Ninety Minute Forts? This Is Your Lucky Day!

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AndrewTaylor
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Ninety Minute Forts? This Is Your Lucky Day!

Post by AndrewTaylor » Tue Aug 23, 2005 8:15 pm

This wholly unofficial patch should allow you to play Forts for 0, 5, 10, 15, 30, 60 or 90 minutes instead of 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 or 30. It even has updated graphics for the menus I've designed myself (though you wouldn't know to look at them -- they're nearly indistinguishable from Team17's icons).

It also features a programme I wrote specifically called "patchwork". You don't need to know about that, but it shrinks the download from 36MB to less than 100kB. I've had the hacked files on my PC for months now, but I just today wrote patchwork, so I couldn't really distribute them before, what with them being 35MB long and all.

HOW TO USE:

1. Read the disclaimer.
2. Download attached file: patch.zip
3. Unzip it to the Forts directory (the one with WF.EXE in it -- you'll get an error message otherwise).
4. Read the disclaimer again.
5. Run "install.bat".
6. Run Forts.
7. To uninstall, run "uninstall.bat".

DISCLAIMER:

This is now tested. I'm not promising it won't break anything, but it certainly works on every installation it's been tried on (2 of them, in fact).

You should be OK if you back up the following files first:
data\frontend\MenuTweak.xom
data\bundles\Bundle173.xom (which is 36MB long)

The batch file should back these up for you anyway.

I don't know what would happen if you used it online, but from what I hear that's unlikely to work anyway.

DO NOT run the uninstall batch before the install one. There's no reason to and it WILL mess up your installation. Not irrepairably, but pretty bad.

EDIT:

I bought Forts from a shop on the first or second day it was released. If you have some other version that's significantly differnt this may not work. I have no idea if other versions are different. I haven't got access to a Trymedia version, but I'm pretty sure it'll fail on the Forts demo.

I can, if you want, offer anywhere up to 2 hours 46 minutes 39.99 seconds, but it doesn't display properly past 99:59, so I didn't.
Attachments
patch.zip
(99.33 KiB) Downloaded 952 times
Last edited by AndrewTaylor on Wed Aug 31, 2005 1:44 pm, edited 3 times in total.

K^2
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Post by K^2 » Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:31 am

How general is your .xom parser? Is it just good for replacing .tga images in bundles? I still haven't figured out how to read the TYPE chunks properly, so I cannot read in a CTNR chunk of an unspecified type.
None of my projects (Minus One converter, W3D/W4 Map Viewer, and WMapEditor) are endorsed, supported or otherwise affiliated with Dream17. I just find Dream17 forums to be a nice place to share and discuss my work with others.

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AndrewTaylor
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Post by AndrewTaylor » Thu Aug 25, 2005 1:11 pm

It's not very general.

What I have is a programme that looks through XOM files for TGAs, displays them, displays the file address so I can copy-paste data from a new TGA file over them in a hex-editor, and displays some numbers from the header data in case I can figure out what they are while I'm at it.

I can't remember offhand how it identifies TGA files -- it was months since I wrote that part of it. I'll have a look later on, if I remember.

The programme in the download here doesn't know anything about XOM files at all -- all that does is overwrites chunks of bundle173.xom with chunks of patch.dat

stevenh
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more than 90 mins?

Post by stevenh » Sat Sep 03, 2005 2:10 pm

Which file did you need to hack to make it up to 90 minutes? Is it possible to release a patch that will increase the limit further or remove it altogether?
I also saw in the team17 forum someone put an alternative solution:
http://forum.team17.com/printthread.php?t=21631
In there Krevnik suggests modifying some scripts, but I can't find these scripts anywhere... everything under the data directory seems to be in a compressed or encrypted binary format. Is there a tool to compile/decompile these .xom and .lub files?
Thanks

Steven

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AndrewTaylor
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Post by AndrewTaylor » Sat Sep 03, 2005 3:17 pm

It's the file that stores the options -- you can't remove the time limit completely by hacking it. I doubt if you could remove it completely without altering executable code, unless there's a mission with no time limit.

It might be possible to use a memory peek to lock the timer at a certain level and eliminate the limit that way, but it would be awkward without knowing exactly how the game works.

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Post by stevenh » Sat Sep 03, 2005 4:21 pm

Can you provide a patch that offers the 2 hours 46 minutes 39.99 seconds? I already managed to hit the 90 min limit and was very annoying when the god worm comes out every round. I wouldn't mind too much if it was every few rounds, but every round was overkill!

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KennyTornado
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Post by KennyTornado » Wed Sep 14, 2005 12:14 am

Say, not a bad idea, since some of my battles last for almost an hour. I'll try downloading it tomorrow since it's kinda late in the night right now. :)
"Well here is Kenny Tornado in his purple goodness." by Alien King on DA.

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