So I've been pretty busy in a hilarious gaming escapade.
I'm trying to mod the 2000/2001 video game "Empire of the Ants". Amazingly fun and interesting little RTS game based on the 'Les Fourmis' novel series.
Firstly, the game is programmed in the obscure dead language...French. This already makes it a hilarious task to mod and tinker with because I don't speak French, although I am learning it through modding the game.
Oh wait I am getting ahead of myself, did I mention the entire game files are encrypted in some sort of generic but unique cipher? Because good luck modding it when every file looks like "ºŸÌîãäŸÒêèñìèò猉Œ‰ÚÀËÌÎÒÓÞÖÈÍÍÄÑÜŒ‰Œ‰ÌÒƼ¡ÈëŸíäŸãîèóŸäíŸñäòóäñŸðô¦ôí¡Œ‰"
Yeah it looks satanic, and somehow that translates into French.
But for some ungodly reason there exists a handful of non-encrypted files in Patch 1.61 ( released like...18 years ago) which are in the form of handy little .ini files!
So, with some elbow grease and shed blood I translated EVERY, FUCKING, CHARACTER, IN, THE, FILES. Creating a key for which character corresponds to what.
Inputting the key into a translation software helped so god damned much, turning some...120-180 keypresses per file into like 10.
Yay, file translated and ready to go, right?
>Opens game, fucking crash on level start
Oh that's great news, where did I go wrong this time?
>Crash again
>And again
Hmmmm...
A handy fella by the name of Emperor of the Great Unknown did all of this before me and gave me enough information and resources to do all of this myself, and made his own little mod to nerf a laughably overpowered faction.
Comparing my modded file to his showed that both were identical...Hmmm what gives?
>Fucking encoding is different, his is ANSI and mine is something else which I do not understand
Fine, re-encode the file to ANSI, done!
>Enters game, units die instantly when touching enemies
Uhhhh that is not normal...
>His doesn't have this issue
OH WHAT THE FUCK IS IT NOW!?
>The line-feed should be
Carriage Return Line Feed
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Fixed that crap, now everything works hunky dory except all the numbers used are a complete joke.
Want an example? The Queen you use to make your armies and units lays an egg every 8000 seconds according to the code...Uhhh why the FUCK is it such a big number?
>Egg-laying-speed-modifier is 0.0005 for a worker/standard soldier, resulting in about 40 seconds per unit
WHY...NOT...JUST...USE...BETTER...COIFICIENTS
SERIOUSLY YOU CROISSANT DEVOURING FRENCHIES WHY DID YOU NOT JUST SET THE EGG RATE TO...OH I DUNNO 100 SECONDS THEN SET THE MODIFIERS TO SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T REQUIRE SCIENTIFIC NOTATION!?
Game has pretty simple graphics (hell a lot of ants are fucking SPRITES) but if you like RTS games, give it a shot, its fucking hard too because the English version of the game (still programmed in FRENCH) incorporates the addon content of the French release, turning the otherwise laughable Harvester Ants into the T-800 except in insectoid form.
The release on Zoom Platform is the only one which seems to work on my PC but some people report the GoG release functions fine (sure as fuck doesn't on my PC though, crash city).