Hello again!
Thanks for your reply.
Ah, sorry for the mess I've caused, that was actually what I did want to know.
Yes, all it is hardcoded and it cannot be changed unless complete rewrite of the game.
Okay, thanks for the explanation.
Needs testing, not sure it is possible, but most likey not.
Disappointingly, it seems that all the "special" weapons (of type 5) are treated exclusively, so it isn't possible to create stellar converter or any beam weapon which would act like spatial compressor aswell. But it was totally unexpected to me that the bio weapon flag
can be toggled on weapons (i tried it out on particle beam).
The ship I've chosen for testing was the Avenger since first I've tried to find out the thing about 2-square radius flag and hadn't SST researched at that point.
The result was I had 240+ bombs at the after-combat screen instead of standard 103, and that was the bio weapons - causing, as expected, diplomatic penalties etc. I think it's quite interesting feature for balancing weapons, don't you find?
Unfortunately, it's of no use in PvP, tho
BUT, that doesn't have any effect on stellar converter itself.
By the time, I didn't found any other unusual possibilities with that possible exploit.
Yes, you can edit ingame pictures by means of picture editor, which is part of MoO2 Workshop, written by Grig de Griz. The problem will be to locate the exact file where the target picture could be stored. Its one of the many lbx files.
Ah, I see. Completely forgot about this tool.
Actually, the idea that made me conceive some scruples was the game uses some kind of... Um. Data files, and therefore there's a light of hope of using this to deal with hardcoded things. But it seems there's almost no way to do that, since most of the parameters are still held in the .exe, right?
The editing of functions is even more complicated than deciphering ingame data.
The programming should be performed in asm code and there is a limitation on space. The new code should fit the given space. If you are able to do the asm coding then you could try to implement the wishes you announced.
Ah, that good old-style fit-in-here asm coding... Ye, that's totally a challenge, seems to be nearly impossible for the whole game, could be done for several fragments and very hard indeed.
Alternatively one could completely rewrite the game and compile it anew. There were several such attempts, but to no success yet. Hope this helps.
Well, this all makes me think of finding the original devs behind ATARI's back
May I feel free to PM you if I ever would go that far?
Thanks for your thoroughly provided help, Overlord2. You definitely make me feel comfortable here (and embarrassed with my own incapability to figure out some, maybe, not-that-hard-to-dig facts at the same time
).