Reverse engineering Fallout 2

Oh wow. Great job, Alex!

 

Holy. Fuck.

I have a question now, and everyone who's savvy about the inner workings of the engine are more than welcome to answer: there were leftover functions from Fallout 1 in the engine iteration of Fallout 2 as I read it. I'd assume one of those were the "Ask a Question" features of Fallout 1. What I want to know is, if it's going to be possible to restore those functionality for Fallout 2 engine and not have it crash, through reverse engineering? I'm not asking to have it apply to Fallout 2 in particular, but I'd imagine modders could have another option for if they're going to make another total conversion mods for the game. Imagine being able to "Ask a Question" in Fallout of Nevada, for example...

 

We already restored TMA via script for ettu. It is easy to adapt for vanilla Fo2.

 

Sorry for my ignorance but would this mean that you could create a new engine?

 

Yes! From what Alexander wrote he wants to take a similar approach as the Devilution project which is a reverse-engineered engine of Diablo 1. They also recreated the original engine with all its bugs and limitations. When that was done a new spin-off project called DevilutionX was created which added multiplatform support, widescreen, tons of bug fixes, etc. I haven't been this excited since I found out about Falltergeist. Unfortunately, much like the Falltergeist project, this is a one-man show so if Alexander gets bored we are screwed.

@alexbatalov would you consider writing a follow-up article about your process of disassembling the binary in IDA, conversion to C, and figuring out where the functions belong? I thought the only reason reverse engineering of Diablo 1 was even humanly possible was because of the leaked debug symbols and as far as I can tell there is nothing like that for Fallout 1/2.

 

The official mapper and the mac version has readable debug stuff.

 

Good luck with this endeavor! Hope it will be able to get to completion!
Not newspage worthy btw? @Proletären

 

I basically just read off the article and tried to give a little insight to the "lost" source code

 

Wow amazing work and gives me the tinglies for what can be done with this! Will follow closely!!

 

How to compile sources?

 

1. clone repository https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-ce.git
2. in Visual Studio 2019 click on menu File → Open → CMake...
3. select CMakeLists.txt from the downloaded repository
4. click on menu Build → Build All...

 

I'm writing a letter to the original devs and bethesda/obsidion/microsoft to see if we can't get some version of the source code available.

Would anybody be willing to host and curate the source code if we do get it?

 

Waste of time ... nobody is going to release the code. First, simply because that's not what Bethsoft does, and second, because it was tried before, even with Interplay. It's just not going to happen. There is also the issue of licensed software in it (sound shit etc), which they can't strip out, so that alone will give you a big no.

tl;dr - just don't.

 

Can't hurt to try again. It's not like sending a letter is to much of work.
Good luck QA! May u get an unknown zip file send to you by an unanimous sender (and not being a virus either)

 

Or you risk drawing more attention to fo2-ce and then Bethsoft decides to write a c&d letter.

 

sigh...

When? Who? How? and Where?(link pls)

Not saying it won't happen, just looking for help in case it does...I like planning ahead just a little.