Rayman 3

Progress update: the 2D Madness map is, in terms of distance covered, about 40% done I think. The latter parts mainly consist of clouds instead of jungle lands, which will be so much easier to reconstruct. However there's still one big stretch of jungle terrain to be done. I will also have to find a way to deal with prickly fruit swings and the water at the bottom of the map. Finally I found and corrected three mapping errors - correcting them takes extra time, so I hope I won't find any more mistakes...

I just started up Cheat Engine and I was shocked when I saw this:

11FSpvq.png


However a quick Google search told me that it's an April Fools joke :) the program is free and open source.

Anyway last night I realised something incredible I may be able to pull off with Cheat Engine... I don't want to reveal what it is just yet (I'm going to test now to see whether it will work), but it will be amazing if I'm able to do it.
 
OMG my hack is STARTING TO WORK... I need to investigate further!!!

(by the way, this "incredible hack" I am talking about is not an April Fools joke...)

EDIT: Hmm I spoke too soon... I'm on the right track I think... but Rayman 3 keeps crashing when I modify stuff.
 
Meh... it doesn't work. I wanted to find the value that holds the current map. I hoped to be able to change that to load whatever map I wanted. If it had worked I would have been able to start any part of any level I wanted. The level selection system in R3 is crappy - you can only start at the beginning of a world, not somewhere in the middle. With this hack I hoped to take control of the loading process.

But it doesn't work... there are hundreds of thousands of values that change based on the map, making it very difficult to locate the one value I need. I made some assumptions (the value will be static and always lower than 1,000,000) and managed to isolate about 10 values, but modifying them either crashed the game or had no effect at all. The closest I got was when I modified a certain value and the game kept working until I went Game Over, triggering a level reload - but then it crashed again. This is not some trivial piece of information I'm trying to change (like what powerup Rayman has) - knowing what map is currently active is vital for the inner workings of the game. I think in order to successfully change the map being loaded a combination of values all have to be changed at the right time - else the game will crash.
 
if you have seen this post you will know my name chashey - lee pease ( my first name has a dash in the middle ) insted of a prank heres a gift :D
 
Remember when I posted in this thread I had decompiled Rayman 2? I now have a better decompiler. It doesn't leave asm inside the code. I also decompiled the Rayman Designer Mapper, Rayman 3 and Rayman Origins with it :)

The compiler also has an option to decompile DOS programs, but I've had no luck so far with Rayman 1...

Origins apparently has a debugging file (.pdb) linked to it... too bad it isn't available... that would make the code so much more readable.
 
Robotic Teensie said:
Remember when I posted in this thread I had decompiled Rayman 2? I now have a better decompiler. It doesn't leave asm inside the code. I also decompiled the Rayman Designer Mapper, Rayman 3 and Rayman Origins with it :)

The compiler also has an option to decompile DOS programs, but I've had no luck so far with Rayman 1...

Origins apparently has a debugging file (.pdb) linked to it... too bad it isn't available... that would make the code so much more readable.
Click to expand...
This may be a derp question, but Im still going to ask it:

What does it actually mean that you decompiled these games, and what good does it have? I mean, are you going to rip some sprites/textures? Also, what program you used to decompile them?
 
I'm no expert, but I'd assume by decompiling we can understand the game better, and perhaps even reverse engineer it for modding.
 
Robotic Teensie said:
Remember when I posted in this thread I had decompiled Rayman 2? I now have a better decompiler. It doesn't leave asm inside the code. I also decompiled the Rayman Designer Mapper [..] with it :)
Click to expand...
How about to host a FTP Server where users can Up-/Download Rayman Designer Map files ( I can do that :) ) and then recompile the Mapper. Instead of connecting via Modem to UBISofts Server the Mapper should connect via direkt LAN to our FTP-Server? *Just a though*
 
It would be nice modding that in order to have a server for RPC members to upload their RD levels...
 
The programs on your computer look like this:

Code: 
00 00 8b ce e8 26 1a 02 00 6a 00 e8 70 11 00 00 83 c4 04 e8 98 13 00 00 33 c0 8a 88 c0 10 43 00 88 88 08 0d 45 00 40 84 c9 75 ef c7 05 38 a6 43 00 00 00 00 00 e8 a6 1b 00 00 6a 00 8d 4c 24 08 e8 1b 01 00 00 8d 44 24 04 8d 4c 24 04 c7 84 24 a8 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 89 46 1c e8 03 ac 01 00 8d 4c 24 60 c7 84 24 a8 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 e8 8f 11 02 00 8d 4c 24 04 c7 84 24 a8 00 00 00 ff
Now that's not very helpful if you want to understand how the program works... can you guess what program that big bunch of numbers was taken from?
No? Then take a look at this...

Code: 
else
  {
    MessageBoxA(
      0,
      "Please check your DirectX version. At least version 8.1 is required.",
      "Rayman 3 Setup Error",
      0x10u);
  }
  return 0;
}
Can you guess it now? It's Rayman 3's graphics setup (R3_Setup_DX8.exe). What I did there was put the program into a decompiler, which decompiled it. It translated all those numbers into readable code.

The problem is... decompiling a program is incredibly complicated. The code the decompiler makes is not 100% perfect. It's often not even valid code. Many errors and inaccuracies pop up. A lot of information was also lost in our versions of Rayman games - only Ubisoft has the original code. Most of the decompiled code is really incomprehensible, such as:

Code: 
    CWinApp::Enable3dControlsStatic(v1);
    sub_402290(0);
    sub_4024C0();
    v2 = 0;
    do
    {
      v3 = byte_4310C0[v2];
      *(&FileName + v2++) = v3;
    }
    while ( v3 );
    dword_43A638 = 0;
    sub_402CF0();
    sub_401270(0);

In order to make the code more understandable one must manually add lots of data to help the decompiler. I'll quote Wikipedia:

(...) the nature of disassembly precludes total accuracy, and a great deal of human intervention is necessarily required (...) (the) user will begin with an automatically generated disassembly listing and then convert sections from code to data and vice versa, rename, annotate, and otherwise add information to the listing, until it becomes clear what it does.
Click to expand...
So the automatically generated code we got is impossible to understand. It really doesn't have any practical use... it would require weeks or months of analysing by someone who has the necessary expertise (and I don't have that) to make sense of it all.
 
Well, for one, a while loop would never end in a ; before telling the program what it should be looping. That should be some indication. Strangely enough, the 'do' step with the method in enclosed brackets is before the while loop, which is usually the thing that the while loop should be doing. This makes me think that that excerpt of code you have is the wrong way around! Or at least, the while() do section is in the wrong order.
 
Shrooblord said:
Well, for one, a while loop would never end in a ; before telling the program what it should be looping. That should be some indication. Strangely enough, the 'do' step with the method in enclosed brackets is before the while loop, which is usually the thing that the while loop should be doing. This makes me think that that excerpt of code you have is the wrong way around! Or at least, the while() do section is in the wrong order.
Click to expand...
There are two kinds of while loops - the most common one is while (condition=true) {code to be executed}. But you can also check the condition after the code... {code to be executed} while (condition=true). In the latter case, the loop will always execute at least once. And that's done with a do... while loop.

Code: 
do
    {
      v3 = byte_4310C0[v2];
      *(&FileName + v2++) = v3;
    }
    while ( v3 );
Here v3 is modified first, and if the condition is valid, the loop runs again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_while_loop

The programming language... hm. I'll check it... hang on.

EDIT: The original source code was Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. However the code I posted - which is what the decompiler spitted out - is some C-like pseudocode (not original, valid C++ code!)
 
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