Setting Hardwar up in 2011!

[magitek]

So I decided to give Hardwar more of a chance than I did a decade ago (about three minutes worth) and I was pleasantly surprised about how good it is. I hate the terribly early 3D but rest assured if you like Hardwar it's not just nostalgia talking- very few games today have a decent city/life simulation going for them.

Now I'm trying to get it setup properly for multiplayer with some local friends; and I added some bonus questions for maximum long!

Current mods:

Hangar loop fix - Voted mod of 2011
Arach's grey skins (most of Hardwars ship texturing seems borderline clown-ships, dull metallic grey is the future guys! .. too bad about these novelty colored cargo pods.)
UIM06 (So many fixes/additions I'd wager the game unplayable @ u2.04)
UIM06 Enhanced (Some great stuff here that really improves the game)
Jimmy's fixes (Enhanced was completely broken without this, thanks for these fixes Jimmy!)
Changing weather (untested.. is this worth putting on for more variety?)

Highrise world file: the world_output contains a boatload of errors. This seems to be the latest/best world file; did I miss something?
It seems like it adds quite a bit to world traffic, so I'd like to understand what's going wrong here or if it's simply obsolete.

Missing mods?
MSGCv9b6 - can't find it anywhere on the net. Would like it to run a dedicated please. Plenty of source for it floating around but no binaries anywhere I've seen.

Questions:
1. Is there a way to get police more functional in multiplayer?
I toiled for many an hour and found jimmy's fix for enhanced and it helped a lot: Pirates get shot at by the police after 3 kills and players get fined for shooting innocents.

Unfortunately it still seems as if players are still getting a free pass for piracy. Doesn't look like AI will hunt player pirates for bounty, or that police will attack you like it attacks the AI (after they've killed 3 innocents). The removal of bounty is too simple.. and ironically, the cost of paying normally for your fine seems too high (no value-based fee).
Anything out there that can sharpen this against players?

It seems that earlier in development, according to a deep dark once-upon-a-google cache, police would actually attack the player but it was cut because it would not inform the player before hand. I doubt this can be restored at this point, but I was intrigued anyhow.

2. Is there anything that lifts the hangar FPS clamp? Very irritating.. I'm not exactly running out of bandwidth here. I understand why they did this (though not why they decided to tie the renderer to network activity..) but it's very jarring to rock up to a hangar and have it fall apart, I would like to find a way to remove or reduce it.
If all else fails, maybe comparing offsets between the patches that introduced this would provide me insight?

3. Ambient sound disappears in multiplayer (lightning strikes etc).. I thought this helped create a lot of atmosphere, but its gone in multiplayer(whyyyy).. the interface no longer shows shield and hull bars of targets, enemy ships no longer have health-colored shields (default shield effect is not pleasing or informative). Players also can't see what products are buying/selling for from target interface (wish I didn't get used to this, it's hard to buy blind).

4. At some point player-hangar repairs became free; the game doesn't have many money sinks and I'd prefer this wasn't a free ticket. Hangars have a proper repair button which I assume was actually useful before someone implemented auto/free repairs aka repair droid that you don't even need to install into the hangar now.

5. Starting equipment in multiplayer: The persistent game option probably broke a long time ago, no one seems to actually know what it does.
My experience:
Ticked, You get a cargo pod?
Unticked, No cargo pod for you!

Is there a way to slow players from marauding the entire server in the silver-starter-y. Ideally I'd like to strip the plasma kannon from the super-y you are gifted upon joining because the game does not have much progression to begin with, and it's just so tempting to start out blasting everyone like deathmatch was still in season.


_{Starter-Y > Murder everything > Law continues to not care > Neo-tiger > upgrade 2 or 3 things > buy up all the property for lack of anything better to do with money.}

Naturally it's more fun to start a business and such but I can't help but notice that the upgrade system could have been a lot more if there was just a few more upgrade variants and a bit less starting funds! Too bad it doesn't seem like we'll see the source in my lifetime.

6. Did anyone ever re-balance the pulse laser? It's crazy-talk that you start out with the best weapon combination on the silver-y in multiplayer.. furthering the crazy is that the pulselaser seems to be inferior to the plasma kannon while costing more at the same time.

-----------------------
I assume that question #3 is disappointingly server-side and cannot be remedied, but I figure I should ask because I will miss all of these features, and will remain permanently baffled by the lack of background sound in multiplayer.

TL;DR
Add more mods, make Hardwar actually hard, fix strange issues, save the whale.

54600 characters remaining.. that covers at least half of the things I wanted to ask.
Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this Hardwarl of text.

[Captain Zedo]

Good questions and I'm not able to answer them all. I'd like to redirect you to Hammer in Online Gaming. He's run some really long-term games.

There is a hack to make the Police respond quicker. As it stands, they'll come after you 24-hours after your first attack. You can have them respond immediately. I'm pretty sure OUCH can tell you how to reset this time/value. There's more to it that purely time.

There are various strategies to prevent marauders. In the few online games I hosted, we used a secret police force manned by human pilots. That was cool because it made for a real city feel where not everyone could be a pirate.

[duncan]

I've got MSGCv9b6.exe and -b7.exe. I forgot what the last 'released' version was. If someone doesnt mind to host, let me know. Also if you want it directly sent me a pm with an email address.

Hammer uses an adapted hardwarw.exe with certain TI commands vulnerable of abuse disabled. If you are handy with a hex editor, you can just string search them and replace with something of your own choosing, but dont change the number of bytes.

i dont know about 1,2,3,4,5

for 6, maybe one of ouch'es tweak tools

[magitek]

Alright thanks for the replies guys, Duncan I sent you a pm with my email.

I think reducing the timer for when the police act might be a reasonable solution, as it stands it feels as if the piracy is far too profitable. Would be nice if we were forced to dodge police patrols at least once or twice; they seem pretty dangerous to tangle with!

I have no real idea how to find things in the hardwarw.exe sadly, so I guess I will have to PM OUCH for the offsets?
While I would love to have a human police force (can humans collect bounty on other human players?) I don't think we quite have the manpower to pull it off (much like the real police in hardwar it seems!)

I will look into getting various tweaks off Hammer if he's still around, as they're probably too good to pass up.

[ouch]

you could pm me but I don't know the offsets either...

also my editor doesn't do weapon stats. I specifically asked Ciaran for information about them but he said the weapons don't have a real structure and is one of the most hacked together parts of the game I guess...

[magitek]

Sept 20, 2011 22:38:48 GMT -5 ouch said:

you could pm me but I don't know the offsets either...

also my editor doesn't do weapon stats. I specifically asked Ciaran for information about them but he said the weapons don't have a real structure and is one of the most hacked together parts of the game I guess...

Figures, thanks for the information. Would've been nice if I could improve the pulse damage; maybe I should just bump the prices around instead.

Your patcher is great btw. If you're still interested in improving it at some point I was thinking maybe you have an option to either randomly generate names(particularly starter pilot names) or pull them from a larger file. Shuffling hangars could be interesting too, though I think this needs wld editing or something.

There's quite a few things I want to tweak but it seems to be pretty hard to find where in memory things are. Does anyone know of a list of UIM06 offsets somewhere? or a guide to messing with the enhanced patches?

The Misopian scripting plugin for instance seems pretty interesting, but only works with u2.04 offsets, does anyone know if the UIM06 console supports any scripting like this?
For instance, the police can actually check ships for narcotics; would be nice if I could expand on things like this and introduce a decent smuggling mechanic for players.

UIM06 console seems like a cleaner message system, but I'm not sure how to manipulate it into doing anything interesting other than commanding a deathsquad of thugs.

[duncan]

//adresses ti command names and exe hacks in UIM.06
#define TIhangarname 0xffb08
#define TIhangaraccess 0xffd34
#define TIhangarstatus 0xffbdc
#define TIhangarlogo 0xffe4c
#define TIhangartype 0xffec0
#define TIhangarsoftware 0xfff34
#define TIhangardamage 0xffdc4

#define TIadminplans 0x1012e8
#define TIadminblag 0x1012f0
#define TIadminpermissions 0x10136c
#define TIadminexec 0x1012e0
#define TIadminbuild 0x1012b0
#define TIadmindescribe 0x101264
#define TIadmincreate 0x1012b8
#define TIadminteleport 0x1012cc

#define TItarget 0x1012c4
#define TIrecruit 0x101308
#define TIroomnavigationB 0x104b3c
#define TIroomnavigationE 0x104c5f

#define HACKhangarrepairAddr 0xda9f
#define HACKhangarrepairTest 0x908991d00800c3909090
#define HACKhangarrepairNew 0x902bc28981d00800c390

#define HACKhangarnamingAddr 0xc92f
#define HACKhangarnamingTest 0x0175258B484885C9741E
#define HACKhangarnamingNew 0x1075258B484885C9741E

[magitek]

Thanks for the offsets Duncan, will these be valid if I simply insert them into MSGC?

[RoadDemon]

Hey Duncan, You can post any software that is hardwar related at hardwar.us . You just need to register. And that invite is for anyone who has any hardwar software that is not already posted.

[sinisteragent]

Hi.

It's so great to hear that there are other people interested in Hardwar multiplayer. It was such a massively underrated game and setting, and I've thought for ages that it could be a brilliant multiplayer game, with a persistent world where any role could be fulfilled by a human player, from the cops and criminals right down to the guy doing the food and water 'milk run' - not a big profit, but safe, and without him, everybody dies, or prices go haywire and chaos ensues. It'd be a nice change of pace from the usual wow style grindfests and identikit deathmatch shooters.

Is there a beginner's guide to Hardwar mods/utilities anywhere? I've seen lots of utilities and files named here and in some of the sites you've linked, but it's not clear what some of them do, so if someone's already done a write up I'd love to know about it.

Edit: Never mind! I've just found a lengthy FAQ on capsu.org that looks like it'll answer many of my questions.

[duncan]

Sept 21, 2011 19:16:19 GMT -5 magitek said:

Thanks for the offsets Duncan, will these be valid if I simply insert them into MSGC?

Not sure what you mean, but yes it is C code so you can put it in the MSGC source and compile. But without some additional code it will not do a thing.

Questions -any that you can answer would be helpful- first up, how can I go about compiling this?
I've never really compiled console apps before.

Just give it a try, if you are lucky it compiles first time otherwise there is some debugging waiting. Latest versions of MSGC I compiled from codeblocks. So that should work. I cannot check, as I am no longer on windows.

The police HQ data changing; when does this happen usually? I probably won't fix it anytime soon but I'm curious as I haven't seen it happen yet. (or maybe it happened right away?)

The name you see in-game with police HQ hangar changes, sometimes with unreadable characters. It doesnt happen very often.

I can see most of the pilot memory is mapped out, do you have any idea how or where faction/wanted/aggression is handled?
#define PILOT_MEMORY_PILOT 768
#define PILOT_MEMORY_PILOT_LOCK 808
Maybe these refer to the pilots hate list? or something else?

I believe these are the addresses to the pilot that attacked last (which will be the target for retaliation) and the address to the pilot/building that is in the ships target system. Not sure.

I'm thinking maybe I can monitor and make police more pro-active, as I'm about to re-balance AI traders and pirates using a patch to enhanced.

#define HQ_ENEMY_NUMBER 29
#define HQ_WANTED_NUMBER 29

If I were to guess, police store their wanted list in the headquarters and attack based on enemy or wanted number?

The wanted lists are probably chained lists in memory (with a memory address to the details of the next target in the wanted list). Not directly in the HQ bulding code. Although, there may be a memory reference. Not sure, where does the HQ_ENEMY_NUMBER actually point to ... ?

Sounds like I'll be doing a lot of stabbing in the dark if I can get this to compile

Trial and error

[duncan]

Sept 24, 2011 1:23:24 GMT -5 sinisteragent said:

... and I've thought for ages that it could be a brilliant multiplayer game ...

Totally agree with that, and welcome to the community. Where is the blog going to happen? Feel free to ask any question.

[magitek]

Sept 24, 2011 11:25:58 GMT -5 duncan said:

Sept 21, 2011 19:16:19 GMT -5 magitek said:

Thanks for the offsets Duncan, will these be valid if I simply insert them into MSGC?

Not sure what you mean, but yes it is C code so you can put it in the MSGC source and compile. But without some additional code it will not do a thing.

Just give it a try, if you are lucky it compiles first time otherwise there is some debugging waiting. Latest versions of MSGC I compiled from codeblocks. So that should work. I cannot check, as I am no longer on windows.

I did indeed get this to compile with luck (surprising because I usually have to fiddle with the compiler/code for hours)..

Sept 24, 2011 11:25:58 GMT -5 duncan said:

The name you see in-game with police HQ hangar changes, sometimes with unreadable characters. It doesnt happen very often.

This specific behavior hasn't happened to me yet (keeps crashing around day 32 and MSGC doesn't want to restart it currently), the probable cause is the memory corruption the config loader is causing. I happened to notice it(or something else!.. just love C ) when I put a <265 value into CYCLE_WAIT and it kept being overwritten.

Sept 24, 2011 11:25:58 GMT -5 duncan said:

I believe these are the addresses to the pilot that attacked last (which will be the target for retaliation) and the address to the pilot/building that is in the ships target system. Not sure.

If I can get this information to read, I intend to use these to allow traders to pay players for their protection... soon as I can tap into the mail system, argh!
I'll probably also use it to manipulate the AI to break off instead of always fight to the death also.

Sept 24, 2011 11:25:58 GMT -5 duncan said:

The wanted lists are probably chained lists in memory (with a memory address to the details of the next target in the wanted list). Not directly in the HQ bulding code. Although, there may be a memory reference. Not sure, where does the HQ_ENEMY_NUMBER actually point to ... ?

Wanted and enemy lists are stored directly in buildings, to be precise:
BUILDING_ADDR + SECOND_PART + HQ_WANTED + list*4 bytes
BUILDING_ADDR + SECOND_PART + HQ_ENEMY + list*16 bytes
I'm currently processing this data to manipulate the police into prioritizing targets. Sadly I'm having difficulty understanding the ENEMY list and how wanted level is calculated or where bounty is stored so far.

Sept 24, 2011 11:25:58 GMT -5 duncan said:

Sounds like I'll be doing a lot of stabbing in the dark if I can get this to compile

Trial and error

3 days of OllyDBG and messing with MSGC and enhanced later.. OllyDBG just 'forgot' my user comments, so I've lost most of the memory I had mapped out.. sigh.

[sinisteragent]

Sept 24, 2011 11:29:50 GMT -5 duncan said:

Sept 24, 2011 1:23:24 GMT -5 sinisteragent said:

... and I've thought for ages that it could be a brilliant multiplayer game ...

Totally agree with that, and welcome to the community. Where is the blog going to happen? Feel free to ask any question.

Thanks. The blog's nothing big, just something I started recently about a heavily modified Fallout 3. I'll basically be playing a series of games with no reloads and few resources, seeing how far I can get in each without getting killed. Hardwar is a good candidate since it's open, has an economy, and is great fun to play. I'll post the address here when it starts, if nobody minds.

I did have questions about what mods etc. to use, but I think I'm getting there anyway. Once I've got it running the way I'd like, I'll put together a quick guide. If I get stuck I may take you up on that

Actually I do have one question for now. The default installation (2.04) had the camera fix on random distant NPC craft when the Esc key was pressed, as well as bringing up menu options. I've installed UIM-e and hardwar enhanced, and now the Esc key instead brings up the boring main menu screen (the options are still available though). I don't know why this is so, as it's clearly not as nice. Could anyone tell me how to restore the original function? The 'enter attract mode when idle' function doesn't appear to do anything except cut off the sound when idle.

[magitek]

Sept 26, 2011 12:41:37 GMT -5 sinisteragent said:

I did have questions about what mods etc. to use, but I think I'm getting there anyway. Once I've got it running the way I'd like, I'll put together a quick guide. If I get stuck I may take you up on that

If you grabbed the latest enhanced, make sure you get jimmys fix- enhanced falls apart at the seams without it, also, don't play with the economy mod, it really breaks stuff.

Sept 26, 2011 12:41:37 GMT -5 sinisteragent said:

I've installed UIM-e and hardwar enhanced, and now the Esc key instead brings up the boring main menu screen (the options are still available though).

I'm not positive but I have the feeling this was due to the render changes from u2.04 -> UIM, I could be wrong however. It also may have been causing crashes.