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Windows Town Editing


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Until someone gets around to re-writing the Windows 3D Editor there will be things that it can’t do:

  • Alter the size of an existing town
  • Delete a town other than the last one.

Here are hex-editing solutions to these two problems.

 

Alter the size of an existing town

Firstly the size of the town must be altered, town number 0 has its size listed at place 5,968, thus add 5,968 to the town number to get the hex address. Big towns are listed with a 0, medium towns are listed with a 1 and small towns are listed with a 2. (In the source code file “global.h” this table is listed in the town_record_type as “unsigned char town_size[200];”.)

 

Next delete the original town record entry and paste in a new entry of the desired size.

 

Delete a town other than the last one.

Figure out where the town size value is stored, delete the relevant number. This causes all following numbers to move forward one space, you will then need to go to place 6,167 and insert a 1.

Next, delete the relevant town entry, it starts with the town name and has one of the following lengths:

36,826

27,866

21,466.

 

Town records have three different possible sizes.

Size of Town_record_type = 16,346

Size of Town_record_type + Big_tr_type = 16,346 + 20,480 = 36,826

Size of Town_record_type + Ave_tr_type = 16,346 + 11,520 = 27,866

Size of Town_record_type + Tiny_tr_type = 16,346 + 5,120 = 21,466

 

I have decrypted the contents of the bas files, these notes will be found here:

http://www.freewebs.com/ishadnha/BasDecrypts.zip

 

you will need to manually copy the address and paste it into your address bar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This is all useful, I'm sure, and I don't want to ruin anybody's parade (8 more to go for a trophy, after all), but if you make a town, and realise it's too small, it's not difficult to either delete it, or, if you've started another town afterwards, just leave it out, with or without the intention of using it later.

 

I'm not sure about other people here, but I'd rather just have a 48x48 town that's not being used, than risk the rest of my data by hex-editing.

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The problem is that once you introduce an error, obvious though it will be, it will likely be impossible to fix. When I was working on these features for the Mac Editor I threw away many copies of scenarios that I corrupted before I got it all to work correctly. If this works for you, great, but we really need to get somebody to put some work into the windows editor.

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I drew up a list of where everything is found in the bas file. You remember what changes you made, you will be able to figure out where the errors may have occurred.

 

Most likely the problem will be that one byte too many was inserted or one byte needs to be added.

 

 

We need more than two or three programmers in the entire community.

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It would be nice, but the biggest problem we face in getting more than 3 programmers (and, by the way, I am sure that there are more than 3 competant coders), is time. A lot of people here work/go to college/attend school, and just don't have the time to learn something that they may use for an hour a day so so.

 

And really, we shouldn't expect them to. I still stand by my first point - whilst having the option to delete a town other than the last one is nice, we've managed for 4(?) years without doing so. It's really not a big issue.

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Originally Posted By: Nikki.
It would be nice, but the biggest problem we face in getting more than 3 programmers (and, by the way, I am sure that there are more than 3 competant coders), is time. A lot of people here work/go to college/attend school, and just don't have the time to learn something that they may use for an hour a day so so.
That's the main reason I haven't made any contributions. Other reasons include my incomplete understanding of the Carbon library functions and an inability to get the code to compile.

Maybe some day I will sit down and put some work into this, if someone else doesn't do so first, but that day will probably be in a year or three.

Currently our most active Mac programmer seems to be Niemand, but I don't think he has any intention of doing anything beyond the Carbonization of the Character Editor. Which is fine, of course.
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