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TTDPatch Origin

Posted: 25 May 2005 06:14
by etko
I'm quite new to TTDPatch and OpenTTD. I was playing TT long time ago but thanks to great port (OpenTTD) I'm playing it again :). However I would like to know how TTD Patch and OpenTTD was made.

Especially TTD Patch Microporose doen't seem to release sources, so how the author got all the info needed and more to alter game at run? Was it hexhacked and disassembled or how?

Posted: 25 May 2005 07:22
by SHADOW-XIII
OTTD was created by reverse engineering (rewriting TTD from ASM to C) which is illlegal in some countries (check OTTD section for topics about), personally I dislike OTTD (everyone knows that already)

TTDPatch was a lot more effort and hard work .... it copy TTD executable and edit it's internals, it's written in ASM,

Posted: 25 May 2005 10:25
by orudge
TTDPatch still used disassembly to gather internal information, of course. However, the final patch only modifies certain bytes of the existing routines, rather than providing a modified binary.

Posted: 25 May 2005 11:32
by Darkvater
SHADOW-XIII wrote:OTTD was created by reverse engineering (rewriting TTD from ASM to C) which is illlegal in some countries (check OTTD section for topics about), personally I dislike OTTD (everyone knows that already)

TTDPatch was a lot more effort and hard work .... it copy TTD executable and edit it's internals, it's written in ASM,
You are bullshitting again Shadow, as you do more often when it comes to matters of OpenTTD.

The basis for TTDPatch and OpenTTD are both exactly the same disassembled binary. While TTDPatch took the path of modifying the game during runtime (just like all cheats/maphacks/etc. for current games do; but ofcourse what TTDPatch does is a lot lot more).
OpenTTD took the path of rewriting the whole disassembly into C (translating it in fact). From that point on OpenTTD was born and we've been working on it for the last year to change it into what it is now.

And I absolutely have no idea why TTDPatch was a lot more effort and hard work than OpenTTD. They have both been a tremendous amount of work and you certainly can't say that one was more work than the other because it chose to work in assembly.

Posted: 25 May 2005 19:31
by OBrown
*goes off on a tangent*

Me, I dun get why OTTD is still in the 0.x stage, when it has all the features of TTD and then some. Seems to me, if it works just like TTD, except is written in C and functions in Win2K environments, it should be 1.0, with new features being added and increasing the revision numbers from there. But that's just me.

Posted: 25 May 2005 20:58
by krtaylor
I would guess that the Patch would be more work, because working in assembler is lots harder than writing in C.

I'm kind of disappointed in OTTD, actually. I would have expected that it would have caught up to Patch TTD as far as features, at which point I imagine everybody would have switched over to using it. But it hasn't particularly in the vehicle-sets area.

Posted: 25 May 2005 21:01
by Villem
Well then maybe you can learn how to code C, and become a OTTD acolyte amongst the OTTD devs? :roll:

Posted: 25 May 2005 21:06
by krtaylor
Bah, my time is better spent shepherding the vehicle sets to completion. There are quite a lot of C coders around, really. Not so many Assembler and GRF coders.

Posted: 26 May 2005 11:17
by orudge
krtaylor wrote:I would guess that the Patch would be more work, because working in assembler is lots harder than writing in C.
The initial creation of OpenTTD would have been a lot of work, though... I know it took at least from June 2002 until early 2003 before something fairly playable existed, whereas TTDPatch had the advantage that the game was already there. ;)
krtaylor wrote:I'm kind of disappointed in OTTD, actually. I would have expected that it would have caught up to Patch TTD as far as features, at which point I imagine everybody would have switched over to using it. But it hasn't particularly in the vehicle-sets area.
Don't be so sure about that, HackyKid has recently been working on newgrf and should soon be applying a number of patches that help implement more newgrf features (eg, short wagons, various callbacks, etc), so it's just a matter of time. PBS has also been in existance for some time and should be committed at some point in the near future. :)

Posted: 30 May 2005 15:20
by Geo Ghost
How long ago was TTDpatch made, and who came up with the ideas for it and produced it? thats one thing im curious about :)

Posted: 30 May 2005 15:31
by Mek
Geo.c Ghost wrote:How long ago was TTDpatch made, and who came up with the ideas for it and produced it? thats one thing im curious about :)
Check this usenet post

Posted: 01 Jun 2005 05:53
by Han
and to quote Josef how this patch came to be:
All right, it's this squishy, grey, disgusting thing in my head, and it
appears to be called "brain". I have version #25.7ck, got it somewhere
around 1975 I think. I've been looking for an update but couldn't find one
yet. :-)
:lol: