Solved: Energy Screen Project

Energy Screen with 15+ Building Buttons + patchtool; support/discussion/questions

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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by xDx »

Sorry I'm a late bloomer but all I can say is WOW. Great job QD in cracking this years old mystery. I plan on implementing this into my mod of UDM3 to see if it works but as Peter has already tried it in his TOS mod I'm sure it will work in pretty much anything. :wink: Of course this will go into UDM4 as well. I can't offer any help with making new graphics yet (since I am the noob modder here lol) I can only offer a quote from Q "You have my everlasting gratitude."
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by KrazeeXXL »

QuasarDonkey wrote:Do you think anyone would be interested in switching all BotF graphics to 1024x768?
that'd be awesome!!1 But I dunno how it may look afterwards. You might have to do a lot of artwork to make it look good again. But it's definitely worth the shot!
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by Tethys »

Oh My God... QD amazing work here, I havent tested it out, but it definitely looks good from the reviews :mrgreen: Thank you for all the hard work.

One thing I must ask does this rewrite ALL wdfs? I know you mentioned moving them to another part of trek.exe
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by thunderchero »

Hi all,

I played with my wdf files a little and corrected 1 text that was out of place on klingons and also moved everything. :D

I made room for the special and defense text and also set wdf file up so it would place them space 1 row 1, then space 1 row 2 then space 2 row 1 ect instead of row 1 space 1 - 7 then row 2 space 1 - 7.

new_wdf.rar



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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by Flocke »

QuasarDonkey wrote:But regards that data block at 68A000, it's about 78 KB of unused memory (it's filled with floating point data). IDA shows no cross-references to it, and I've zeroed it out and BotF still runs perfectly. I assume it's left-overs from a development feature. It's odd that an entire segment of the Trek.exe is unused. As a side project, I'll extract the data and do some analysis, I'm thinking it might be 3D vertex data. Or maybe it's an easter egg :D
Hmm, could be that they included some precalculated values but never used them. E.g. for sinus and cosinus values often are precalculated in games.

As for the dll sdk, think currently there's no need, but if there is, the most simple way in my opinion is by using a dll wrapper on an already existing dll (just delegating calls to original dll), and during an initial call to the dll, write a single pointer to an unused dataoffset of botf referencing a function pointer array of additional dll functions. Thereafter functions of the dll can easily be called directly from trek.exe. That's an easy thing and if someone needs more info on this I'm happy to help.

Also, now that you found a way to adjust all ui, I think it's a great idea to increase the resolution to mpr max. :D
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by QuasarDonkey »

Tethys wrote:One thing I must ask does this rewrite ALL wdfs? I know you mentioned moving them to another part of trek.exe
No, it's only the 5 WDFs for the energy screen, csenergy.wdf, fsenergy.wdf, hsenergy.wdf, ksenergy.wdf, and rsenergy.wdf. I'll post all the technical details later today. I think I've kept people in the dark for too long.
Flocke wrote:Hmm, could be that they included some precalculated values but never used them. E.g. for sinus and cosinus values often are precalculated in games.
I was thinking that, but I already found a sine/cosine table in Trek.exe. I'm gonna plot the data later to see what it looks like. But the data is not one giant block of floats, it's a whole lot of small blocks, with some numbers, including the block size in bytes. Also I noticed the trek.exe icon is stored at the end of this section. I don't do much Windows programming, but IIRC you can store "resources" in an application, i.e. attach any files you want. Maybe this is the resources section?

On the note of maxing out the MPR resolution, I think we should get another project started for this. I'll post the details later, and maybe I'll try make up one screen. What I'm thinking is to enlarge the screens without upsampling, e.g. for the main galactic screen, we could enlarge the area of the map left and down, but leave the width of the left taskforces pane and the height of the solarsystem map at the bottom alone. That way, the area of the galaxy map would be much larger, and the taskforce list would be longer. It should make playing on large galaxies much nicer. I might just make up a prototype screen to show what I mean.
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by thunderchero »

Just a quick note, earlier we did find enough space by relocating other areas so the unused section does not have to be used.

info at the bottom of this post it would allow 14 14

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2078&p=30767&sid=86 ... 877#p30767

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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by Tethys »

QuasarDonkey wrote:On the note of maxing out the MPR resolution, I think we should get another project started for this. I'll post the details later, and maybe I'll try make up one screen. What I'm thinking is to enlarge the screens without upsampling, e.g. for the main galactic screen, we could enlarge the area of the map left and down, but leave the width of the left taskforces pane and the height of the solarsystem map at the bottom alone. That way, the area of the galaxy map would be much larger, and the taskforce list would be longer. It should make playing on large galaxies much nicer. I might just make up a prototype screen to show what I mean.
Also would make a larger screen for combat, and maybe I can finally do something for combat (UI) that Ive wanted to since I got my hands on the GUI editor in UE ;)
Flocke wrote:Also, now that you found a way to adjust all ui, I think it's a great idea to increase the resolution to mpr max. :D
I will help where I can, but I have much more can't time then I do can time.
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by QuasarDonkey »

Well there's no rush with this. I'm not expecting it to be an overnight thing. I was planning on posting my info, and basically make it an open project where anyone can submit graphics/WDFs.
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by QuasarDonkey »

I just updated the main post with some details on how it works. You'll have to decide if I explained it well tho :?
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by Tethys »

Interesting stuff there especially about the CivConf screen. Wonder what that is for? Sociology tie in?
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by QuasarDonkey »

Tethys wrote:Interesting stuff there especially about the CivConf screen. Wonder what that is for? Sociology tie in?
No, not sociology. Looking at some of the data for that screen, it has words like "PREWARP", "INTERSTELLAR", "INTERGALACTIC", "AUTOMATED" and "ADVANCED".

Looking at the wdfObject descriptors for this screen in Trek.exe,

Code: Select all

<13, 146, 4>
<13, 147, 8>
<13, 148, 0Ch>
<13, 149, 10h>
<13, 150, 14h>
<13, 151, 18h>
<14, 152, 1Ch>
<2, 153, 20h>
<2, 154, 24h>
We see it has two buttons, 6 pictures, and one textbox / label.

My guess is that originally there were separate screens for setting up galaxy size/shape, and the CivConf screen for setting up empire starting techlevels, etc.

Of course, the retail release of BotF is missing the WDF/picture files. I just thought it'd be nice to resurrect the screen for fun, by reconstructing civconf.wdf using images from some of the other screens.
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by Tethys »

Prev discussion about Build Queue moved here: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2219&p=30820&sid=c6 ... 097#p30820
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by QuasarDonkey »

New energy screen patchtool, with GUI!!
This version lets you separately patch Trek.exe and the WDFs, which may be useful.
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Re: Solved: Energy Screen Project

Post by Quintaine »

Hello every one,

i make a new mod for Stbof with 1366 Pix (Basemod is: ECM in 1366 Pix) and have a problem with just used this tool. Unfortunately, I got the following error message when starting the game: "Mss32.dd is not installed." Please reinstall the file. The file is available. In other words, this tool does not work and causes the trek.exe to crash.

I need 14 Energie holder for specails and defence in Energymenu.

how can me help.

Thank you

For German Speaker:

Guten morgen liebe Freunde,

ich habe ein kleines Problem. Wollte mein Mod auf 1366 Pix bringen (als Basis Mod ausgesucht: "ECM 1366 Pixel Mod") und auch wieder neue Gebäude editieren. Dami ich das machen kann, bruache ich 14 Energieslots für Verteidigung und Spezialgebäude. Nachdem ich mit hilfe dieses Tools die betreffenden Dateien bearbeitet hatte, schmiert mir anschließend die trek.exe ab. Der Grund ist das eine Datei: "mss55.dll" nicht existiert und neu installiert werden muss. Was quatsch ist, denn die Datei ist vorhanden. SO wie es aussieht scheint das Tool nicht mehr zu gehen. Kann mir einer helfen?

Danke Leute.
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