posted 10 May 2018 07:59 PM EDT (US)
I wanted to interview WarriorMario, the man behind a recent breakthrough which has been the subject of attention in the recent weeks. And then i figured, the heck with it, I've already got the interview, why not just make him Member of the Month? So without further ado, here is your Member of the Month, WarriorMario.
First off, share with us who the present community knows you as.
I think most of the community knows me from either Age of Mythology: The Natives or Age of Mythology: Tale of the Dragon but recently I’m more that guy you ask if something is possible or not in AoM Modding.
What interests or hobbies have you had growing up?
I used to play a lot of video games such as Roller Coaster Tycoon, Age of Empires II and Age of Mythology. All these games were not in my native language so I did not really understand them until I got older and learned to understand English better. Nonetheless I loved the trial and error aspect of it. I also started modding Age of Mythology when I was just 9 years old which basically also was a lot of trial and error.
And what is your native language? How did you get to learn English so well?
Thanks! My native tongue is Dutch. In the Netherlands there was a new thing called bilingual education which basically meant that some subjects were taught in English and the subject English was taught at what they called ‘native speaker’ level. As a kid that could barely speak a few English words it was a nice surprise. No one said it would be easy... Looking back at those days I am grateful that I was pushed to do it as it was one of the few actually useful things that I learned there. (I could probably rant a few pages about our education system.)
What kinds of things, academic or recreational, are you up to these days?
I am currently a game development student and have been working for Forgotten Empires on Age of Mythology: Tale of the Dragon and Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, which is basically my childhood dream - becoming an Age of Empires developer. In my free time I play the guitar and the piano and give piano classes to children. I also take Salsa dancing classes, organize board game nights basically every week and if I still have time left I work on personal programming projects.
How long have you been playing these instruments, and do you have a preferred one? How about a favorite board game?
I learned how to play piano when I was 4 years old but then I got a series of lousy teachers and I quit until I started teaching it myself when I was 14. I found a great teacher when I was 17 and am still his student. So I have been playing piano for roughly 8 years now. The guitar I picked up 3 years ago and I haven’t found a teacher for it but I’m also not really searching for it. I prefer the piano but the guitar is easier to pick up and play.
As for my favorite board game it is either Catan or Risk.
When you just started exploring modding, what kind of things did you do when playing around with the files?
Mostly data changes to the protox and combining mods as I wanted more than one mod at a time. I did not understand XML at all so I tried to copy some random chunks until I found something that worked. This still was not how XMLs worked but it did not break the XML pattern so it worked. I think only during the beginning of the development of The Natives I actually learned what the XML syntax actually was.
It seems you've been working on a project involving modding and coding for some time, and have gotten quite far with development. For those who of us who aren't as astute in this avenue, what exactly is it and why is it so significant?
So a while back I started on the project: Age of Mythology: Reverse Engineered which is about reverse engineering the AoM executable. This basically means that I am now attempting to understand the compiled code in the executable and try to map it back to C++(which is the language in which AoM was programmed).
The goal of this project was for me to learn assembly programming and to be able to add new cultures and civilizations to the game which is something that previously was not possible for modders.
For fun, can you give us a sample code and tell us what it does?
Sure, I was just working on something fun in C++ to improve my prototyping speed with something very basic.
#include "MagicType.h"// Here we include a file that I made to use the dark magic
int main()// Our entry point of the program, if we return from this function we exit the program
{
// We load our integer variable with the name “Hello” and store it in a variable
int storing_int = MagicInt( "Hello" );
return storing_int + 10;// We return the variable after adding a hardcoded value of 10 to it.
}
What this allows me is to basically generate configuration files like AoM as if they were hardcoded values in code. This is very useful in short projects where I want to be able to tweak/let designers tweak variables but don’t want to setup a system to be able to do this.
Sounds simple right? Well, you’d be wrong as this is C++ at its best/worst haha.
For the people that have a little bit of understanding of dark magic in C++ this is a compile time hashing of a string literal combined with some template meta programming to generate a static variable which can be initialized by a variable read from a file on program initialization.
A few years back we were introduced to an intriguing project from you called The Natives, a unique civilisation conceived entirely by you. Was it ever your goal to implement this new civ by method of this program? And is it still?
Eventually yeah, but I’m focusing more on what things would be useful for the community which would be adding new features to AoM:RE.
Features like what?
Things that could improve the observer mode like AoE:EE has and some extra controls in the editor like a simple way to change the position, scale and orientation of a unit. There is quite a bit that I have access to right now but there is still a lot that I have to uncover. I have not yet figured out things about actions of units so it will take a while before new actions or abilities would be a thing.
Thanks for your time, and congratulations on this. I hope we get to see plenty of new and exciting abilities with this incredible tool.
No problem, there will be some for sure.
Congratulations!
As for my favorite board game it is either Catan or Risk.
The goal of this project was for me to learn assembly programming and to be able to add new cultures and civilizations to the game which is something that previously was not possible for modders.
#include "MagicType.h"// Here we include a file that I made to use the dark magic
int main()// Our entry point of the program, if we return from this function we exit the program
{
// We load our integer variable with the name “Hello” and store it in a variable
int storing_int = MagicInt( "Hello" );
return storing_int + 10;// We return the variable after adding a hardcoded value of 10 to it.
}
What this allows me is to basically generate configuration files like AoM as if they were hardcoded values in code. This is very useful in short projects where I want to be able to tweak/let designers tweak variables but don’t want to setup a system to be able to do this.
Sounds simple right? Well, you’d be wrong as this is C++ at its best/worst haha.
For the people that have a little bit of understanding of dark magic in C++ this is a compile time hashing of a string literal combined with some template meta programming to generate a static variable which can be initialized by a variable read from a file on program initialization.
[This message has been edited by TAG (edited 06-08-2018 @ 04:07 PM).]
