Is there any chance we'll see mods for this? Maybe not this one but the sequel? I have always wanted to play the heroes from the first game through the second one. I know the second one hasn't been confirmed but I never thought this would be on PC but here we are.

Oh, and fix the armor bug so armor is actualy worth wearing.

I have the game on Steam and I had a quick look at the executable file. It looks like the executable file on Steam is encrypted. Does anyone know if it is on GOG? If it isn't I'll rebuy it on GOG to have a look at it.

From the quick look I've taken it looks like it was written using SDL 2.0 to handle the sound, controllers etc.. and OpenGL for the 3D engine. The game is also a native 64 bit game. I know old fashioned 32 bit x86 code but I don't know amd64, so I'll need to learn that.

In the game files the .lmp files look like they are archive files and I don't think they are compressed or encrypted. They can contain .tex files which are the game's texture files.

The first thing I would probably do is to increase the size of the texture files and see if the engine can handle it. As it's a console port all the texture sizes could be hardcoded.

What armor bug?

And iirc, you can unlock the original heroes in the second game, they have been captured, after all. No mods needed.

Hey, scanti if you are willing I'm looking into trying my hand at learning how to mod this game. You seem to know some about this I'd love to pick your brain or anyone else that has info on how to do this if they're willing.

If you do go about modding the game it would be much appreciated. I don't like the idea of buying a game that's broken at the outset with no attempt to polish it for PC.

Wait wait i just made an account here just to ask this ive played baulders gate dark alliance 2 many many times and only unlocked drizzt how the hell do you unlock the characters from first game? i mean i have saved them in the guest but you cant choose to play them and if your saying this works please mate do tell since that would be super awesome i would instantly play this game again for it.

Yeah, look's like I actually mistook that. I really thought so. Oh well, it's ages ago. Sry to say that.

But hey, welcome anyways!

Makes me wonder if i'm going to be the one modding the game or not...

Found some interesting things after hacking stats, the lmp files are basically small archives, which i could make a program to extract, includes animations sounds and other things. But that would be more useful to someone graphical, while i'm scouring a way to modify the abilities.

Hi there! I'm quite interested in modding this game as well, specifically characters' skillsets. I know there are some unused skills from the previous game and I'd like to make the Necromancer use them. Those are the wizard's spells from the first game and there's a kind of alpha trailer of this game in which you can see the Necromancer use such skills. Pls, let me know if you find something intereting about abilities' modding :)

Those would be nice.

While i might make some of the hacking an option, i doubt i'll do a lot of it. I tried modifying magic missile, so damage or number of missiles scaled better, and while the display of damage changed, the actual missiles wouldn't. So the data and code is a bit deeper,.

What's also curious, is obviously the game is/was a 32bit game, but the executable is 64bit. I know the original Xbox had this game. It would make sense to either do emulation layer, or to use a tool to translate the 32bit to 64bit without changing it's results, and then do a compatibility fix/adjustments to use current DirectX API rather than what was built into the Xbox and Kernel.

The weeds are a bit thick for me. I can't find any class/character list of skills, meaning they are likely inside the executable somewhere, That or hidden in the character select menu somewhere; but with no idea which ID's are what raw data all looks like garbage to me.

After some more tests, the best i think i can do is probably going to be texture/audio extraction to which you can then edit or replace them before rebuilding said archives.

From what i'm seeing there's a translation portion in gtext and gtext_uk files in the res directory. That's where names/descriptions are basically stored for all languages, as the raw names internally for the spells/skills is something a bitshorter. Like 'MagicMissile'. then you have AV_MagicMissile which i think is the information for particle effects and sounds associated with it. If you find one, all the other names are bound to be close by. So I'd wager it's a combination locale lookup, and depending on the input you're using, it swaps between the controllerkeyboard inputs (as this was released on consoles so just swapping the textures and texts is easy-peasy so long as you can change the pointer).

But that doesn't tell me how it handles the default config, how it determines the spells/skill set, only that it's confusing enough, and using a debugger/cheating tool certainly can help in the moment, but isn't quite enough to help as a mod.

I'll look over the video, though I'm not expecting much. I wouldn't be surprised if in the save file the characters skills are listed, how many points are put into them each. That would be more universal, while the character creation copies a bulk template for starting character and gear. It might come down to making save files with different modifications and just importing them; but as the save has error correction checks, you'd likely have to make them in game, then save them like i did for stats for them to stick.

Makes me miss the old Diablo 2 saves, which was only like 800 bytes and you could find and edit everything easily. (then they added their own CRC and you had to update that too, but that's another issue)

Hmmmm.... I remember once when i had to help with a MSDOS program to create a TSR (Terminate-Stay-Resistant) program that one of the solutions i had was to use a call/jump from a known working code to an empty block of code to add my own, then return. So hooking in to almost anywhere will work. The real problem is still finding it.

As for making it scale; well i found where the stats are stored in memory (and can easily find it again) but that would be closer to hard-coding it. That's fine if it never moves.

I really really wish games were written so their sources were included with the game; Albeit encrypted or something so they can be unlocked or cracked later and modded. Copyright as it is (creation of arts and works) is useless when companies have the mentality the copyright will never end and games just disappear wholesale into the void.

This is called making a code cave. It's pretty easy to do in Cheat Engine, because unlike the old DOS days, you don't have to look for an unused piece of memory. My favourite spot was at the very start of the code, where there was always a standard notification/licensing message of some kind.

Through cheat engine scripting you can actually allocate a small chunk of memory pretty easily and label the code and the jump point so that you can shunt back and forward. Have a look at some older simple cheat engine scripts, and you will find examples of how to do it. If you are used to assembly coding, it's not that hard to do some pretty solid stuff without too much trouble.