Reverse Engineering Elements of a WH40k RTS

[Kharos]

Hello!

For the past year or so, I've been modding a Warhammer 40k RTS game called Dawn of War II: Retribution; it's practically abandoned by the developers, so for myself and the rest of its modding community the time came to utilize dll injections to open up more modding opportunities and make our lives easier. We currently have only one person actively working on reversing certain functions in the game's engine, but due to the complexity of the game combined with the obligations of daily life, the pressure being put on only one person can feel daunting; reinforcements to both alleviate the pressure and expedite the process would be ideal.

So far, we have a working injector and functional injections that allow for things such as adding new factions, gamemodes, and removing certain visual limitations, so the brunt of the work that remains is entirely related to the long list of things we would like to alter with the game.

I call for anyone here who would be interested in joining us in our endeavor to help us bring new life to this game that some of you may have played. Please feel free to directly contact me, or discuss directly on this thread if you have any questions. Thank you

 

[Flipend0]

What's the goal?
And is there any incentives for joining, will I get paid?
You probably don't even need an injector, dll proxying should do just fine

 

[Kharos]

What's the goal?
And is there any incentives for joining, will I get paid?
You probably don't even need an injector, dll proxying should do just fine

While there isn't a specified final goal (it's more of an ongoing project), the current priority is to expand certain arrays and lists that largely have to do with UI, but appear to be hard-coded in the engine itself, such as unlocking extra "slots" for squads, abilities, etc...; moving from there are more complex things, such as creating new dropdowns for map modifiers to allow for more selective gamemodes, and, in the very long run, hopefully re-enabling LAN functionality that was disabled when the game went from GFWL to Steam.

About payment: it's on the table, but keep in mind that it won't be industry rates or anything like that since it'd be paid out of pocket - it's a passion project first and foremost. I guess the ideal approach would be to demonstrate and discuss what'd need to be done, so you can determine how long and how expensive it would be to do certain things.

I'm not a reverse engineer myself, another guy does that, so I don't know if we should/can use dll proxying, it's also part of the discussion I suppose, --- EDIT: but from what I can tell the code that needs to be changed is largely in the .exe, not a distributed .dll that's part of the game (although i know that some of it is actually in .dll files, but it's mostly to do with simulation, something we might even touch later on)