Keen: Modding

thehackercat · Joined: 26 Sep 2009 Posts: 69 Location: Mississippi, USA

I would like to make the Korath perform the Ampton behaviors. Climbing poles, pushing Keen, and so forth. However, it would require two extra sprite frames. I believe the last two frames of the marshmallow point item could be used.

However, I want to use THOSE frames, not the one for my Ampton replacement.

levellass · Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2010 3:59 am Post subject:

Right. The main problem we have here is that of space. You see, when a sprite acts like something, hard-coded in are other sprite actions. Thus it's easy enough to make a Korath start out acting like an Ampton, but the Ampton's behavior quickly takes over and it ends up behaving exactly like an Ampton, death, interactions with Keen, everything.

The way around this is to copy the entire Ampton behavior to another place in the EXE and subtly change it so that the Korath can use this second behavior but still remain a separate, individual sprite. I am not sure the executable has enough space for this, but I shall check and see.

thehackercat · Joined: 26 Sep 2009 Posts: 69 Location: Mississippi, USA

Any way this can be done with an external file? (well, maybe one the size of the EXE, plus a little bigger, with a memory address at the end that stores Ampton behavior)?

I don't know whether that's practical, or even possible. It might be a Lemm question.

levellass · Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2010 5:05 am Post subject:

It might well be.

In theory we can just tack the ampton behavior onto the end of the executable, but I'm not sure that the CALL_FAR thing works like that past the text segment. (Near the end of the executable.) I'm hoping to place it into the space taken by the F10+M cheat, but any Lemmnation would not go amiss!

XkyRauh · Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2010 1:58 am Post subject:

Speaking of finding space, how much room does the F10+T "Sprite Test" stuff take up? :) As cool as it is to be able to peruse the sprites, (particularly in a mod's case, where you admire the new art,) foregoing the in-game viewer for additional effects would be preferential... we can always extract the sprites and check 'em on our own. ;)

levellass · Posted: Sun Aug 01, 2010 11:46 am Post subject:

Actually, it takes up far less than F10+M (About 1/3 the space.) because it's rather simple, get a sprite chunk from memory and display it. F10+M has to pick through everything and is the largest F10 cheat in terms of using space.

thehackercat · Joined: 26 Sep 2009 Posts: 69 Location: Mississippi, USA

Well, the movement/items cheat are the most widely used, IMKO. P'raps the others could go.

As for the F10+T cheat, why couldn't we just host a bunch o' mod graphics somewhere? The TUIT mods would be good candidates, as well as KeenX, Yorphius, Retrosis, Zoltan, so on.