Exult Forum

Hi,

I've played U7 and SI for ages in my youth and wandered upon this great project of yours. Being a programmer, I could not resist and had a look through the code... Looks okay I guess

I noticed (in the code & the faq) the ammo and weapons data files have not been deciphered fully yet (nor some of the other files). So I did some scanning - haven't found much yet...

In the ammo.dat the 8th byte I have partly figured out. Bit 6 (2^6) seems to represent if the ammo should explode on impact (only set for burst arrows [shape 554]). Bit 5-4 are always 11 for spells and always 10 for returning throwable weapons. Don't know what 01 and 00 mean...

The "type2" (byte 5 and 6) seem to represent what should be fired instead of this ammo. For example, for a cannon [702], and why is it in this list?] it is a cannonball [703]. And for light spells [70, 74] it is the glimmer spell [566]. Others don't use it.

Okay - so that is not that much or useful. I was wondering if anyone has attemted a sourcer or ida disassembly, of the U7.exe file for example? Or a bochs debug?

Before I spent several weeks locked behind my computer trying to make sense of the output - I thought I'd ask

Mentis.

Hi again,

I tried an IDA disassemble - which is actually readable (for example, IDA correctly names C library calls like fopen and fread etc. - which could speed up the search; sourcer doesn't seem to do that)...

A well, maybe I'll give it a try - if I can find where the program opens ammo.dat for example and where it stores the data read; I'll be one my way to hack that file completely!

Okay - so shoot me in the leg if this has been tried before...

Mentis.

I'm pretty sure Jeff has already decoded most (if not all) of these files, but is waiting until the post-1.0 overhaul of the combat system before implementing them fully.

Okay, if there's nothing more to search in those files - I won't waste my time...

I assumed info was missing because a lot of data is not stored in the shapeinf.cc and monstinf.cc when it is read from game files. With question marks next to it and all

Maybe I should have checked the CVS source instead of the .98rc1

If there is something I _could_ find out for the project using a tool like IDA, just let me know - I'm having fun with it, so I would not mind digging for some information.

Later.

Mentis

If you enjoy reverse-engineering old DOS games, you might want to take a look at the xu4 project:
http://xu4.sourceforge.net/

They've already figured out most of the U4 data files, but I think there are a few things they don't know yet.