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Zebranky food
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I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame issue
« on: December 07, 2002, 05:04:58 am »

I admit it, I'm a cheating bastard.  So, I've been using UltraEdit 32 to track down the offsets in the savegame.
From what I've discovered, RUs are stored at 08h, 09h, 0Ah and credits are at 82h, 83h (least-significant portion first).  I'm able to change the RUs just fine.  However, when I change the credits...while it shows the "correct" number of credits in the game loading screen, when I visit the Melnorme, the number of credits have reset to what I had before I edited the savegame file.  When I re-save the game at that point and look at it again, the values for 82h 83h have indeed been reset to their pre-edit values.

As for me being a cheating bastard, please don't send someone with a  baseball bat to attempt a bugfix on me...
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2002, 07:07:19 am »

I was bragging to a friend on how I beat the game in one hardcore day of playing (fairly).  But he went straight for the cheats.  Playing all the voices from the oggs and rather than messing with the save games there are these programs that let you search, replace and lock memory values in the game memory itself while it is running.  This apparently works fine on resource units, bio data, and ship health...
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2002, 07:10:36 am »

Forgot to get to the point of my post.  Once online melee gets put in some sort of cheat protection would probably be a good thing.  Not that I'm a coder, but mentioning it early might make it easier to implement along the way. ^^
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Hector
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #3 on: December 07, 2002, 08:33:10 am »

Apparently the real 'number' behind the credits are represented elsewhere. This is actually a mystery for myself since the DOS version.

But you can do a workaround,Hack the number of biolife units instead. Then sell to the Melnorme. This works...
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #4 on: December 07, 2002, 11:11:33 am »

Indeed, hacking the number of bio-units worked.  Offsets 14H 15H.  However, take care not to give yourself more than 2500 bio-units...the game freezes at somewhere over 5000 credits when transferring them.  2500 bio-units is 09 C4 in hex, or C4 09 in the savegame file.
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Marticus
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #5 on: December 07, 2002, 11:21:10 am »

I loaded up my trusty windows game hacking tool, and found a few interesting things. I can freeze the crew, fuel, and bio data. But I can't find the crew in lander, power in melee, and melnorme credits.
One thing I found out which is amusing is if i freeze the date, I never get encounters in hyperspace, and the quasi space portal never opens; this stays in effect even if I unfreeze it. So I had to go find the flag which says whether or not you are in quasi space and poke that when I want shortcuts Smiley
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Pekka Kujansuu
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #6 on: December 07, 2002, 04:20:27 pm »

Wouldn't it be easier to just look at the source code and figure the format out that way?  Grin
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Marticus
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #7 on: December 07, 2002, 05:55:53 pm »

Quote
Wouldn't it be easier to just look at the source code and figure the format out that way?  Grin

Pfft, searching for hex values is simpler than looking through source.
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Dan
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #8 on: December 09, 2002, 04:13:14 pm »

if you really wanna cheat get 2 credits, buy fuel off the melnorme (spelling) and then go back to home base and sell the fuel, the credits dont go down for buying fuel..infact they go up one...just buy a full tank from melnorme, they'll fill it up, give ya a credit, then sell it, but their fuel technology, and then you have to buy atleast 1 fuel, before filling it up
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Marticus
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #9 on: December 10, 2002, 09:36:38 am »

Agreed, fuel selling cheat is pretty good; but I know the game pretty much back to front from my old DOS games, and find it amusing to see how many variables I can hack. Strange pastime, but I like it Smiley
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ForgedReality
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #10 on: December 11, 2002, 11:45:01 am »

Odd..  Hacking the credits seemed to work fine for me.. Maybe I did something different.  I look at this thread and I see people having problems with it.. I only had a problem with the fuel value I had found.. which I can't remember the location of.. Which appeared to be simply a 'display' value, and not the actual real value, which was probably a more precise decimal number as opposed to just a whole number used to give a round-about visual idea how much fuel you had...

I did notice though, that if you give yourself lots of bio units, or find some rainbow worlds (or tell the game you did Wink that you have to sit through and let it 'count down' to zero as the melnorme convert the information to credits, or the total won't count.  If you don't let it do it this way, it will stop right where you skipped past it to save time.  At least that's what it does in 0.1alpha win32 release.
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Marticus
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #11 on: December 12, 2002, 09:04:35 am »

You managed to hack Melnorme Credits?

As to the fuel thing, it's not like the number on the screen, regularly it's over 10,000 or something.

I just wonder if my freezing time bug prevents any delay events from happening, eg the shofixti breeding, but I have a short attention... ooh shiny
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Hector
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Re: I'm a cheating bastard, and related savegame i
« Reply #12 on: December 12, 2002, 11:36:00 pm »

Ya only the tens unit of the fuel is actually represented in the game.
For eg. 7 units of fuel you see on the window may be 70 or 75 in the game. In order to hack this fuel, sell all your units of fuel. Then when you buy 1 unit, it is actually 10.
(I hope you understand what I mean?)

But please tell me how you hack the credits?!! What is the real value behind the credits shown on screen? Is 100 credits really 100 credits?
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