Hey folks, which files are hardcoded in Empires and how can I get access to these files? Which software do I need? Any ideas?
What do you mean when you say "hardcoded", if you refer to any source code that will not be in your folders.
Hardcoded means that a value is declared within the sourcecode, rather than being changeable within scripts.
This particular mod has much of its code in bin/client.dll and bin/server.dll. To edit those, you need to edit the source code and recompile. It's tedious and requires a certain amount of technical ability. For peasants, certain scripts were used to input parameters to the code. Pretty much everything in the scripts folder gets slurped up by the code. You can change shit in the scripts and not have to recompile any code. It makes it easier to iterate and allows less skilled people to participate (*ahem*). It might make more sense to go play in the scripts folder. That's what I do.
Well any source code will not be in the client files, the files only have the binaries which is the source code compiled into binary code, the source is usually kept by the dev teams because it's potential intellectual property that they wouldn't want to have stolen. If you know how to program you could probably get on the dev team and have access to it, but I get the feeling you don't yet have the adequate skills.
Ah ok, I understand... is it "open source" or do you/they keep it secret for a commercial future? I mean, are there plans to earn money for it in the next year?
LOL, I'm sure any code in there that I had to be embarrassed about has been replaced by embarrassing Mootant code.
Like complete_ said it has Steamworks code that valve doesn't want all over the internet. Also people have made arguments on why Open Source wouldn't be optimal, and it's been argued to death, but that's not mine to argue.
I do suppose for some super basic stuff you could download the 2013 source code from the git hub and try to make rough guess of what's happening. Though I remember hearing a lot of code was actually made up because they didn't know source could do it already, or wasn't capable of doing what they wanted. So unless you really know what you are doing I don't think that would help at all, unless you wanted to make some map entity. You'd have to ask whoever to put it in, but they would also have to make sure it works with whatever empires does.
Oh yeah, I didn't have the internet or access to any reference books when I was writing most of Empires 1.0 (I was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean), and that's one case I remember I couldn't look up how to convert degrees to radians and had to figure it out on my own. There's a lot of shitty code out in the world. Most of the time you can't even fix it because you're told that there's no return on investment for refactoring the code.
That's pretty heartbreaking. I've always wondered how much refactoring actually takes place in a project that has to make money.
Depends on how maintainable it needs to be. If it's a release-and-move-on kinda' product, not much. Long-term it becomes much more important though.
