BW1 & CI Tool Requests

[Moron]

I'm a programmer (Primarily C#) who likes messing around with and trying to reverse engineer games (Mostly file formats, hex editing, and snooping around in the memory, I'm no good with a disassembler yet), and just in the past couple weeks or so decided to turn my attention to Black & White. Been messing around with various things, picked up a copy of the the B&W Platinum Pack for Mac (i.e.: the version with the scripts), both prima guides just on the off chance they mention something worth looking into, and a p5 glove (lol). Just started on a comprehensive registry tool for B&W since there doesn't seem to be one, and started up a wiki for whatever technical information I can find out myself or scrounge up from other sources, both of which I'll release once I get them to a useful state.

Just posting this to take requests. If there are tools you'd like made, parts of the game you'd like investigated, or any some such things, reply to this thread and let me know. I work full time so progress will probably be slow going, but I'd like to try and breathe some more life into the B&W community.

 

[Matt]

So the fun thing about the registry in Black & White - is how most of the options are actually used. The game reads the registry values but never applies them to any global variables.
And good pickup of the B&W Platinum Pack for Mac, if you have IDA the executable contains symbols which makes reverse engineering 1000x easier then the Windows version.

You can find a lot of reverse-engineering work here for both BW1 and BW2: https://github.com/openblack (a lot of the LHVM work from BW2 can be translated over to BW1 as it's the same file format).

You can also join the Discord if you want to talk to me (I know pretty much all the file formats the game has): https://discord.gg/u4q7fS

 

[Moron]

I've noticed that myself in the past, that a lot of the registry options didn't seem to do anything. I've also noticed that it looks like there are a quite a few hidden registry options, but I haven't tried too hard to track them down yet. Right now I'm mostly just trying to fill in gaps in the tools that are available, and a registry tool is an easy one. Going to make it load all its definitions for the registry values from plaintext or xml files, and support descriptions as well as optional clamping on the values to keep them in "safe" ranges. So ideally the last tool anyone ever needs for the registry.

Don't have IDA, since I never really need a disassembler for file formats, which is what I normally focus on. So as such I'm pretty bad with a disassembler. I mostly snoop around in the memory with Cheatengine and refer to its disassembler every once in a while. Might have to remedy that though, with how complex B&W is. Any luck enabling any developer tools such as debug or the logger? The exe is absolutely lousy with strings related to debugging.

Also, can you send me another discord invite? The one you posted expired.

 

[Matt]

Logging is easy enough to enable, I have a ddraw.dll proxy that opens up some developer options of the game I could give you via Discord.

Try this: https://discord.gg/scCqFFc