Prophecy Hacking Info Assembled

Standoff's PopsiclePete is giving us an insight into all the code hacking HCl had to do in order to modify key aspects of the Prophecy game engine. Various enhancement packs (such as the hi-res patch, the DVD upgrade and the multiplayer add-on) as well as the fully-featured game conversions, Unknown Enemy and Standoff, all make use of these techniques. Anyone with a background in software development should find this interesting.

As you know, Standoff is a modification of Secret Ops. Even if SO is much easier to mod than the previous WC games, many aspects of the game were hardcoded into it: the number of guns, number of ships, number of displayed asteroids, etc. To be able to break those limitations, the main game's EXE has to be altered. Those of you who have tried hex-editing their favorite games knows you can't do much using that method. To solve this problem, WC editing guru HCl developed a very effective method: do a very small hack to the EXE so it loads a DLL, and from that DLL rewrite the EXE directly in memory!

Using this trick, HCl has made many amazing patches to WCP/SO, like the hi-res and DVD patches. He also made a number of patches for Unknown Enemy and Standoff... but the really cool thing is that he gave us a formidable tool through which we've been able to add on our own little patches every time a need arises.

At this stage in the Episode 5 development, Standoff includes over 80 patches which allow us to raise the limits of the original SO, add new mission commands and making the game closer to the original Wing Commander 2 gaming experience.

I have prepared a small demonstration explaining a very simple patch I recently made. After hearing people complain about the game's screenshots being overwritten with new images every time the game was reloaded, I decided to make a quick patch. The problem is that when the player hits the "Print Screen" key, the game doesn't check for existing files and starts to save them over what already exists.