Just got this email. And this is where you can see some ingame pics of the new breakthrough... Pics

COOL!!!!



Now just have to wait for ultimate mod to impliment all the new weapons.

Seven years...all it took was seven years...

Fingers crossed this can be implemented in ALL the modded ships now.

Well done Jig, Dafedz, and DCER. Your years of hard work have finally paid off...

thanks DCER, great work !

Great stuff...now all we need is voyager!

After thinking more about this news im woundering, is it "just" that ships can fire now, as in new models ones. As i thought which i dunno why, that, new ships had new weapon effects as in each ship can have its own weapons effects now.

Jig or anyone comment?

@Skeeter:
First I wish to be sure you understand we're talking about the original BotF and not the sequil we're all here to support.

In the original BotF you had two basic types of weapons: beams and torpedoes. Each model could use a different effect for their beam or torpedo weapon and could be called anything you want, but it was still either a beam or a torpedo.

As I understand it, it has been possible to change the effects on these weapons for quite some time. More recently, putting into the game models not originally included became possible. Soon afterwards it was possible to make those new ships fire torpedoes.

But for quite some time, getting these new ships to fire beam weapons was a major wall to anyone wanting to make a complete mod. This new developement means that a modder can put into the game any ship they wish and have it act as if it were meant to be there: topedoes, beams and all. (Thanks to DCER for this new development!)

This is my understanding, anyway. I reserve the right to be completely wrong on my history or conclusions, or anything else.

Comments?

Yeah i was a bit confused at first but jig explained it all. What DCER did was just allow beam weapons to fire on new ships ingame. Still very nice and much praise to him.

Obviously i knew it was for BOTF 1

Also knew about phaser and torpedo mods which changed the colours but it still was same old beam and same old torps just diff colours. What i was hoping was more cooler and more animated phasers and torps.

Well if DCER can enable phasers maybe he can let every ship have its own unique weapons so there not all alike in the future.

Coz i dont know much about moding how come it took so long to add phasers ??? im not being nasty i rely am wondering

dont want it to sound like im saying its been slow or anything coz it hasnt and im not being evil i rely just wondering what made it take so long why was it such a big job coz im a newbi at modding stuff??

I don't completely understand it myself, but based on what i've read in the tutorials that have been put up on Armadafleetcommand, it's taken ages because the game's code doesn't explicitly state where/how Phasers are placed on the models.

The guys that have been working on this problem have had to manually go through each bit of code to find out what needs to be done, which involved a lot of trial and error. (Knowing BOTF it was probably mostly error)

Jig has also said that it takes about 20 minutes to add in ONE Phaser to a ship - which means that it msut be a very involved process.

Factor in the fact that Microprose opted to use file types that no-one has ever heard of, AND they rushed the game, it's little wonder that it's taken 7 years for the Phaser problem to be finally cracked.

Is it actually the source code that people are using? Or are they just decompiling it (which would get ugly)? If it's source, I am most interested in taking a look at it. I'll do some searching around, but figured I'd ask the question first incase someone answers it before I find (or not find?) something.

They are hex editing the .exe i think.

Yeah, it's looking like it. Taking seven years to find something like the phasers isn't really that surprising.

This might help you, Azhdeen:

Phaser how-to helpfile

You should be able to work out which file(s) need to be worked on from that. It's all another language to me.

Yeah, I checked out that file. They're using a hex-editor to change values in the executable. Which means... it's not source code (ie: something that human beings are capable of reading).

So the reason that it's taken 7 years to add Phasers to ships is that we simply don't understand the game language?!

Someone needs to take language lessons!

Not quite. When you make a program, it's in a programming language, which I might add is a LOT easier to understand. If I type "int num1" then I am declaring a variable (container, whatever) which will be treated like an integer (whole number).

But the computer doesn't know what int num1 is. The computer ONLY understands numbers. Numbers, numbers, numbers. The graphics you make? Converted into numbers. The data on this forum? Converted into numbers. Seriously.

When someone makes a program, they "compile" the code. What this does is it takes the english-like programming language that humans can understand and converts it into something the computer can understand - numbers. But you can't just unconvert it.

Hence in that link you posted, part of what you need to do to get the beam weapons working is tinkering around with numbers in that hex editor. It is actually changing some of the values stored in the executable - and it's about as close as you get to directly communicating with the program.

I watched a friend of mine tinker around with FFXI. He wanted to create a minimap, so he ran a program that monitored his system RAM and then ran around the game a ton and just watched for which memory elements were changing. He eventually narrowed down where the coordinates are stored in memory, and wrote a small script to monitor the coordinates and display them in a seperate window. It was pretty neat - but it was all trial and error. Such is the life of reverse-engineering a program.

Wow...I guess I wasn't a computer in a past life then! Maths was never my strong point...

...

I've never played any of the Final Fantasy games. To be honest, I only heard of them recently coz my friends mentioned them.

Now i'm off to play Tetris DS.

There are some interesting decompilers out there. The trouble, of course, is that there is no way of actually converting hex code to a human programming language... At least not perfectly. It's actually an interesting subject in that it involves differnt ways of getting around the haulting problem, which means it's a subject of cercomventing the rules of algebra on a machine based on algebra. (I love paradox!)

Still, there are such things as decompilers -- some of them *very* clever -- and I tried to decompile BotF1. It yeilded interesting results, from an academic point of view -- none of them were usefull. It was an huge and fascinating project I simply could not devote enough time to. To the right person-- with the time and inclination -- doing a complete decompile (including .dlls) to compilable, readable C++ code (it was written in Visual C++ 7, as I remember) would be greatly appreciated by the community as a whole... They would become a God, in effect, as such source code would allow for extentions, error corrections, bug squashing and infinite moddability... Of course such a project would be more taxing than just rewriting the game from scratch. So it's not really a viable solution... But that's not really the point is it? :D

Jig is putting phasers into the Ultimate Mod. I can't wait! I wasn't interested in the mod when it wasn't "complete" with phasers. Now I wanna try it real bad! (Kinda prejusticed of me, hunh?) In fact, I can see myself playing alot of BotF1 from now on... Oi! More time wasted on this game than all my girlfriends combined... Kinda sad, really. :lol: ... And delusions of finally making my own mod pop up.

The fundamental problem with decompilers is that unless you have debug symbols (names of methods, variables, classes) then the results would be so obfuscated that it'd be virtually impossible for them to be of any use at all. Now, if someone had a beta copy of BOTF with debug symbols included, that might be useful. Then again, I can't imagine the original game's source code being of much use anyway, given how many problems the game had. The best it would allow for would be basic modding of the game. It certainly wouldn't help the BOTF2 project.

Wow, well done to all the dedicated peole involved in this. To say it's been a long time coming is an understatement! Nicely done!

Any word on when the Ultimate mod with all the new Starfleet ships with working phasers will show up? It almost looks like it's supposed to be available now, but the Armada site only seems to have the previous "Ultimate Mod 2" available for download.

ask dafedz it`s his mod, please move this topic to botf forums. it does not really belong here now.