 80. For ToT, it's the second 10 27. For those confused, programs tend to have base-sixteen numbers flipped around.

That's 1CDAF, 1CAFF and 16D58, with the latest patches.

Don't forget to make backups.

Cipher7071
July 10th, 2006, 11:52 AM
Sorry narf, couldn't help this (I teach computers and math)....

For memory reasons the numbers for most such things are usually 2 to some power minus 1, because zero is always counted. For instance, the RGB colors each go from 0 up to 255 (2 to the 8th power minus 1). So, the number you refer to in your original post is indeed 32767: 2 to the 15th power minus 1.

narf poit chez BOOM
July 10th, 2006, 05:34 PM
Not nessasarily. See, if the 'zero' slot is filled with data, then the number of slots that can be filled with data is indeed 32,768.

So there. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Cipher7071
July 11th, 2006, 02:08 PM
Right. I guess we're talking about the same thing after all.