Mission Loading Screen

Copy-Cat and I seem to have located the X and Y coordinates in the game executable.

decimal offset 299457

Little-endian to decimal translations required

32 00 translates as 50
17 02 translates as 535

In other words, the mission loading text is printed at the coordinates 50, 535

What is odd though is those coordinates should be for the top left of the second line...not the first.   The missions look like they can have two lines of text.   The first line should have been 50, 516.   One hack seems to control both lines of text.

Slippery Jim wrote:

What is odd though is those coordinates should be for the top left of the second line...not the first.   The missions look like they can have two lines of text.   The first line should have been 50, 516.   One hack seems to control both lines of text.
 

Huh, no wonder I had no luck finding that, only ever looked for the first line, nice find though.

It is a weird one but it works.

Copy-cat was looking in the code in the cheat engine and noticed a reference for 50 quickly followed by 535. We were also looking for the top line at the time but that set off alarm bells in my head when he mentioned the numbers since I had written down those numbers as possibilities.

I searched for 32 00 00 in the game executable and came across the location that had 17 02 right beside it (it was the only one). Took a wild shot at hacking the .exe there and it worked.

Sometimes working together helps

UPDATE:   Copy-cat's "cave" hack unfortunately has one negative side effect that prevents us from using it.   If you choose 1920x1080 in 3D, as an example, but choose a lower resolution for 2D when you run the game in 3D you get a glitch if you hit the escape key.  The 2D menu opens up in a smaller window over the top of the larger 3D window.

The conclusion is that the area that is hacked does too much.  That area controls almost every image that loads in the game.   If Copy-cat can narrow down a better location for the first jump that leads to the cave code the hack would probably still work.

I went ahead and created patches for all changes affecting the loading screen
so now i can just turn them off and on and change values on the fly.

For some reason the calculations in the exe is creating negative numbers, studying code to be sure.

the code cave doesn't produce the negative numbers its the exe after the code cave that creates them,

gonna break for a bit and get back into it in a few hours

UPDATE: while in fullscreen mode when the loading screen is launched your desktop gets set to 800 x 600, doesn't matter what your settings are in LRM
while in windowed mode when the loading screen is launched your desktop get set to what ever you have your 2d settings to in LRM

Sorry didn't show up to visit. Today turned out to be a gaming day for me.

I will try to get on after supper to see if you are about.

Unfortunately my wife is back to working from home after the holidays and right now her computer is dead from a power surge. Until hers gets fixed she will need to use my computer during the day.

The wife goes into work on Wednesdays so I almost certainly will join Copy-cat on Teamspeak during the day (if he will be around).