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New PC Status Icons


Motardo

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Hello,

I modified the status icons in Exile 1-3 to use a pie chart to indicate the level from 1 to 8 of how much a PC is Blessed, Hasted, Poisoned, etc.

 

staticons.png

 

It is nice to know when a monster Slows or Curses or Acids your PCs, whether it is minor nuisance that will wear off by itself the next round, or a major problem that needs attention. There are download links to the patched games in this blog post. (These are the free registered versions from SW's site with some code and graphics modifications. I hope it is allowed to post these here?).

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  • 4 weeks later...

I despise the graphics (those pie charts look supremely ugly behind the tiny status effect icons) but the idea is pretty nice. From the sounds of it, this patch is more than just the graphics, right? I wouldn't expect the code to just support that implicitly…

 

It's a little unfortunate that the Mac version is harder to patch… why is that, exactly? Patching the graphics should be easy on your Basilisk image as long as you have ResEdit, so I assume the problem is code-related?

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2 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:

I despise the graphics

 

Hah, yes, I am not an artist. Hopefully, someone will make nicer icons.

 

2 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:

I assume the problem is code-related?

 

Yes, the 68k code was compiled with Code Warrior, which uses it's own executable format. I couldn't find documentation on the exact format so I had to reverse engineer it. I finally did get the Mac version of Exile 3 working, but I haven't uploaded it anywhere yet. I'm trying to consolidate what I learned from doing Exile 3 into a process that will make it easier to patch Exiles I, II, and Blades.

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7 hours ago, Motardo said:

Yes, the 68k code was compiled with Code Warrior, which uses it's own executable format. I couldn't find documentation on the exact format so I had to reverse engineer it. I finally did get the Mac version of Exile 3 working, but I haven't uploaded it anywhere yet. I'm trying to consolidate what I learned from doing Exile 3 into a process that will make it easier to patch Exiles I, II, and Blades.

Ah nice; and good to know you figured out a solution. I believe 68k code on MacOS was stored in the resource fork, right? Is that what you meant by using its own executable format, or is there something unusual about the code itself? I'm pretty sure there's actually a disassembler that runs right in ResEdit… but I could be wrong about either of those assertions.

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On 9/14/2020 at 2:22 PM, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

statusstrength.png

Awesome! I'm going to use this for the Diseased icon because the pie chart doesn't work with that icon anyway.

 

On 9/14/2020 at 7:19 PM, Celtic Minstrel said:

I believe 68k code on MacOS was stored in the resource fork, right? Is that what you meant by using its own executable format, or is there something unusual about the code itself? I'm pretty sure there's actually a disassembler that runs right in ResEdit

 

Yes, 68k code is in CODE resources in the resource fork, and there is a nice disassembler plug-in for ResEdit that works really well.

 

For Windows 3.1, the executable format is well documented and public. It has to be because the program loader and initialization logic are built in to the Windows operating system, so any program that wants to run under Windows needs to follow the standard.

 

For Macintosh, by contrast, the operating system doesn't do any special load-time initialization when a program is launched. Each individual program is responsible for initializing itself. So the format of the executable is left to the whims of whatever compiler created it. I compiled the same test program using Apple's MPW, Metrowerks Code Warrior, and Symantec Think C. They all generated different executables. The worst part is that I could only find vague generalizations about their formats in the compiler documentation; not exact technical specifications. My guess is that they deliberately kept their format undocumented so that they would be free to make improvements with each new release version of their compilers. The secrecy is also a good defense against malware hackers. Windows, on the other hand, by declaring a public standard, was then unable to ever make changes.

 

Anyway, I've decoded about 60% of the executable format of Exile 3, and about 40% is still unknown. It was enough to get the status icons patch working. Hopefully, the other Exiles and Blades were created with the same compiler version and have the same format.

 

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  • 1 year later...
On 8/20/2020 at 5:30 PM, Motardo said:

I modified the status icons in Exile 1-3 ...

Hey Motardo, I'm a year and a half slow, but I finally tried your new status icons (Exile 1 fresh install with your self-contained install program, with DOSBox and Win 3.1), and it works great! Thank you for doing this. 

 

Really cool to see how these affect things even in just the 30 minutes I've played so far. In my first battle, it was curious to even see that the mage's Strength spell blessed to a higher level than my priest's Bless (though they are all noob characters now, and sure Bless will improve with caster level). Without your new icons and patch, there would have been no way to even know this. Right before this screencap below, I ran through a few swamps just to see how the red poison addition worked. 

 

WeGeny8.jpg

 

Since I grew up with the later version of E1, I had to get back my nostalgic graphics (right image as compared to left). But I just layered my MIXED.BMP from a normal Exile 1 install and overlaid it into the correct position of your revised MIXED.BMP file, and it works just fine. You can see the Wound spell in the image above ;)  Link here if anyone wants to use it: https://imgur.com/a/iU9mqwB

 

LYSAshZ.jpg

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