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Nyerguds

Command & Patch
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About Nyerguds

  • Rank
    Commander-In-Chief
  • Birthday 14/12/1983

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  • Location
    Flanders (Belgium)
  • Interests
    C&C

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  1. Nyerguds

    source ?

    Note, since the release of the source code, I have kept a close eye on the source when researching any issues I've found, and have reported them on the VanillaConquer bug tracker. So some stuff is on there. Some of the stuff mentioned there will make its way into a new version of this patch which I'm preparing. OpenRA never cared about keeping any parity with the original games, though. It's basically just its own game, in a C&C skin. I don't see much of a point in it from a C&C preservation / patching point of view.
  2. Nyerguds

    source ?

    Oh, I've dug into the source code extensively, and have often used it as reference material in assembly patches I made for Kilkakon's "Dawn of Tomorrow" C&C95 mod. (for which, learning from my earlier mistakes, we made sure to meticulously keep track of all edits ) But still, I'm not a C++ programmer. From knowing c# syntax, yes, I can read the code, but that still doesn't mean I can program C++. Not to the extent I can in asm, anyway. In the raw bytes, anything is possible. As for "a long time ago", well, the source code was published in 2020. My patch was made between 2008-2012. So, just to put that into perspective... since C&C95 was released in 1997, that means that at the moment the source code was released, C&C95 had already existed longer with my patch than without it. I know why Vanilla Conquer does not support my patch; it's mostly because I added a language switching system into it, and to optimise that a bit, I split off the sounds.mix file into two files; sounds.mix for sound effects, and talk_eng.mix for the unit voices. This allowed me to add a talk_fre.mix, talk_ger.mix and talk_jap.mix without needing to include duplicates of the sound effects four times. I also made some edits to make the sidebar expand, and those edits require increasing the game's graphics buffer, otherwise it's not large enough to load the entire expanded sidebar sprite. Music should not be an issue; I just use the unmodified Covert Ops scores.mix file as far as I know. I added some extra soundtrack-versions of some tracks too, but they're added in an external mixfile, so that should not affect anything
  3. Nyerguds

    C&C 1 Documents

    That was just C&C3 marketing fluff, no?
  4. Nyerguds

    source ?

    I'm not sure what you mean. This whole patch was developed without access to any source code, and wasn't written in C++ itself. My "source" is a combination of undocumented hacks, and a whole mess of text files with asm code, and from a lot of those I'm not even sure if they're obsolete or actually the final stuff that ended up inside the game. Many of them are later updates of the same parts, and I know the exe contains undocumented edits where I just pushed existing parts of the exe a few bytes back or forward to put my own code in, and for such edits it never seemed worth it to transcribe the entire code block I moved, since the only real edits that were involved for me were changing the jump distances of things connecting to such moved blocks. I've been trying to use binary diffs to reconstruct all of it in a more sensible manner, but it's a huge work, and I don't have a lot of time these days. And since this isn't C++ code, it's also not something that can easily be integrated into projects like VanillaConquer. Absolutely none of this has ever been compared to the source code to see where it would even belong as actual C++ patch. And I'm also very sure that a lot of the stuff I hacked in could be done in a much more elegant way in the real source code. You also have to understand, I'm not a C++ programmer. I'm a C#/Java programmer, and on the C++ front, I mostly just know what it looks like when compiled to bytecode. So I'm familiar with very high-level and very low-level stuff, but the C++ in between those two extremes is something I'm really not familiar with in terms of syntax and overall structure.
  5. Nyerguds

    Real Command & Conquer

    Already saw it on Reddit, but, yea, cool stuff
  6. Brute-forcing with extra characters added in the dictionary entry list ( ! . - _ ? , ) gave some matches for the bibs one, but nothing plausible. F7867BF0 = "!GEARECLEANUP" F7867BF0 = ".BUSHELSJOULING" F7867BF0 = ". DENOTE HAJJ" F7867BF0 = ". KERNED YACCA" F7867BF0 = "- COMBY OVERFEE" F7867BF0 = "-DEFUNDSFARAD" [edit] Apparently, in the RA Play Codes, "ANTHRAXROCKAWAY" is a somewhat plausible match for Paul Mudra's code; he was a sound guy, and Anthrax is a thrash metal band from the 80s. It's quite long compared to all the other ones though.
  7. Interesting! Yea, the special #8 and wchat ones do seem pretty plausible. I uploaded my code now, in v1.0.7 of the tool. Though note that it's not very polished; some of the controls don't disable as they should while the operation is in progress. I'll probably release a 1.0.7.1 soon to fix these small details. The tool can accept a list of hashes, so that tends to speed things up a bit, since the result of one hashing operation can be compared to all of the values. Though in that aspect, the command line parameters and ini options still need to be treated as separate categories, of course, since the ini ones can contain spaces.
  8. The tool I used was something I wrote before in C# with the original intent to brute force hashes from mix files. When we started digging into these secret password hashes, I added the obfuscate algorithm into it. http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/project_stuff/2014/CnCMixNameFinder/ I'm not sure if I got the latest version of my tool uploaded (it's possible that the uploaded version does not contain the dictionary attack support), but anyway, it's a rather unoptimised C# desktop app. It doesn't have any kind of special way to distribute loads; it's plain CPU-powered, without multi-core processing or anything like that. To do parallel hacking, I generally just started it 8 times, assigned each instance to another core manually in Windows Task Manager, and gave each instance another range to go over. I mean, it was originally just meant to brute-force hashes from mix files, which means pure ASCII filenames up to 8 characters of which the extension is generally already known. So yea, for that purpose, it was good enough Note that the Obfuscate algorithm I use was partially rewritten by Tomsons26, with findings which I think were based on earlier reverse-engineering. Toms noticed that certain operations cancelled each other out, and have no effect on the end result. So the c# code I have is in fact more optimised than the version in the original code, and thus, more suitable for brute force operations. [edit] Ugh, seems the whole Obfuscate method isn't in the currently released code yet. I'll upload it asap.
  9. Oh wow, a lot of these are unknown. I brute forced on these a lot, but I never thought of including underscores or exclamation marks, because the algorithm just substitutes them for alphanumeric characters anyway. Never made the obvious realisation that that didn't mean they didn't use them. I found JURASSIC, FUNFUN, GONEWILD, CHOMPCHOMP, and a few others you got as well; basically, purely alphanumeric dictionary stuff. The #2 one you're missing matches "RAPATTACK", but I have no clue about #8 either. #4 actually has a lot of fun dictionary matches, but none seemed very plausible. I like the "ANKYLOSAURTOWEL" one though "OBWAN" is completely confirmed. First of all, it's obviously a Star Wars reference, and secondly, It's Joe Bostic's developer password, and Joe has always used "Joe B Wan" as online nickname. In fact if you look in the Petroglyph Discord, "Joebwan" is his nickname there. PARM_EDITORERIK (0xC2AA509B) matches "SUPEREDIT", so that seems extremely plausible too. Red Alert also has a bunch of hashes like it. I got a spreadsheet on which I keep track of everything found and confirmed so far: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EnkKM28eDt1VbhtFKHnD1PCm-FmboygiuIyehFfSudo/edit#gid=0
  10. Basically you just have to do the calculations right and find a nearby resolution... For 3840x2160, if you divide both sides by 4, you get 960x540, which is within normal functioning parameters for the game. If you then apply the fix of multiplying the height by 5/6th, you get 960x450 So 960x450 pixel-upscaled (filter "nearest") to 3840x2160 should do the trick in your case.
  11. Have you tried... simply not playing the game in your native resolution? The game was never designed to go over 640x400, and even the 1.06 patch is not deigned to go over a screen width of 1024 pixels. There are stretch options available in the config tool. Use those to upscale the game to your actual resolution.
  12. Nyerguds

    C&C 1 Documents

    Never heard of anything like that...
  13. Nyerguds

    Crash research

    Odd. Does the original unpatched game also show this behaviour?
  14. Huh. Someone should ask him about it then.
  15. Those were not clones. They were the biological component of CABAL. CABAL's processing power are human brains. An interesting inspiration for the character of Kane was recently unearthed: Isaac's Asimov's short story "does a bee care?" As I summarised it on the C&C Wiki:
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