Photon man template

Some cheat units are also available in the units list (like flying dutchmen), but there is no way to get big daddies in a scenario without hacking into AOE, which is illegal.

There is no way of doing it, but you can get Flying Dutchmans etc into scenarios though. Yes, hacking into AoE is illegal.

Well, by that logic you could say that AoKTS is illegal too, which is the only way we have of getting any beta units. DiGiT actually sent ES an email asking for help, and to see if it was okay by them, of course they never replied, because they don't care. No gaming companies care about games that are this old, so you can do pretty much whatever you want. Hacking the files themselves is "illegal", but if you do it as a way of getting beta objects, nobody really cares, since the result is a perfectly legal SCN/SCX file.

If you guys knew more about the subject, you'd realise it dosen't involve hacking and it isn't illegal. I once managed to get some cheat units in a template (I really do forget how, sorry ) but I had lots of problems.

Check a thread I made in General Discussion about Photon Men, it laid the seeds of how I did it, if anyone wants to try.

If you can actually do that you should try again, with some walkaround the cheat units can be used to great effect, especially the lightning bolt priests. I'll have a look for the topic anyway. I think the photon man template along with all the others are from the beta version, so anything made another way would be a first.

K, you're right about the hacking thing.. ^__^

I've had a look at the topic, though there's not much you can get out of it. Too sad.

There's still my theory though, that you could create cheat units scenarios using .gam files (saves).

Hmmm, I looked at your topics, (mainly "I'll be on holiday ones ). I can't find anything in general. Could either of you point me in the direction of the topic? A name or something?

asldfjladf

what about that aok thingie... any progress therE??
i waaaaaaaaaant new uniiits

You should really just buy Empire Earth. It has an uber scenario editor and two epochs with Cybers. Even if you can have robots etc, you can only use them as fixed force, the game will still be Age of Empires.

Okay thanks for the link LF, I don't know why I couldn't find that topic. It doesn't have any info though anyway, all it says is

Quote:

The photon man template came from a beta version scenario anyway. To make a template you would have to actually make an SCN file and that would require the ability to compress and decompress the files. At the moment we can only decompress them, and we don't know what the unit constant numbers are and we still need a good programmer type to understand the code anyway. Getting the unit constant numbers is really hard and boring work, and you still need to be good at programming and such to be able to do the job. I believe you have to trawl through the .dat file and look for them, but it is all encoded and frankly I wouldn't know what to look for even if it was in a highly non-geek readable form.

As for progress, there hasn't been any so far, so don't get your hopes up.

[This message has been edited by Richard Ames (edited 05-23-2005 @ 05:50 PM).]

I remember clearly getting a lighting bolt priest on a map. It could have been pot luck, but he was there - unfortunately, the scenario crashed on test.

If you remember a month ago when i was asking for how to get cheat units into a game and making computer attack ground, it was for a lightning priest to attack ground hiden in trees creating the lightnig effect

that was also my idea....
yeh... good ol days... i wish there were more hope.
perhaps you still got that scenario?

Well could you maybe explain a little about how you did it? For example, what method did you use to alter the SCX file? How did you know what the unit constants were? That sort of thing. The topic you mentioned doesn't offer any information about how you did it.

Didn't he say he forgot how he did it? :-/

Well, I think it has something to do with the "Empires.dat".
By looking how it easy was for TC.dat to debug units.
Might be the same or similar for AoE.

Well ... lets get som research into it...

i really need the Zug and the laser towers.

You can put mirror towers into a scenario, is that okay for a laser tower?

kinda yes... but the real laser tower is more intersting and i urgently need the zug

I've had a look at empires.dat, I believe that's where the data on what the representation of units and the positions etc is stored. The info is also stored in the scenario files, but it needs to be in dat too so it can recognise it. I don't have the skill to pick out unit constant numbers though.

Edit: The file we're talking about is empires.dat, in the data folder. It's one of the more important data files in AoE. If we can get the info out of it it should be possible to alter scenario files using a program. It's all Vbz!g¨ÃL+­žvЪ­,¯´ºhék rubbish in notepad though. I think it needs to be decompressed somehow, although I don't really know anything about these things. If someone knows a little about it they should try and help.

[This message has been edited by Richard Ames (edited 05-29-2005 @ 02:14 AM).]

empires2.dat
is also just some non-understandable rubbish.
we need to know how the did...

I could get DiGiT to explain it to me but I probably still couldn't help. I think you need a Hex Editor to read it, but a standard one won't show you anything more than notepad.

hmmm...
this is really an impossible task...

I worry what we'll get coming into the granary if people had templates with Bigdaddy and stuff. We'd have an influx of cheating newb campaigns for sure. I'm playing an EE campaign right now (not sure why) called "The Cyborg" where literally everything is written in CAPSLOCK. THE TREES ARE EVEN ON ASPHALT. HOW DO TREES GROW OUT OF ASPHALT?

well it could be nice anyway...
and i wanna first finish my futuristic war campaign then il make a war campaign
using big daddies.