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Where is a boat or horse?


Ishad Nha
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If you ever wonder exactly where you left a boat or a horse in a BoA scenario, you can examine the save game file in a hex editor.

 

There are thirty boats, each boat record has ten bytes in it, this makes a total of three hundred bytes. All records that I have seen so far have ten bytes for each entry: town x, town y, four places for outdoor locations, two places for town number ("200" = no town), boat/horse exists and is it anyone's property? If the boat was outdoors the town x,y might become outdoor x,y.

 

The situation with horses is exactly the same.

 

This information is spoilerific, it tells you about all boats or horses, even if you don't already know about them.

 

In BoA save files the information is found to start at these hexadecimal addresses:

Boats - 40,976

Horses - 41,278

 

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Is hex-editing still outlined specifically in the CoC as being something not to be discussed?

 

Also, I can think of exactly no scenarios where hex-editing to find out the locations of these things would be quicker than just looking in-game.

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Hex editing is quite okay. Here we are not even editing we are just looking.

 

In BoA this might not be so useful because BoA scenarios are smaller than their BoE counterparts. My impression is that most BoA scenarios are relatively small by comparison with Avernum 1 through 3.

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The registration information is in the application binary (the code which implements registration checking) and the user's preferences file (the registration numbers), so as far as registration is concerned examining scenarios and savefiles is harmless. It's conceivable that Jeff might still be concerned by this if he considers his file formats to involve any of his trade secrets, but I assume that this is not likely, since at least in the case of the scenario format he has made this information publicly available via the editor source code.

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Has Nikki ever examined an application in a hex editor? It is nothing like a BoA script, it is compiled. Most of it looks like gibberish. There are bits of intelligible text here and there.

 

Unless you had a four - digit IQ you would never know where to find the registration information.

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This is not true, there are tools which make finding such information entirely possible, particularly if one knows what one is doing; consider the amount of software pirated by such methods. Jeff would like to keep a lid on such pirating, at least in his own forums. The rule seems to me to have been justified, since I have seen multiple persons banned for requesting (or if I remember rightly, even posting, possibly links to) such information.

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imho, the main justification is that search spiders will catalog this discussion, and ill-placed hex discussions could lead nefarious peoples into gaining knowledge on these boards which could defraud The Vogel Family of Jeff's just rewards. I prefer to think that they get their needs met on sites which cater to porn adverts and the related ITDs.

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I have not ever looked at an application in a hex-editor no. I do remember, though, several people being banned for discussing hex-editing, and not even doing it openly on the boards, like you are.

 

You've done a lot of useful work for BoA, not limited to porting graphics and identifying bugs, and the like, and to be honest, those things are far more worthwhile than cracking open scenarios to see where a player left a horse.

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