Anyone interested in Total Annihilation multiplayer?
Posted: 2006-03-29 04:20am
If so, I've released another version of my rewrite of the Total Annihilation demo recorder, Linky. The biggest difference over the 0.99b2 version from the Swedish Yankspankers is the new ShareLOS code which allows automatic targetting of object's in your Allies' LOS. As well as multiple AI in multiplayer.
I've still got a few things planned todo, like allowing AI players to share LOS, radar & stuff.
For those coders & technical people around here, the TADR component is a DirectPlay3 proxy class which is does low-level analysis of the packet stream. It breaks each packet up into the individual network messages and does stuff depending on what is happening in the game. In addition, it implements several code injections which alter how the game works. Things like the ShareLOS code require code injection in at least 10 locations or so.
The DirectPlay proxy class is written in Delphi (pascal-based language) and is ~18000 lines of code.
There is also a DirectDraw proxy class which implements the GUI extensions and is written in C++. The 2 components communicate via a shared memory mapped chuck of memory. This contains a bug which causes TA to crash when you alt-tab back into TA on some systems.
Currently I've been working on the DirectPlay proxy + gameplay improvements part and at some stage plan to move onto improving the DirectDraw part.
Working on the gameplay extensions requires an indepth knowledge of x86 asm, since the Relevant sections of the TA exe must be reverse engineered to understand what is happening. Then custom x86 asm code injections written to implement the new functionaility. The DirectPlay proxy requires fairly advanced programming knowladge as there are some hard preformance requirements on the code. I'm rewriting the existing packet handling code for better preformance, but the large scale changes are hard to implement without breaking stuff.
I've still got a few things planned todo, like allowing AI players to share LOS, radar & stuff.
For those coders & technical people around here, the TADR component is a DirectPlay3 proxy class which is does low-level analysis of the packet stream. It breaks each packet up into the individual network messages and does stuff depending on what is happening in the game. In addition, it implements several code injections which alter how the game works. Things like the ShareLOS code require code injection in at least 10 locations or so.
The DirectPlay proxy class is written in Delphi (pascal-based language) and is ~18000 lines of code.
There is also a DirectDraw proxy class which implements the GUI extensions and is written in C++. The 2 components communicate via a shared memory mapped chuck of memory. This contains a bug which causes TA to crash when you alt-tab back into TA on some systems.
Currently I've been working on the DirectPlay proxy + gameplay improvements part and at some stage plan to move onto improving the DirectDraw part.
Working on the gameplay extensions requires an indepth knowledge of x86 asm, since the Relevant sections of the TA exe must be reverse engineered to understand what is happening. Then custom x86 asm code injections written to implement the new functionaility. The DirectPlay proxy requires fairly advanced programming knowladge as there are some hard preformance requirements on the code. I'm rewriting the existing packet handling code for better preformance, but the large scale changes are hard to implement without breaking stuff.