Quick Modding/Hacking Answers Thread

I Seem to have put <CMU0010 <RMU <WAI[something] in my code instead of
<CMU0010 <WAI <RMU
once again, bug fixing, the detective show where you are the detective, victim and murderer

 

Three birds, one stone...

Firstly: is there a travel range for entities like Last Cave bats or the green things from the Ballos boss or those wall-ignoring attacks of the doctor, or do they just go on forever?

Secondly: in case of hidden, not-so-obvious stuff, what do the sixteen NPC table flags and the sixteen entity flags do?
(As far as I can tell, the "Invulnerable" entity flag does nothing.)

 

Secondly: in case of hidden, not-so-obvious stuff, what do the sixteen NPC table flags and the sixteen entity flags do?
(As far as I can tell, the "Invulnerable" entity flag does nothing.)

They're both mostly the same thing, really. Difference is however, the ones on the NPC Table affect all entities throughout the game, and the ones in the Entity Map Editor only affect them on an individual basis.

 

Is there a hack that allows you to hurt Balfrog while his mouth is closed?

 

That's oddly specific. I'm sure you can make some simple change to do that, but I'm not aware of any pre-made hack that someone has put together that specifically makes Balfrog vulnerable while his mouth is closed.

 

I am respriting Balfrog, but with the room that I have it just hops constantly towards the right side of the room, until the player is cornered and gets 1-hit killed.

Also, is there a way to change Balfrog so that he only does 1 damage when you touch him?

 

I can't tell you specifically what you'd change, but I might be able to give you some pointers. 0x0079030 is the offset for the Balfrog AI. And the function for doing damage to the player is this, taken from the assembly compendium (except for correcting Noxid's spelling):

push damage
call 00419910 ; this will also hurt your exp, not separate functions.
add esp,4

That's where I would start with trying to figure out how to change that and other properties for Balfrog.

 

Thanks, I guess I just use a different call? I don't know much about ASM.

 

Well not exactly. You'd want to look in the Balfrog AI code and see if you can find it calling that damage function, and change the amount of damage being done (AKA the number that gets pushed onto the stack before it calls the function) to 1. Some amount of knowledge of how to use Ollydbg will be needed to do this.

 

Well not exactly. You'd want to look in the Balfrog AI code and see if you can find it calling that damage function, and change the amount of damage being done (AKA the number that gets pushed onto the stack before it calls the function) to 1. Some amount of knowledge of how to use Ollydbg will be needed to do this.

I've only used OllyDbg to change framerects, so I do have good experience with it.

 

(I'm on mobile so hopefully this is worded right and helps)

2 problems:
1st problem: It wouldn't be the damage function actually. NPCs don't continually check player collision and then run that function from what I've seen. Instead it just has a variable of how much damage should be dealt on contact (this is in the NPC table, so ALL npcs have one). There's seperate generalized functions that check collisions for the NPCs and will calculate that etc.
This variable is expressed as "E?X+A4" in the NPC's code. You'd be changing the constant in an instruction that goes something like

MOV DWORD --?-- [E?X+A4],###

where ### is the damage.

2nd Problem: Balfrog (as is most mapbosses) is actually composed of seperate sub-entities with different hitboxes. iirc there's two that both deal damage.
You can find the offsets towards the end of this sheet. (This link is also pinned in CSMC's #resources.)
Looks like Balfrog has 3 entities (one of them being the main one that Hayden gave you the offset for). And your gonna change any E?X+A4 constants you happen to find like I mentioned earlier. That should do it!

 

Some maps have no background in-game, despite the map properties being set.
(And in one case, at least one map that did have a background in-game, suddenly stopped having it.)

Is there any way to fix this, and if so, how?

 

Some maps have no background in-game, despite the map properties being set.
(And in one case, at least one map that did have a background in-game, suddenly stopped having it.)

Is there any way to fix this, and if so, how?

Depends on these two factors.
1. Is the background type set to "Hide"?
2. Are you using Cave Editor and are making maps past room 94?

 

Only three maps using the Water Level entity are set to "3 - hide". (Though the water doesn't show up on one map, despite showing up on the other.)

Yeah, I'm using CE (with maps numbered to 099).
I'd use Booster's Lab 0.4.5.0 but I can't place entities in that (I'm guessing that's an issue on my end that can't currently be fixed, due to circumstances) so... kinda stuck with CE here. :/

 

In v450 and above, you need to press the "i" key, cuz double clicking really resulted in quite the number of bugs. I do suggest using BL v500 since that's the most stable version (and v511 really has some issues that have been reported to Noxid and Leo and not a single fix was made).

 

I'd use Booster's Lab 0.4.5.0 but I can't place entities in that (I'm guessing that's an issue on my end that can't currently be fixed, due to circumstances) so... kinda stuck with CE here. :/

Try either doubleclick lmb or the i key.