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Hi Prehistoricman! You would have been here and left before I arrived, but welcome back regardless I would like to think of myself as one of the more knowledgable LRR modders: I know nothing about exe hacks but have succesfully poked and created all sorts of configuration files to do things with: like balance the game, create my very own profile picture, and some more zany things. So welcome once again, and I hope you'll be able to contribute something to the slow community that is RRU. You're welcome to ask me anything if it'd help you. I'm mildly surprised nobody else answered this in great detail: Cyrem seems to be the only magician, there are a couple of other wizards who float in and out of existence and you might get somewhere if you asked them. Slimy Slug / ShadowDraikana and Jamesster/Terrev/UTTER_BODGE/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA would be useful people to ask. Slightly tangential, but as for content that isn't exe hacking & is stuff I am knowledgable about: since you left is that we've sorted out most of the LRR files... adding new vehicles, new monsters, new maps, and even new buildings is all under our control. Modelling has always been difficult but with some very recent tools using Unity anyone can definitely add stuff, with enough patience. We have varying levels of functionality: vehicles, monsters, and buildings generally can't do much more fun stuff outside of what they already did in LRR. So the Front Loader fits in as a cheaper, more accesible, but less efficient transport vehicle: but functionally it's still basically a Small Transport Truck. The Air Filter fits in as a oxygen-producing building low on crystals - but functionally it's still the same as the Support Station just with some tweaked properties. Monsters in particular use Small Spider AI, Slug AI, Rock Monster AI, with almost nothing in between - Rock Monster AI can be disabled from being able to use rocks but that's literally about all I can change. The exception to this is maps, which we have a ton of scripting power for that has only recently actually been worked out what-the-heck-is-going-on, and oddly it's one of the more friendly & functional things of LRR - for an example utilizing it a lot, see this. There are some really cool ideas which I have floating around with this (I recently worked out I can force crystals away from you if you haven't build a good amount of Power Stations, and give you said crystals back when you build enough. I could even force those Power Stations to be built on specific tiles), some of which I put into reality (like Christchurch) and others of which I tried to put into reality and then ran into a brick wall. Oh, and adding new minifigures is on the radar, but they do the same stuff regular raiders would anyway even if you try to make them not to, so it can be a little pointless. Cyrem's Cafeteria also makes installing mods for an end-user less painful than ever, and it's quite nice to work with overall - especially as when LRR eventually bricks itself you can just copy out your mod files to a new folder and keep going. Back to the exe hacks, Cafeteria + Community Edition also has functional resolution support, which is super great! Community Edition is Cyrem's collection of exe hacks and has a bunch of cool stuff to play with, like custom smoke particles, and fixing the glitch whereby the Tunnel Transport will delete all your raiders off the map. Something I think would be super cool is that debug key Z corresponds to Eat Sandwich. What if you could magic that so that key pointed to Fire Hand Laser? That would be super cool and is magic totally beyond my capabilities. There are some really cool ideas here as well. You've already increased the radar zoom level which is super cool, especially on more massive screens Keyboard shortcuts would be a godsend, too. Ultimately I think the jank, crashiness, and general weird shenanigans of LRR keep at least myself and others from making stuff with it. (Remember how I said I could subtract crystals using script? It freezes the game for about seven seconds every time I do this.) Also Path.map and hidden caverns are very stupid and I don't know why. This is just two examples of a weird and broken game from 1999 that was rushed to completion and despite the best efforts to make it playable, it really shows. I'm surprised it still runs on my modern machine so flawlessly, given there are so many other classic Lego games that just... don't. There is just so much jank, so much shenanigans, so much indecipherable crashing, and so much uncustomizability that can make doing things with LRR very un-fun. But - it sometimes works, and, when it does, those moments are special. My Upgraded Hover Scout brick model still sits above my PC and LRR is still installed on all the machines I've ever owned. It's truly special, and the community of RRU that surrounds it and has kept the slow fire going all these years is also special. Again I say to you: welcome back to RRU! P.S. I realise this has been a very long post, but there is much to say in the years since you've been here, and also there is no such updated list of functionality that I could easily refer you to. I tried to put in as many links as possible for all sorts of examples to prevent you from having to navigate what sometimes feels like a quagmire of history and knowledge, but I cannot link everything - that is why the forum exists, to be navigatable - and there are many more 'sucess stories' buried deep (like this one!)

LRR was, as far as I remember, my first video game. I used to go to some child care thing where they had a single crappy PC with like 4 games on it. LRR was one of them and I played for hours. It's been at least 14 years since then, and about 10 years since I last posted here at age 12. At that time, I had only started to develop my interest in programming and electronics. And the website is still here! That's nuts. I remember back when there was a live chat at the top of the forum. Anyway the main reason I wanted to say hello is that I started doing some of that exe magic that you guys talk of sometimes. In LRR, that is. The radar's zoom level is completely insufficient by default, IMO, so I started with doubling the maximum zoom out possible. That only requires modifying 4 bytes. Next challenge is to make keyboard shortcuts because the game is very mouse-heavy and it's tiring. I've already got the main right-side menu mapped out to the 1-4 keys, and tab to press the back button. Unfortunately, the sub-menus for building selection, raider management, etc. are handled differently internally so they don't work yet. What's the situation with exe hacking in LRR at the moment? I understand Community Edition has some changes to the exe. Is Cyrem our only magician? Assembly hacking and reverse engineering is fun for me. It's a great distraction from my university work and always feels like there's mysteries to uncover. Recently I dumped the memory of a microcontroller in a product about the same age as LRR. It had some factory test code in that was super weird and probably nobody had seen that code in over a decade. Back to LRR, it's fun seeing its awfully-optimised code. It almost exclusively uses _cdecl which creates unnecessary memory activity. There are several functions that are a single instruction long, which the compiler should have inlined. Those are just a couple of things I've seen so far. Here's a screenshot from playing with the debug keys. I modified the sonic blaster code so that it triggered not only when the keys were pressed, but also while they were held. Turns out the game doesn't handle multiple of these blasters going off at the same time very well. It also hopelessly broke the AI, as you can see by the 3 support stations that the raiders were completely ignoring. The debug key itself was also broken: it's supposed to send the rock raider to your mouse pointer, but at this point they would return to previous blaster locations as well as the intended one. That was a fun journey in single-digit FPS. So anyways I hope to be posting here a bit and contributing some exe mods.

I know it might be kind of a thread necroing, but I picked up this old thing of mine to work on - and I think to have made a small step forward. As of now, I'm trying to fix 4 kinds of bricks: The Arctic sail and blue 24 flag, the generic black/blue/red/white/yellow flags and Dino Island's brown toolbox - small refresh, but back to the point. I tested out picking a differend block's BCD file and renaming it like the one I want to use - so I picked the generic 1x1 black square BCD and renamed it. Since I have the GAMEDATA extracted and my LR2 plays on without the need for its CD, I made a copy of the original toolbox BCD, then copied the renamed one in its place. When I tried using the toolbox in the game's car builder, it worked - although it works...a bit funky: it somewhat glitches inside the driver on certain chassis. The same happened when I tried the same with the flags and sail, however I noticed something: they seem to be not aligned correctly with the chassis I use. Example: I tested the flags with a Sandy Bay chassis, the policecar chassis, which has the driver sat down at its very center, also it's perfectly symmetrical. Now, do you remember the front and back of this chassis, right? Well, the flags snap anywhere BUT in the very front and back, and snap in the back of the driver where other bricks don't. In the case of the big black skidoo Arctic chassis - which has the front Arctic nose on the chassis itself - the flags just...phase through this piece and snap below it, whereas they should snap ON it.

I usually use imgur (with an account, so they don't expire) since the uploading process is just pasting images directly in (or clicking and dragging a file), but the RRU gallery is under Browser -> Gallery (or: https://www.rockraidersunited.com/gallery/). Either works.

BTW - just letting you know your images aren't embedding and are initially throwing 403 errors when loaded separately in another tab; I have to refresh that tab to get then to appear. Could use imgur or the RRU gallery, perhaps? Looking forward to seeing what sort of exe trickery you can come up with

Thank you so much for the quick reply. Stay safe and healthy

Wow, what a huge reply! I appreciate all those links. I am liking the look of your improvements mod. So far I've been using the "No frustrating mechanics" mod but it does over-buff lasers, and the walking speed buff hilariously breaks the tutorial. More sandwiches is a real hoot, thanks for that. I did take a look over the forums for tools and mods when I came back to LRR a couple of weeks ago. It's pretty amazing what IS possible since it's easier to program a game to be rigid rather than flexible. NERPs was a surprise to me the first time. The fact that they added all these functions and their own scripting language to make levels work. You wouldn't see that these days - it's a waste of time to roll your own language and make the interpreter for it. Cafeteria is pretty awesome. It's nice to see how the modding tools have matured over time. It's been long enough! I wonder what the original devs think of this dedication... I need extra resolution! I had a good try at running at higher res but didn't manage to do it. Cafeteria only had the standard resolution available and LRR:CE crashed after loading (on higher resolutions). So the sandwich-eating debug key Z is triggered by this code: It seems reasonable to me that this number in the lower block '23h' is related to the particular activity the RR performs. I haven't tested anything though. More of that to come. You also see some of that optimisation I was on about earlier. This code makes 5 calls to the same function to get the same value. The trouble with changing some of the ways the game handles things is a classic software engineering problem. LRR is an existing code base with files that support whatever quirks were hard-coded in. Improving the things that make no sense can break everything! So you're left with two bad options: make no change and live with a crap system, or make the change and put in all the effort to make the overhaul. You say that but... this makes me think of my personal guitar hero Jack White. For a solid decade he focused on making music by limiting himself as much as possible. He put effort into making performing inconvenient. Often, I choose to hack certain things simply because they were not meant to be done. As an act of defiance against the universe. Perhaps it's the same for some members here? Your journey with discovering all the scripting stuff is not too unlike reverse engineering the exe. Come to the dark side. We have more crashes here Thanks for the interest in hotkeys. Right now my hack is very incompatible with debug keys (I managed to get permanently stuck in first person). Thank you for everything you've done with mods and LRR knowledge. I hope you continue to...

You really must be an oldie if you remember the chat. Those were interesting times. It's good to see another wizard and even better to see a returning member. Cyrem is currently the main person doing EXE mods, but I thought there was maybe one other person doing something. Maybe I'm getting mixed up with a different LEGO game. Definitely talk with him to see what's possible to include. Anything to make the game less of a nightmare would be personally welcomed since I got a little fed up with the bugs when trying to create new things. Stuff like a model crashing the game unless I put a green triangle deep within the model... those truly mind-boggling bugs.

Cirevam was very nice and gave me lovely icons to use as well as some nulls. I gave the Mega Mole an engine upgrade - I felt a Drill or Scanner upgrade would a) be mostly useless (already drills everything in <= 1s) and b) require some graphical indication, which I didn't feel capable of doing. Overall it's a more expensive but slightly speedier Chrome Crusher. The Front Loader I put a lot more work into, with an Engine and Scanner upgrade. I was trying to get Carry to increase cargo space from 2 to 3, but LRR simply wouldn't let that happen (weird... I got Carry working on the Tunnel Scout fine), so that's not happening. If you unpack the .wadp you should be able to see the commented-out lines (unless Wad Recycler ate them, which it sometimes does) which to the best of my knowledge should work but don't. Again, many thanks to Cirevam - he made all the models and the icons, I just put them into the game. (Split them into two separate downloads because they are now two separate fully functional units) --> Mega Mole --> Front Loader

Cirevam has heard my plea and we now have a custom icon for it! Which you won't be able to see very much because it collides with the Ore & Crystal HUD. But hey, icons! Updated the download above with the Cafeteria patch.

With full thanks to Cyrem, for the original topic, Cirevam, for the modelling and releasing the model, I present to you a finally functional version of the Air Filter! That doesn't overwrite any existing buildings and adds on in the 11th slot. > Download! This mod doesn't actually require CE to run, as LRR supports 11 buildings and only uses 10. Balance: Does not require power 1 crystal, 9 ore to build +2 oxygen off the bat, then 2.5, then 3.3 It might seem a bit overpowered but you need a lot of them. The Support Station is significantly cheaper in terms of ore, crystals, and space, and also necessary for game progression. If you have balance feedback (or any feedback!) let me know. (However the Support Station is also the only building that gives out sandwiches. Build it for the dependencies, depower it, and you'll never have sandwich woes ever again ) @Cirevam - could you please make an icon for it? It currently just uses the Support Station's icon.

Hah well, I tried community edition and it doesn't work for me at all I'm afraid. My issue is the game will run fine up to about an hour of playing, then it just freezes and closes. I am at my wits end as I can't finish the mission erode works and progress my story on from that I'm a bit tired of building up my base to get a chrome crusher, and tell it to drill that one bit of hard rock and as it's about to and the mission is about to complete, the game freezes. At least that's what happened to me 20 minutes ago. :c