Reverse engineering Fallout 2

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.
 
Goat_Boy said:
Sorry for my ignorance but would this mean that you could create a new engine?
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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.
 
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)
 
Lexx said:
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.
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I felt bad because this was what I was gonna say but you are top modder that posts on Discord so it is ok. Don't waste your time.
 
Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that I've released Community Edition v1.0.0 which is available for all major platforms - Windows, Linux, and macOS. In case we didn't break up things while porting to x64, vanilla game works from top to bottom. Up next is integrating Sfall and making sure it's compatible with RP, Nevada, and Sonora.

https://github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-ce
 
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