Hex-editing the .exe file to change certain settings?

[BTB]

Curious if there has ever been any investigation into using a hex editor to change some of the hard-coded behavior in the game. A few wishlist items I've had for awhile include:

• Disabling disease from Jungles, either via the same flag as Medicine disabling flood plains disease or simply eliminating disease from Jungles entirely

• Removing (or altering) the effect of railroads on irrigation and/or mines

• Editing the odds of goody hut results per difficulty level

• Remove/edit certain keyboard shortcuts (if I had a dollar for every time I've accidentally hit "E" instead of "R"...)

• Cutting down a jungle/forest should also destroy the resource it contains

 

[Samez]

I am not sure if it is as easy as hex editing. Afaik for the no race patch/ exe some sirious reverse engineering was undertaken regarding the hard coded stuff.
Regarding your first point: are you sure medicine does not already erase the disease from jungle and floodplains as well?
It has been quite a while when I last worked with the editor but iirc you can alter the effect of railroads in the terrain settings regarding resource bonus and the disease stuff should also be adjustable.
For the other points editing the hard code is probably the only way to do it.

 

[Civinator]

Curious if there has ever been any investigation into using a hex editor to change some of the hard-coded behavior in the game. A few wishlist items I've had for awhile include:

• Disabling disease from Jungles, either via the same flag as Medicine disabling flood plains disease or simply eliminating disease from Jungles entirely

• Removing (or altering) the effect of railroads on irrigation and/or mines

• Editing the odds of goody hut results per difficulty level

• Remove/edit certain keyboard shortcuts (if I had a dollar for every time I've accidentally hit "E" instead of "R"...)

• Cutting down a jungle/forest should also destroy the resource it contains

BTB, for C3C a lot of hexediting was done with wonderful results for the Civ 3 community. The most prominent was named by Samez: The No-Raze-patch done by Skyer2, but also the wonderful work done by Antal1987 is based on hexediting. Other very interesting features first done by hexediting, were the deep water harbors by Shay Roberts and landmark-terrain for every kind of terrain used in C3C, the last two now are also available as features of the wonderful Quintillus editor.

About 'disease in the jungle': Both BTB and Samez are correct, each one from his point of view:

BTB only seems to mod Civ 3 vanilla (and here is achieving remarkable success). In Civ 3 Vanilla, disease could happen in jungle and flood plain terrain, but there is no option in the Civ 3 Vanilla editor to disable disease or to adjust the strength for the disease in that terrain.

Very different -and by far better - are the possibilities offered by the standard C3C editor, that are mentioned by Samez. Here you not only can disable disease completely for a kind of terrain, but you also can adjust the strength of the disease attack in that terrain:

Of course nearly nobody tries to hexedit to avoid disease 'in the jungle or flood plain' if it is offered as a normal feature in the C3C editor -with the exception, that he doesn´t use C3C.

I´m not aware of any of the other features mentioned by BTB were fixed by hexediting, but may be an important work, that anybody who is working with hexediting of Civ 3 Vanilla could do for the Civ 3 community, would be to find out what were the working fixes in Civ 3 Vanilla for the submarine bug, comparing this with the settings of C3C and introduce the fixed settings for the submarine bug to C3C.

 

[BTB]

Thankfully, I don't think the underlying structure of Civ 3 (except in certain areas, like corruption mechanics) were so radically changed from vanilla to C3C that information gleamed from hex-editing the latter wouldn't be helpful in figuring out the former.

I'd say of all the things I posted above, the most important one is that last one. It also seems like the lest likely to be doable... but also (hopefully) the one most likely to be of interest to someone to look into.

I do wonder if it would be worth my time and effort to basically hack C3C to resemble vanilla (basically just revert its graphics and interface wholesale to vanilla settings)... or if that would even be doable.