Kraellin,
thanks, I have over 7Gig of such tools on CD
- including very ancient tools that cannot be downloaded from the www
(I was fotunate enough to go to QIT/QUT, where they write their own operating systems and utilities from scratch)

I can make dupes of the SamS bif's and texts,
replacing the Sams images with Naggy images.

I can do all sorts of wonderful things to the executable, except decipher it to a point where i can add a extra few lines of code, - (i can't find the morale equations either - sorry - would have been nice to understand exactly whats going on in THAT department)

What we are hoping is that we have not yet deciphered all the text files, and that some of them control what image is shown from a certain camera position.
If some of them do control images/angles (lets hope), then we can change some of the Sams images for Nags images still using the same file,
but you won't have quite the range of 'angles' for the images.
Given the amount of time we have in battle to sit and admire the craftsmenship of the images I won't find that a problem.

If, However the images/camera angle relationships are hard coded
- well - then we have a problem.
If they are hard coded then I'd need the exe to load the Nag's Bif's and associated text files, (insert a few lines of code)
and whenever the program has to display a nagy, to use the naggy bif.
(change the pointers)

Hex edit is fine to change a hardcoded misspelling, or no-op a line here and there.
But to actually change the code in the way required for this project?
For that i need either source code (with dev notes still inserted) - OR one of the developers to take an interest.

If the developers have been smart they will have left plenty of extra room in their code to add new lines, for repair and expansion purposes.
They were smart in forcing the exe to ignore most load errors, allowing them to proceed to distribution without having to erase redundant code.

If they left room, then a patch would be very small, simply line up the old and new exe's, run a compare utility and extract differences to a patcher - one util will do all this easily.
Such a patch will simply contain the lines of code, instructions on where to edit them into place and instructions to overwrite old code.

Lets hope we can either decipher the text files which tell units to run, march, fight and die, and that the 'pointers' are in those texts, (allowing us to replace some Sams with Nags in the Sams bif)

Or else
Target - where are you???

------------------
DoragonBarocca of Clan Doragon

[This message has been edited by barocca (edited 06-11-2002).]