A brief history news

Hello, and welcome to my new ModDB page! It was high time for this patch project to get some more exposure, and ModDB is a really nice way of doing so. For those who are unfamiliar with this patch, I'll give a brief history...

With the release of The First Decade pack, a lot more people started playing the first Command & Conquer game again, which brought to light a few serious game-breaking crashes. Some brave hackers took it upon themselves to fix those, by editing the game exe file. From this, VK released his unofficial 1.05 patch for the game, which fixed a crash that happened when units with a lot of sight range came too close to the top or bottom edge of a large map. Meanwhile, another brave bytebiter called Komfr had developed another crucial fix, for a crash related to the stealth tank cloak effect. Somehow, Komfr and I ended up discussing the possibility of high resolution in the game, which led to the development of a rudimentary high-resolution patch.

At that time, I had no idea how this hacking stuff was actually done, but I was collecting fixes for The First Decade. So I took my hex editor and combined the exe edits made by both people, and added Scorpio9a's unofficial thipx32.dll fix that re-enabled the game's defunct LAN play. I released this as full fix pack for C&C95, and also released a small program that did the edits needed to enable the high resolution.

Later, through my discussions with CCHyper and pd, I finally found out how the changing of exe files actually worked. This eventually led me to modify the high-res hack to become an optional setting in the game's configuration file. And very soon, I started fixing more bugs, not only in the exe, but also in the missions, the graphics, the strings files and the sounds, and the small high-res patch grew into a complete game update for all language versions of the game.

Now, three years later, the patching is still going on, with an increasing focus on mission, mod, language and multiplayer support. The current patch already has support for 6-player multiplayer games, addon campaigns up to 15 missions, user-made language packs, and a mod launching system that allows you to have several mods installed without any of them affecting the game unless they're actually loaded.

I am planning to make this game nearly as moddable as Tiberian Sun, with all unit stats in ini files, fully customizable for the users. The current version, 1.06c, already contains the proof-of-concept of that system; it reads all of its music settings from an ini file.

Note that C&C1's base building AI is dumb to non-existent, so no matter how many requests I get for a skirmish AI that builds bases, it simply CAN'T BE DONE. If you have a problem with that... deal.

The current version of the mod is not yet available on ModDB, but (edit: is available now) can be downloaded from the project website. Note that at this moment, the patch consists of two parts; you should first install the full patch, and then add the exe file from the hotfix download. This will all be fixed once 1.06c revision 2 rolls in though. (edit: if you're still reading this now, this part is quite irrelevant since we passed revision 2 quite some time ago)