This is what Gothic needs

[Guest]

I was really excited when I heard someone made a multiplayer patch for GTA3 --- because GTA is the kind of game that would ROCK with several players, and also because it proves this type of thing can be done. I was mixing with some people over on the JoWood forum about how a similar patch should be made for Gothic II (preferably by the developers), and for some reason they were fanatically against the idea, like they made the game themselves. I mean, damn. . . you'd thing I was soliciting children for sex.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an appropriate section in which to post this. This one is for the developers of MTA. I'd like to know how you did it, because I'd like to do the same thing for Gothic. Is there some kind of framework in GTA that makes it possible to access and change anything in memory? Or do you have to hack it yourself? Did you get any help from Rockstar Games? If not, you must have done a lot of homework to figure out how all the memory registers are used.

Anyway, I'd love to chat with someone about this. It's important to me. Thanks for your time. Sorry for the off-topic post.

[Cray]

Essentially, we are memory hacking GTA to read and write what we want, when we want to.

It is a lot of work to find the addresses and is a huge project. You have to be extremely dedicated and although it sounds like I am boosting our egos, you have to be fairly knowledgable in programming.

[Guest]

That's what I figured. I understand perfectly the dedication it takes to do such a thing. It seems to me that your biggest problem would be with values in memory that periodically change location --- because they're dynamically allocated, due to different versions of Windows, or simply because the memory controller moves them around. But, since you've got a working mod, I guess you don't have too many problems with that.

I'm a VB programmer --- been doing it for about seven years --- so we're pretty much in the same boat. (I understand you're planning to switch to C++ for speed. You might consider C# instead --- I hear it's a good step up for VB programmers who want more power.) Could you give me some tips on how you access memory used by other applications? I would really appreciate it.

At the moment, I want to spend some time studying Gothic's memory layout, trying to figure out what all the values represent. After that, I'll change them bit by bit, one at a time, and play around with it until I'm comfortable --- and then I'll try to do what you guys did.

By the way, what software did you use to poke into GTA's memory? I've got a couple progs, but neither of them suits my needs. I may need to write my own.