The [FGS] Clan

Only the pole is needed and would shove it somewhere else!!

LMAO.

He might lighten up if he got laid. Even if it is a Santa dong!

The only present Darko will get this year

Cozmo wrote:Modders are not to blame. That's insane. Pretty much all of our problems come with the engine, and cannot be fixed with uscript. I doubt anyone who's ever played DXMP is capable of modifying the engine, which afaik is totally illegal and would still need distributing, enforcing etc etc.

I've always kept my technical skills on the down-low (apart from one long conversation with Alex) but I'm skilled at reverse engineering and writing x86 assembly. I've created a small army of software cracks and mods for personal use.

I'm actually one of the most technically talented people to ever play DX. BSc in CS (specialism in logic gates, boolean algebra etc.), MEng in machine learning and statistical networking and PhD in computational neuroscience.

I just don't like boasting and it's never come up before.. Besides, I'm not in a position to help out, unfortunately. I'm seriously ill.

Self-praise stinks

~][FGS][Nobody~ wrote:Self-praise stinks

It does indeed.

I wish I'd gotten involved with the modding side of things years ago when I would've been well up for the challenge of modding the engine. Unfortunately, I never got involved with modding DX at all. Never even learnt UScript. Although I'd assume that having a lot of experience with C++, C, Java, C#, VB.NET, PHP, Perl, Python, JS, Haskell and x86/64/MIPS ASM would make it rather trivial.

I can't guarantee I would've made any progress. I don't know if there's any attempt at obfuscation on the engine binaries, for example, but I would've had a damn good go at it. I'm used to simple string table hiding, unpacking functions and timing traps because I've reverse engineered a lot of software that was clearly very much not supposed to be reverse engineered but I couldn't do much with modern-day gaming DRM -- neither, it seems, can some of the world's best crackers.

Edit: *love* it. For old time's sake, I'm gonna fire up IDA and see what some of libraries look like.

I guess there is unwritten part in your post that hints at what I am going to say next: our community has seen lot of talented people of many fields, some of them grown up into those talented people, perhaps some even motivated by the game. But, there is a but.

In the end of the day, results matter. Results provided by any member of the community have been spectacularly poor, aside very few exceptions. We've had countless modders learning the trade for the fun of it, and perhaps you are more prepared and learned than most of them, it certainly seems so, but, it will still leave that but. And in the end of the game, that but matters.

synthetic wrote:I guess there is unwritten part in your post that hints at what I am going to say next: our community has seen lot of talented people of many fields, some of them grown up into those talented people, perhaps some even motivated by the game. But, there is a but.

In the end of the day, results matter. Results provided by any member of the community have been spectacularly poor, aside very few exceptions. We've had countless modders learning the trade for the fun of it, and perhaps you are more prepared and learned than most of them, it certainly seems so, but, it will still leave that but. And in the end of the game, that but matters.

Yeah, very true. The thing that would have worked in my favour is that I have a long history of finishing what I start. Once I seriously commit to a project, it gets done 9 times out of 10.

But I can't seriously commit to anything anymore. My health is too poor and unpredictable. So I have no real intention of trying to patch the engine.

It was just a dream really: something I'd really like to have taken on if I was feeling 100% and had the time. Disassembly projects are always some of the most intellectually challenging and I'd need to be in a different place to take on another (unless it was a simple [c]jmp->nop hex patch or something). DX would've been a hell of a challenge.