Modding - Bringing back marker games

[Grogyan]

Sorry to bring this up, but i'm just curious to know whether it'd be possible us to patch the game files so that we can make and share marker games?

I had in my mind today that to maybe get around the copyrighty thing of distro game files to just have an executable to modify just the game files, like you'd normally do manually like removing comments, adding or removing lines of code

[Paradox]

It's possible... but it's a mess because Marker Games are stored in the Vault. Making Marker games is easy if you still have the original ABM files, you just need to do some hex editing in the PRP files to change versions and copy them over. That will enable the full KI.

Extracting the game from the vault and somehow managing to transmit the data, and then add it to another vault is a different story...

[Deledrius]

Extracting the game from the vault and somehow managing to transmit the data, and then add it to another vault is a different story...

They reside in their own node (well, there's a folder node for it as well, IIRC), but all-in-all, not terribly difficult. I'll add a function for import/export for marker nodes/image nodes/etc.

[D'Lanor]

They reside in their own node (well, there's a folder node for it as well, IIRC), but all-in-all, not terribly difficult. I'll add a function for import/export for marker nodes/image nodes/etc.

I remember that Zrax made those functions for UU. Of course they had to be executed in the UU adminKI.

But were the markergames implemented in ABM the same as they would be later in Prologue/UU?

[Grogyan]

I was reading through the python files some time back, relating to Marker games, and it seemed to me that for PoTS (which is the install I have), Cyan had just commented out the code, but i'm sure they did other modifications as well

Who then would want to take up that challenge to bring back the marker games, reading/writing to the marker games as .txt files?

[Deledrius]

Who then would want to take up that challenge to bring back the marker games, reading/writing to the marker games as .txt files?

Geez, I'm already working on it, but I was doing the D'ni Guilds vector stuff tonight so it's not done yet. Keep your KI on! It should be a very simple matter to use the built-in serialization to dump a marker node to XML, and have an import function to add it to the appropriate subfolder in someone else's Vault (after applying the necessary adjustments). I was thinking it might even be neat to have the program interface with a public repository of Marker Games (kinda like the ULM), but that might be overkill.