Game Play Diary of work on increasing the maximum card size. Outrank size 10x10

I'm pre-arranged with the moderators if they postpone my post. As it seemed to me, this section is perfect for seeing such records. What for? I still hope to break a bottle of Chapan about a card that will be more than 10x10 and at the same time it will work in all versions of Cityes well or at least in XXL.

And if, nevertheless, I do not get it, then this post will either be a source of new searches, or become a source of failures in this direction.

 

Day One - December 4, 2017

1. Started searches and information in the Internet
2. I found several forums:
- Are all the maps the same size? :: Cities XXL General Discussions
- Size of maps?!
- Cities XXL
- https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/where-did-the-map-size-elitism-start.838541/

3. Found a mention of the fact that the map of Paris is more than 10x10
4. Divided the maps: Paris, Coastal Plain, Altair
5. Read the forums asking questions

 

Day Two - December 5, 2017

5. Dismantled internal data files
- gamedata.din
- chunksize.bin

6. I found a programmer who worked on parsing bin files for Falcon 4. I found information about parsing bin files for Cities XXL, unfortunately I could not find the link, but now I know the program for parsing data from QuickBMS. It has a special script for parsing the data of our game.
- - Tutorial with QuickBMS
- Luigi Auriemma
- GitHub - DeathChaos25/FE_Fates_Class_Randomizer: Very horribly written python class randomizer for FE Fates

 

Day Three-Four - Down Shift - December 6-7, 2017

1. I decided to make my map in the realities 10x10
2. I collected it through the official editor, it turned out well, what I wanted, I was studying the issue of creating water for it.
3. At 50% dismantled the file of gamedata.bin - its the storage - archive (compression method is not completely understandable)
4. Several times re-reading - chunksize.bin - I realized that the answer is in the size exactly there. That compress ANSI.

 

Soon I will finish work on a major project in my work. And again, I return to this problem, there is an idea to turn to the map through internal API and somehow interact with it. What actions will be next difficult to say, but in the game libraries I did not find any references to the dimensions, there is a frame in which the current map is composed without taking into account its attributes, hence it is necessary to dig into the inner teams.

 

How the map?

 

This is also a good question ... He also takes me. Nayavno I assume that you can do with the current map editor.

 

Last year.

Someone could not help on the forums. Events in my life and professional activities.

AUGUST 2018.

Everyone was fine. I needed information about LUA. Once I understand what is happening in this topic. I found out that there are operators that make it possible to change certain properties of the primitives inside the game, as well as all the global arrays INGAME, which led me to study the map editors and then I stopped working for a while.

 

OCTOBER-SEPTEMBER 2018.

I continued to work and dismantled the vast majority of the functions of the LUA. Found a method Command Post responsible for sending data to the pool of games from the LUA. It took me about two or three days to analyze all the functions. It turned out that the engine has a whole list of interfaces for working with the game engine. Most of the menu in the game and navigation at the time of navigation on the planet is implemented and controlled through the LUA. My research again returned to the map editor in which I found the property SceneDimension. Actually, it interested me. At that moment I returned to the study of the LUA, still believing that it was possible to change the size of the map through the LUA.

 

DECEMBER 2018.

I came close to solving my problem. I disassembled most of the map editor libraries and the game launch file using dotPeek and IDA Pro Disassembler programs. After the last time, having passed through all the chains of the LUA game, it was fully established that it was impossible to change the size of the map with the help of the LUA. But one thing I found out exactly the LUA file of any of your cards gives access to all the functions of the LUA so that you can even change the main menu of the game depending on which card the player has chosen. But still disassembling the startup file of the game, I found in it the SceneDimension variable, which is calculated using a special mathematical function. We are planning to rewrite the method of calculating SceneDimension data inside the file and after collecting a new file with the possibility of creating a large map.

 

In Russia, at all times, there was an unwritten law: kill, steal, deceive, die - but complete your task.

 

I do not plan smaller cards. What for? Errors, lags, glitches and bugs are in all software, even in Apple.