So I did a bit more reading on the work that deanolium and Sol_HSA have done in this thread. Thanks to their well-documented work, I've managed to put together a little mini-mod for Covert Action of my own.

As you can see in the attached screenshots, I've replaced a few of the cities in the European and African theatres, as well as renaming some of the more vague criminal organisations to real-life examples.

@DIREWOLF75
I'm not sure if I can be of much help for you, sorry. :( My advice would be to max out Combat to Awesome and try to figure out the electronic ones the best you can, yes, advanced electronics puzzles are a pain but they can be done. Perhaps you could try lowering your cycles?

I suppose it would be possible through sheer trial and error of different saves to find out the difficulty flags, but it's not something I'd be interested in doing at this time. (If anything I'd be more interested in making a custom case, although that's quite advanced work, haha)

No, it´s not just that they can be absurdly hard sometimes, the HUGE problem is when they end up in ways that does not have a solution at all. Trying to do a level 3 or 4 Electronics can be very painful yes, especially when you get it on a short timer, but there´s a big difference between that and the times i have had time enough and calculated possible solutions and then realised that the chips needed for ANY of the solutions doesn´t actually exist.

And the thing is that because i´ve mostly played so i get level 2 electronics, where you still can see all chips and the interconnects are not so complex, i can say that without hesitation.

There´s also the incredibly annoying variant of the above, where you DO have all the chips needed, BUT, one or more of them cannot be exchanged in any way without triggering an alarm(inverter chips on the two rightmost columns are the usual culprits here(essentially, the only way to switch the chips would be to change two at the same time, which you obviously can´t do)).

And maxing out Combat means i have to accept a level 3 or 4 Electronics, which is simply not workable when electronics is my preferred method of operations, and at those levels, once you get anything but a long time to work with, you tend to fail a lot even when the puzzle does not end up impossible.


That´s what i thought, but after going through a bunch of saves, made from the first moment possible, with both different skill selections and 3 exactly the same, i´m still unable to find any bytes that match up.

Ie, i cannot even determine where the skills are saved, because the numbers i get from having 3 saves with identical skills, the only notable ones the same are also the same in saves with other skills, or have no relative value(ie linear, exponential, binary, multiplied etc) to link to a skill level.
I even tried running a scanner while assigning skills, and got absolutely nothing useful from it, which is just weird.

Did my first modded .exe on PC in the 80s, and a lot more since, so it´s not like i lack the experience.

And i very much doubt that i´m the only one who wants(or needs) to know this...

Hi again,

Sorry to not reply sooner. I don't think I can help sorry. :( What you ask is beyond something I've tried to do before. Hopefully one of the others comes back eventually and can help out.

Wow, just stumbled across this thread today (have been a fan of Covert Action since I was a kid and decided to reinstall it to play again just now)... amazing work, folks! I always thought this would be a game that could've enjoyed new popularity if it was moddable, but never thought that would be even possible!

I would love to be able to use the command line to set those parameters rather than be asked every time I play, so yes please!

Regardless though, would it be possible to get a version that is:
VGA, MT32 Sound, and Keys
please ?

Is your mod available to download and try? I'd love to play with different cities and "fixed" organizations.

Whaaaa my bad sorry for not noticing this until now :(

Feel free to hit me up on my site if you want :) My mod isn't quite ready for release but I can send it to people privately.

Kilkakon, I was wondering if I could get a copy of your mod as well? Enjoy this old school PC game with a passion, in my honest opinion, one of the only detective sims that really put you into the zone. Thanks again, by the way, I also sent you a PM.

Amazing - I haven't been on this forum for a while; so great to see people are still interested and have picked up the ball and done some stuff.

This is still one of the games I keep thinking about and wish had more attention. My progress on this stopped a while ago due to real life and work taking up my time. I've also changed hard drives several times, and whilst my notes still exist, they're on some random drive. When I get some time, it could be good to set up some kind of archive - I still want to be able to create some more missions as I'm sure we've now all played the current set a gazillion times.

DIREWOLF - that's interesting that the electronics gets to the point of being impossible at times. That sounds like a major oversight for the Microprose team. Unfortunately when I was looking at the source, figuring out the individual sub-games was pretty complex, since they're on separate executables which have to be loaded in with data in certain points in memory in order to generate the situation. I don't recall seeing the code which sets up your skill ratings, but I'm sure if I looked into the game again I might be able to find which parts of your save does the skills since the key would be to look at where the text for the skill levels are, look for code which calls that, and then see which bit of memory they're using to select the correct level of that skill. Then it should be a case of increasing those bits of memory (or see which parts of the save fills in that bit of memory).

The main issue for me will be time, and also I'll need to re-get a disassembler to go through the code. If anyone wants to buy me a copy of IDAPro, that would help :p

I know it's 4 years after the last update of this post, but I think I've got the a piece of your puzzle. I'm reading the thread linearly, so I don't know if you've found out, but here it goes.

The clues are indeed generated in packs of 4, as you said. I was attempting to reconstruct a patch for the ultimate plot (the dropbox link is dead) and I found the meanings of two fields of CRIME.DTA.

The first field after the record marker (right before the plotter's name string) looks like an EXPOSURE field. The number in that field indicates how easy is to find clues leading to a specific plotter. If you inspect a CRIME??.DTA file, you'll notice that masterminds always have this field set to 0.

I ran a few tests with the simple theft (ULTRA book) mission and by reducing the exposure of all plotters to 0 and setting the mastermind's exposure to 0x7f, I would always get all 4 clues to the mastermind during the CIA's original investigation. Once the clues to the MM had been uncovered, I would get a mixture of clues for the others.

I wouldn't be surprised the exposure number was being fed to some sort of probabilistic algorithm that decided whom should get exposed by a clue. What you're saying fits perfectly with what I was seeing.

Also, the int16 right before the rank of the participant selects a clue type from some (yet unseen from my perspective) clue type list. This works like an enumerate type.

id | type
---+-----
00 | vehicle
01 | weapon
02 | address
03 | airline ticket
04 | telegram
05 | money (hundreds USD)
06 | money (thousands USD)
07 | identity document

It is clear that what you're describing here is the table that contains the clue templates being referenced in the CRIME?.DTA files.

Been a while since I've been on this forum, but that looks great. It's been a long time since I've looked at the code (changing computers and losing the decompiling software has been a pain!), so I've not advanced further on. But this looks like some good work!

Please share your crime editor! I'd love it!

Has anyone been able to reverse the PAN files that do animations? The format seems very confusing.