June 10, 2021

Reverse Engineering Earth 2150, Part 6: Texture Files

So you know all those things I said I was going to do next? I didn’t. I decided to take a look at texture files instead. I know others have already reverse-engineered this format, so this was purely for my own enjoyment. Deliberately not looking at anyone else’s work, I started with a clean slate, which meant extracting a TEX file and looking at it in my hex editor. I decided to go with the compass texture because there are several known things about it.

June 9, 2021

Some Thoughts on Modding Communities

In the community that surrounds modding any game, there are generally three kinds of people: players, modders, and toolmakers. It is possible to be more than one of these. Players play the game, they have preferred sets of mods they use, and are usually the majority. Modders make the mods, applying a new creative vision to the game. The changes can be tiny or they can completely remake the game, or anything in between.

June 8, 2021

Reverse Engineering Earth 2150, Part 5: PAR Compiler

As of this evening, I now have a working PAR file compiler as well as a decompiler. Source files in the usual place. Most of the work up to this point has been learning about the file structure. The same knowledge that lets me decompile the file will let me recompile it from the generated sources, so I was able to turn out the first prototype compiler in an evening.

June 7, 2021

Reverse Engineering Earth 2150, Part 4: PAR Decompiler

This is what it’s all been building towards. I now have a script that reads off the contents of a PAR file and dumps all the data to a series of CSV files. You can find it over on my git repo if you’re interested, as I know a few people have been. Special thanks to Alexander O., CYDI-TST, Guardian, __jmp32, Noctis, and Skeltek, variously from the InsideEARTH and United Lunar Dynasty discords, for their help in figuring out the last few details, especially to __jmp32 and Skeltek for showing me where to find the source file so I could get the field names.

June 6, 2021

Reverse Engineering Earth 2150, Part 3: Vehicle Data

After talking to the Earth 2150 community a bit more, I hit the proverbial jackpot. I was able to get hold of the source file the PAR file was compiled from. It has the names of all of the fields, and they match the order of those in the PAR file. That means I have a lot more information than I did last time. So far, I’ve adequately worked out meanings for types 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7.

June 5, 2021

Reverse Engineering Earth 2150, Part 2: Data Types

Since writing my last entry on reverse engineering Earth 2150, I’ve been in touch with the small community that still plays the game online. They don’t have any deep insights into the PAR file format, but they were able to point me at the SDK documentation. That doesn’t describe the format, but it does list various attributes that objects have for use in AI scripts, so I’ve got a bit more information to go on.

June 1, 2021

Reverse Engineering Earth 2150, Part 1: File Structure

I’ve been playing an old game called Earth 2150 recently. It’s an RTS from around 2000 or so, and was one of the first full-3D entries in the genre. Over the weekend, I decided that instead of playing it, I’d try to reverse-engineer its data files. I made a surprising amount of progress. This post is extremely technical, particularly the later sections where I’m working out what each thing does, and probably isn’t of much interest to anyone but me, but writing all this down helps me think.

April 25, 2021

The Starship Game — Rules

The setting and ideas of the Starship Game are system-independent, and can likely be adapted to most TTRPG systems. As I’m personally a fan of Fate Accelerated, my thoughts on how the game might be played in that system are presented here. The rules for Fate Accelerated can be found at fate-srd.com and are freely available. Character Creation Reference: Who Do You Want To Be?, Fate Accelerated SRD The basic process of defining a character through aspects and approaches is largely unchanged.

April 9, 2021

The Starship Game — Being a Starship

So you've read a little about the Commonwealth, and now you're wondering: what does being a Starship actually mean? As noted previously, the centre of your being is your Intelligence Core, but what this actually is depends on which culture gave you form. Machine Intelligence Intelligence Cores built from human-derived technology are AIs in the truest sense. Terran and Querral Starships are driven by a powerful quantum computer, granted the gift of sapience by the power of mathematics.

April 8, 2021

The Starship Game — Setting

A Note From the Admiral Welcome to the 3rd Fleet. You are reading this either because you have been assigned here for your current tour with the Commonwealth Navy, or have been seconded to us as an auxiliary. In either case, we are proud to have you with us. The 3rd Fleet is the youngest and the smallest division of the Navy. Some think that places us in a lesser position, but those people are mistaken.