Adding kill type

[Karel]

So, I have a creature which doesn't fit in any category and I want to add kill type. Presumably, it's in proto.msg, positions 1450-1468, and offsets 198-19B in critter's .pro.

The important thing - in proto.msg, the game must somehow know where to stop looking for nodes with killtype and start looking for their description.

I started playing by setting killtype in hexeditor to 1469 (31 in Big Endian, Frank Horrigan is 21-> 16+2 = 18, I believe). The mapper stopped showing critter kill type, in game mode, the game didn't add it to kill statistics.

Any suggestions? Is it in fallout2.exe?

 

[Timeslip]

It's not something that can be done trivially, because Fallout is hardcoded to only use 19 kill types and there's a fixed amount of memory reserved for them. Fallout doesn't allocate memory for that sort of thing dynamically, so you can't just edit it to use more memory. I've already tried to add extras by shifting the counters elsewhere in memory, but there's still a few sticking points.

The big one is getting the new kill types to save. A possible workaround would be to modify fallout to only use 2 bytes for each critter, which would double the number of kill type slots available but would cause the counter to roll over at 64000-ish.

I also haven't been able to get fallout to load extra names/description for the new types, presumably because the amount of memory used to store them is also fixed.

 

[Karel]

So it's impossible unless source code is released or somebody spends tremendous amounts of time. Well, let's edit existing proto's

 

[Timeslip]

So it's impossible unless source code is released or somebody spends tremendous amounts of time. Well, let's edit existing proto's

I wouldn't say a 'tremendous' amount of time. In the end, it took 3 hours.

Using sfall 1.16b or newer, change the ExtraKillTypes line in ddraw.ini to 1. You need to add the extra names/descriptions to proto.msg. (Entries from 1450 to 1487 are names and 1488 to 1525 are the descriptions) sfall doesn't modify the mapper, so you'll still have to hex edit the critters.

You only get 38 kill type slots, because I couldn't fit any extras into the save file. (Doubling it again would cause the counters to roll over at 256 kills.)

 

[Karel]

So it's impossible unless source code is released or somebody spends tremendous amounts of time. Well, let's edit existing proto's

I wouldn't say a 'tremendous' amount of time. In the end, it took 3 hours.

Using sfall 1.16b or newer, change the ExtraKillTypes line in ddraw.ini to 1. You need to add the extra names/descriptions to proto.msg. (Entries from 1450 to 1487 are names and 1488 to 1525 are the descriptions) sfall doesn't modify the mapper, so you'll still have to hex edit the critters.

You only get 38 kill type slots, because I couldn't fit any extras into the save file. (Doubling it again would cause the counters to roll over at 256 kills.)

Good job!