Master of Orion 1 unofficial patch

[Zeraan]

Ah, I see. As a programmer, I'm curious on how it works But unfortunately my reverse-engineering skills are nil

[Guiness]

Wow, I can't believe this exists. I picked up this game recently, after not having played it for...over a decade, I guess. My kids are older, imaginative, and interested in games that are more than eye candy. Moo 1 immediately came to mind. I reved it up, played a few games and am loving it - although I was quickly reminded of the AI 'stop colonizing' bug. Never knew what caused it...

Thank you Kyrub and others who put the work into this. Much appreciated.

one question - should the version level be displayed on the startup screen? I'm still seeing v1.3

[kyrub]

Thanks for appreciation!
"1.3" is a part of graphic files. I am too lazy and inept to deal with graphics so I left it there. If you want to contribute, you may try to unpack LBX file, change graphics, and repack it back. Not easy, but possible from what I heard.

You should know that the MoO patch is not finished by any measure. I have vast plans to
a) improve the MoO AI of the original
b) and to make a mod that will give the AI and the player similar chances and add some new flavor to the game

This may happen anywhere in time (including eternity), so let's stay patient.

[Guiness]

Sure, I wouldn't mind taking a look at that. Too bad it's in a graphics file and not something read from the executable. Makes it possible to have a new .lbx and the old starmap.exe, but still see "1.4" on the screen.

Any direction wrt parsing the .lbx files? Going to start with google otherwise.

btw tried a game last night, small/5 player/average. Yes, this patch makes a difference - almost too much, the human AI must've been given his 'free' CS quickly, because he hit 4 planets before I started building my first CS.

[Zeraan]

Thanks for appreciation!
If you want to contribute, you may try to unpack LBX file, change graphics, and repack it back. Not easy, but possible from what I heard.

Do you by any chance know the .LBX's file format? Or are there sites that reveal it? I could write a program that allows you to modify the .LBX files, if the format and encoding are known.

[Guiness]

I've been looking around, and found some good information.

The first link explains the format, and has a program (source code included) to do some extraction. The second link is a general discussion of the contents. Both of these refer to MOO2, but it seems Moo, Moo2 and MoM all use the same format.

http://owenja.dyndns.org/prog/orion2/lbx/

http://www.spheriumnorth.com/orion-forum....php?t=214

[Zeraan]

I've been looking around, and found some good information.

The first link explains the format, and has a program (source code included) to do some extraction. The second link is a general discussion of the contents. Both of these refer to MOO2, but it seems Moo, Moo2 and MoM all use the same format.

http://owenja.dyndns.org/prog/orion2/lbx/

http://www.spheriumnorth.com/orion-forum....php?t=214

Good info! I will research and let you guys know how it goes.

[kyrub]

Zeraan, if you can write a program that repacks something into a LBX file, that would be awesome. If I understand correctly, such a utility does not exist, does it?

[Zeraan]

Zeraan, if you can write a program that repacks something into a LBX file, that would be awesome. If I understand correctly, such a utility does not exist, does it?

From what I know, that's correct. Since the site have source code for extracting files, I will try and see if I can convert the extracted files as outputted by that utility into bitmap format. If that is successful, then it's just a matter of reversing the process, from bitmap into LBX.

I suspect that image files will have to be of the same size and color format, so for example, if an image is 30x30 pixels, and is restricted to 256 colors, it can't be of any other color format or size.

The thing is, the files in LBX can be of any file format (strings, sounds, images, etc), and it don't really contain data on what kind of file, just how big the files are. So I will need to add a "preview" section so you can try and load a file, and see if it's an actual image file.

Another problem is that it don't define dimensions of an image file, so I'll have to add some controls where you can try and get the right image dimensions (for example if 30x30 pixels with 256 color, it's 900 bytes, so range of possible dimensions range from 1x900, 2x450, etc... to 30x30)

What is MoO 1's native resolution? 320x240 or 320x200? So I'll set a preview of that maximum size because obviously images can't be wider or taller than those dimensions.

[Guiness]

I'll keep looking - there must be some existing utilities to re-pack the .lbx files, because the MOO2 community did a lot of modding. You'd have to repack them for that.