OT: Hacking Silly Civvy Mappy Sizes

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Recently, I got the urge to play civilization again. I don't have 3 or 4, but I do have 2, 2:MGE and 2:ToT.

Anyway, the silly little game will only let me make maps up to size 10,000 squares. Enter a little program called XVI...

...The value wasn't hard to find and now I can make maps (In the MGE map editor, anyway), of up to size 32,768...Or maybe 32,767. Now I'm wondering if anyone here might have an idea on how I could tweak things to tweak that tiny little half-a-WORD into, I dunno, a DWORD would be fun...

(Imprecise language used because some people get all upset at the most innocent things, just because they have illegal uses.)

If successfull, I wouldn't distribute any .exe's. That would be illegal. I will simply tell you how I did it, and if you own the program, you can do the stuff yourself.

Anyway, off to the datamines...

[Fyron]

There was a utility for ToT that unlocked the map size limits in such a fashion, but there was a very practical limit on how big maps could be; Only so many cities could be built in total, so you easily ended up with huge empty continents. It should be on Apolyton still.

Why would you just play the MGE edition if you have ToT?

Changing what a "variable" is in an exe is likely to not work well, since all of the code instructions are depending on absolute and relative instruction/data locations; changing a variable's size moves everything after it around.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Yeah, but I couldn't find it and if I remember right, it was a patch that was one patch back.

...Prettier graphics? (Not normally a factor, but ToT is Ugly.)

Thanks. Oh well, worth a shot. And 32,768 is still big.

[Fyron]

You can use the MGE graphics in ToT.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

*Blink* *Blink* That makes sense.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Oh, right. Info. For MGE, just take your favorite base-sixteen editor, find the first 10 27 and replace it with 00 80. For ToT, it's the second 10 27. For those confused, programs tend to have base-sixteen numbers flipped around.

That's 1CDAF, 1CAFF and 16D58, with the latest patches.

Don't forget to make backups.

[Cipher7071]

Sorry narf, couldn't help this (I teach computers and math)....

For memory reasons the numbers for most such things are usually 2 to some power minus 1, because zero is always counted. For instance, the RGB colors each go from 0 up to 255 (2 to the 8th power minus 1). So, the number you refer to in your original post is indeed 32767: 2 to the 15th power minus 1.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Not nessasarily. See, if the 'zero' slot is filled with data, then the number of slots that can be filled with data is indeed 32,768.

So there.

[Cipher7071]

Right. I guess we're talking about the same thing after all.