How am I supposed to edit arcanum.exe? (lvl cap hack)

Discussion in 'Modding and Scripting Support' started by Dragoon, Feb 17, 2002.

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  1. Dragoon

    Dragoon New Member

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    I want to use the level cap hack. I know I can simply download the hacked file but it really annoys me that I cannot do dumb step by step HEX editing myself. My problem is that I constantly get "string not found" messages and I can't quite make out which is which in Duncanns recipe. Could anyone explain it to me as basically as possible, please?

    I tried using HexEdit and UltraEdit-32.

    Here's what I think Duncanns recipe is about:

    "// allocate space for the experience tab"
    "// fill the experience tab"
    and so on are like step 1)"// allocate space for the experience tab", step 2) "// fill the experience tab"...
    Underneath each step are numbers and letters, like in step one it looks as follows:
    // allocate space for the experience tab
    56 PUSH ESI
    57 PUSH EDI
    6A04 PUSH 04
    6A33 PUSH 33 // change to 6a7F
    Now 6A04 and 6A33 look like HEX string, I'm unsure about 56 and 57 but they're probably HEX too. I just have no idea what does this "PUSH ESI", "PUSH EDI" and other "pushes" mean. Are they ASCII code? If so then what's the order? I mean is it like 6A04 is HEX, then PUSH is ASCII but then 04 would be HEX again? I just dont know what I'm supposed to look for. BTW I tried to seach for sole "EDI" or "ESI" in ASCII and got no result.

    EDIT - Oh yeah I forgot to present whole Duncann's recipe for level hack. So here it is:

    USAGE
    -----
    Search arcanum.exe for the following patterns. Make the changes as indicated (the
    examples change the Level Cap to 127 [in hex 7F, you will notice below]).
    Make sure your xp_level.mes contains experience level information for the new
    levels! Look at http://www.terra-arcanum.com for how to extract this file from
    arcanum3.dat and what to do with it.

    I don't know what this does to multiplayer games. EMail me if something is missing
    from the patch, e.g. you get no experience in some cases or the game will not
    let you level up.

    // allocate space for the experience tab
    56 PUSH ESI
    57 PUSH EDI
    6A04 PUSH 04
    6A33 PUSH 33 // change to 6a7F

    // fill the experience tab
    8BF7 MOV ESI,EDI
    83FE33 CMP ESI,33 // change to 83fe7F

    // update the experience counter of the character sheet
    83C40C ADD ESP,0C
    83F833 CMP EAX,33 // change to 83f87F

    // update the experience bar (I never recognized it, however Greenleaf the summoner did)
    8BF0 MOV ESI,EAX
    83C40C ADD ESP,0C
    83FE33 CMP ESI,33 // change to 83FE7F

    // give levels up to a certain limit
    64 00 00 00 33(change to 7F) 00 00 00-00 94 35 77 E8 03 00 00 d...2.....5w....

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    <font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Dragoon on 2002-02-17 09:48 ]</font>
     
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