Breaking Videogames

For those who can't play a video game without dissecting it

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I didn’t quite mean to, but I extended the traditional summer hiatus by a month. On the bright side, I am finally for-real finalizing the Big Disgaea Post. There was one more item to settle: I tested a couple of claims I speculatively made, and looks like they’re correct. I’ve sent out a couple of preliminary drafts, and got some feedback I want to incorporate. Then it’s ready to send off. I will publish a version here, though if it does get accepted, I’ll wait until it’s published where I sent it.

Here are a couple of disconnected factoids:

Graphics data for an item seems to be resolved when you equip it, even if it’s not drawn yet. I’d have assumed it’s resolved again on loading a map, but it is not the case.
Disgaea apparently reads all (?) of the weapon templates every frame once you scroll down a few spots in the weapon shop interface. This is strange to me, because the list of weapons you can buy isn’t regenerated until you talk to the NPC again.

I can already see several rabbit holes to go down, but I think it’ll be time to look at a different game after this, at least for a while. Current candidates are the Tyr glitch I mentioned, the reward algorithm in another game, or heading back to the serialization mines with Vampire.

I really want to rip the maps from Ace Combat 8 to see how they implemented sections where you can leave combat airspace to resupply, but I don’t feel like touching Unreal Engine. Earlier this year I used UE Explorer to answer a few questions that arose while I was playing Borderlands 2 (Unreal Engine 3), and concluded that people developing in Unreal Engine must be more masochistic than reverse engineers.

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