[Experimental App] Emergence

Halo modding and gaming related applications.
Altimit01
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Re: [Experimental App] Emergence

Post by Altimit01 » Fri Jun 25, 2010 9:21 pm

Ah. I know those exact blank spots. They really are confusing. I thought you meant blank spaces in guerilla exe data. I wonder if it's restricted to a certain set of tags or if it's randomly distributed through the tag set.

Reminds me of the USTR tag data which has some pointer information that would work if only there wasn't a different set of data also in the USTR tag. Weird stuff.
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Modzy
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Re: [Experimental App] Emergence

Post by Modzy » Fri Jun 25, 2010 10:20 pm

More like lazy programmers rather than weird stuff. Can't really blame them, I'd go crazy too if I had to create all these tag formats.
'Course you go crazier trying to reverse them...

Sparky
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Re: [Experimental App] Emergence

Post by Sparky » Sat Jun 26, 2010 8:00 am

Modzy, you might be interested in Monk34's experiments with my actr plugin. I labeled a hidden set of entries for experimentation, and Monk did that. He found that changing the values had a similar effect as changing values in other tag types, but of course there involves a hierarchy issue with actor-related tags (actv, actr, bipd).

Feel free to use my plugin set as a reference for those tags that have these minor alterations to expected setup. I'm testing everything, so I'm not making any mistakes with offsets. You can go back and check my work yourself, if you like, but it would really save you time if you trusted my work... as it is, I don't trust any automatically-generated plugins, which is why I've created maps with tag types that include values for each element within each tag, and then am testing the plugin offsets to make sure that the correct values appear.

Alt, discrepancies occur in Guerilla only between subcategories of elements, for example, between the Looking and the Berserk subcategories within the actr tag type; and also between types, most usually after a dependency type or short type. Enums also use an extra byte after their actually-used 1 byte, so they maintain the even structure. I see a logic to the whole thing, it doesn't seem at all like lazy coding. It's more like open-ended coding, allowing for more features than Gearbox marked in their HEK applications. Some of it is padding in order to make the code more legible in Hex (go figure) and to maintain even-numbered offsets (like power of 2 used by images).

Offsets are thus generally ending in 0, 4, 8, and C, and floats are pretty much always like this, as is anything else using four bytes.
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Altimit01
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Re: [Experimental App] Emergence

Post by Altimit01 » Sat Jun 26, 2010 11:28 am

What you're referring to is byte alignment and those aren't a huge problem. The problem we're talking about exceeds that. There's parts that go far beyond that. And other things that look more lik parts were hacked to make things work. Check out the USTR code. There's some data in it that would work in a linked-list IIRC if only some other data that performs the same function weren't there. That's just unusual as all get out.
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Sparky
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Re: [Experimental App] Emergence

Post by Sparky » Sat Jun 26, 2010 12:52 pm

Perhaps Gearbox had to do some makeshifting. They said they were using Shark for optimization, so maybe they were trying to optimize it or make workarounds. It's all speculation! Blargh.
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Asuka Langley
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Re: [Experimental App] Emergence

Post by Asuka Langley » Sat Jun 26, 2010 7:34 pm

Posted. Now lets watch the massacre

Amy
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Re: [Experimental App] Emergence

Post by Amy » Tue Jun 29, 2010 8:36 am

You mean my favorite map...could be played now...

Converting time!
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