Fallout2.exe Patcher

[jdoe407]

This has been designed for the 1.02d us executable and I can't guarantee that it will run on anything else. There are still many bugs with fallout2 when running with a higher resolution.

The patcher is run in the same directory as Fallout2.exe. What it does is it takes the original executable, makes a copy of it and then applies a few patches to it depending on what information you give to it via the gui.

The slider bar in the "World Map" section determines how much you want to slow the world map down by. The higher the bar, the slower it will get. To enable or disable it, just simply check or uncheck the "Slow Down World Map" check box

The way I patched the file this time did require the removal of error checking functions. All that the patch changes are the destinations to some jumps/calls. The patch also re-writes the resolution picking function into a much more compact system.

Most of the interfaces are in the upper left corner because I'm not too sure on how the mouse events work just yet. The larger the resolution... the more errors you will have when loading different areas. For those who wanted crazy resolutions, you can have them.

multi-version Fallout2Patcher_V3c binary: http://www.jdoe407.com/cpp/precompiled/win32/Fallout2Patcher_V3c.zip

multi-version Fallout2Patcher_V3c source: http://www.jdoe407.com/cpp/cpp-win32/Fallout2Patcher/Fallout2Patcher_V3c.zip

edit: the development of the resolution/mapspeed hacks can be seen in the thread here

edit2: This is more of a 'concept' rather then an actual patch that someone could play with. The real versions will hopefully have all of the interfaces centered and all of the interfaces working. It will take me a while to get that far, so don't expect too much out of it

 

[Wild_qwerty]

Good work!

Do you think you can stablialise it? Also did yuo get the dialogs working okay?

 

[dude_obj]

Cool! So many patcher options. Other things people are interested in patching:

- Turning on debugging (noid's patch)
- The dat file that loaded (altervative to patch000.dat)
- Starting map file name (alternative to artemple.map)
- Character appearance (alternatives before and after vsuit.mve is played)
- Starting date of game (alternative to 2241/07/25)
- City limit (allowing more cities to be added)
- 13 year limit (allowing more than 13 years of play)
- Having pipboy at start of game

Maybe you should work with andy-spacetrain since most of this is already done in his FO2LC. His patcher does the patching in RAM rather than the file, which is kind of nice too.

Question: did you notice if encounter frequency goes up when travel time goes down? There is speculation that this is true but nobody seems to have any proof of that.

 

[Briosafreak]

wow...i mean wow...

 

[dude_obj]

did yuo get the dialogs working okay?

A sort of quick fix for this is to black out the alltk.frm and di_talk.frm. At 800x600 it looks like this. There's still a problem with the part where the NPCs current text is though, seems to have part of the map as background.

 

[jdoe407]

the patcher is nowhere near complete right now and it still makes the game unplayable with all the bugs that come with it. I'm thinking that the map slowing thing increases the amount of encounters, but I have no proof at all that it works, it just seems to work.

Dialogs are #2 on my list of things to do.

I'm defiantly going to get most of the hardecoded crap out of the patcher and into a human readable file (burn in hell hardcoded crap!). I was working on a parser for the fc.exe command, a file comparing utility that comes with win2000 and probably other versions of windows as well, which will generate all the patch data and output it to a text file for the patcher to read, it's not done yet.

after the dialogs are fixed, I hope to get the mouse event areas fixed as well. One thing that I found while looking around was how to make an interface enable drag and drop mode where you can just drag the interface around on the screen. Not sure if it works for all interfaces, but it seems to work for the character screen, but I'm not interested in that yet. It will be fun to play around with later on though

as for the memory patching setup, I think the way that I'm doing it right now should be easy to convert over to a memory patch instead of file, but I don't have much experience with that kind of stuff.

I stoped here because my eyes are, well...

 

[dude_obj]

More on dialogs, simply resizing a 640x480 screen like alltlk.frm still looks screwy, however resizing it but leaving the original image the same and blacking out the extra space seems to work. There is still something "under" the text, but this is getting closer:

Hey jdoe ... can you see if you can find what is rendered under these text areas? Perhaps that can be removed? If so, I think the dialogs will be fixed.

 

[jdoe407]

there are a few different things drawn onto the dialog frame which looks all screwey.

The main background frame ( ALLTLK.frm )
The frame that slides up and down at the bottom ( about.frm )
Their text area
Our text area

I think the problem that I had with the dialogs are that they were one of the only things that actually had a prameter that took the real size of the screen. the parameter that tells how far to the right to draw the frame, which is why its all overlapping and junk. Its hard to mess around with these things because if one messes up just a lil bit it - crashes

 

[dude_obj]

I'll try to fix as many of these screen by resizing with the extra space blacked out.

Is there a way we can render the iface.frm back flush to the left side, but don't change any GUI actions, then perhaps we can fill in the left and right sides with something that just extends the interface.

There might be problems with supporting multiple resolutions. The maps have scroll points that are objects on the maps, and they are positioned for a specific resolution. Maybe if those scroll points were set for the max resolution everything would work okay at lower resolutions. I'll try to find out (what is the max resolution?)

This looks promising, very cool!

 

[jdoe407]

(what is the max resolution?)

I have to say 1280x1024 is the maximum resolution someone could play and still see what's going on. 1024x768 would probably be the resolution to look at to keep the map boundries in jibe with the lower resolutions. And for shits and giggles I included a 1600x1200 mode ; - )


I'm not touching the exe anymore today

 

[Wild_qwerty]

Very good work guys This is amazzing.

From what I've read, it does sound fessable to just resize those other frms and blank out the erst as black or 'transparent'

Dude, have you tried setting the blacked out area to transparent yet? you might need to chaneg that area to some other colour first though or you will get holes in the rest of teh image.

 

[dude_obj]

From what I've read, it does sound fessable to just resize those other frms and blank out the erst as black or 'transparent'.

Resizing the barter frms to 800 wide fixed those parts perfectly, but I'm still getting that crazy background behind text in the alltlk and di_talk areas. As far as I can tell there is no background FRM that is overlayed for this, so I'm puzzled as to why its doing that.

Dude, have you tried setting the blacked out area to transparent yet? you might need to chaneg that area to some other colour first though or you will get holes in the rest of teh image.

Okay I tried making the right hand side of alltlk.frm and di_talk.frm transparent and it still appears as black. Was hoping the map would show there, but no dice. We can fill in that right side with a metal background, or more tubes, or something else.

I tried playing at 800x600 and it's great! I think I'm going to optimize my mod maps for this resolution. I hope we can figure out that problem with the background behind the text. Probably the exe needs to be patched differently for that part work properly. I spent a couple of hours trying different things like making the bottom part extend down another 120 pixels so the two frms add up to full 800x600 but that didn't change anything. I give up on that for now, maybe jdoe has some other ideas as to why that text area is messed up.

EDIT:

The resized dialog and barter FRMs are here:
http://home.cogeco.ca/~desolation/intrface/

Those are for 800x600 resolution. The only problem seems to be text areas of the dialog. And it might be better to move iface.frm to the left side so it lines up with the dialogs.


EDIT: I think something must be slightly out of alignment. I made the whole di_talk.frm transparent. When I first initiate the dialog the text looks like this:

Then when I put my mouse over that text it looks like this:

Seems like something might be just a pixel or two off in both of the text areas. If this screen can be fixed everything else seems to be working except the dialog "review" screen so far, and the map scroll points can be adjusted. The game looks fantastic at 800x600. I find 1024x768 to be too small for me.

 

[Wild_qwerty]

Did you have problems with it crashing? It crashed when I tried it the other day, but then I might have hex edited the wrong part. I havent tried the new patcher yet.

 

[dude_obj]

No crashing ... use the patcher ... one click and you have the modified exe. The only thing I noticed was that the game runs a bit slower.

 

[Oracle]

I wonder how the developers feel about this great progress in fallout modding.

I know I got much respect for the Fallout modders seeing that Fallout isn't easy to mod. Fallout in higher resolution is something I never ever thought that would be do able

Great work you guys !!!!

 

[WraithUV]

I wonder how the developers feel about this great progress in fallout modding.

Well, the developers are all parts of various new companies now as the companies which created the Fallout games no longer exist.

When they did however, the best answer we ever got (from Chris A.) was released in the Fallout Bible.

In my own words, his answer to the question was along the lines of:
We'd like to officially say yes, mod it. We cannot however be arsed to sign a million contracts (not that I blame them there), so we can't officially say yes. But that's not a no. It's not a yes, but it's not a no. In fact we can't officially give an official answer, but we wish we could say yes. So long as you don't make any money off anything you do, or do something that would be contradictory or damaging to the fallout liscense, "you should be ok". But we wish we could say yes.

LOL Ok, I played that up a little, though not too much hehehe

The general concensus therefore is, they don't really care and unoficially encourage us to have fun with it.

-Wraith

 

[Wild_qwerty]

hmmm, some of the things being done here latley though excede what Fallout 1/2 ever done with the engine. The community is diffinitely pushing it as far as it will go

 

[Oracle]

I wonder how the developers feel about this great progress in fallout modding.

Well, the developers are all parts of various new companies now as the companies which created the Fallout games no longer exist.

Yea I know that. But i mean if the fallout developers that are scrolling tru these forums, looking after there baby

 

[dude_obj]

But i mean if the fallout developers that are scrolling tru these forums, looking after there baby

I think they have let their baby be free to grow and mutate. And they probably have little time to spend worrying about it.

 

[jdoe407]

Thank you for hosting the files and support, it cuts down on my bandwidth usage


Are the fallout2.exe's located in the patches fallout2_v102d_uk.exe, f2patch-fr.exe, and f2patch-gr.exe the executables other people use?