Secret Ops patches

Status:	Completed!
Description:	This project consists in creating a collection of DLL patches for Secret Ops, which could prove useful to mod-makers using the Secret Ops engine.
Crew:	Mario "HCl" Brito - Patch research and development UE, B5 Commander and Standoff crews - Beta testing, sending ideas
Patch Description:	Generic loader - This loader allows loading and configuring the patches mentioned below. Patch status: Completed! Currently being used by the Unknown Enemy, B5 Commander and Wing Commander Standoff. Configuration is done through a simple text file (Unknown Enemy, for example, uses ue_tre.cfg for patch configuration). FMV Patch - Initially created specifically for the Unknown Enemy project, which needed a way to import FMV, this patch allows using DivX video, not only as FMV but also as in-game comms. Patch status: Completed! Currently being used by the Unknown Enemy, B5 Commander, and Wing Commander Standoff projects. A screenshot displaying a new comm (comm animation created by the Unknown Enemy project) can be found here (the screenshot also shows the font patch at work). TRE Loader - This patch allows mod distribution through TRE archives by making it possible for the game to load extra TRE files. The patch reads a text file, where the TRE files are declared. Patch status: Completed! Currently being used by the Unknown Enemy, B5 Commander and Wing Commander Standoff projects. Guns' damage patch - This patch allows defining specifically which guns are able to damage capship components and how much damage it'll make to these components (which can be independent from the fighter / corvette damage). Patch status: Completed! Currently being used by the Unknown Enemy and B5 Commander projects. Leech Gun patch - The patch provides three new mission functions (LEECH_Code, this and LEECH_Get) to provide access to a table which holds the number of collisions between ships and a given bullet index. By accessing these values, the mission programmer can choose which actions to take when enough Leech bolts have hit the ship. Patch status: Completed! Currently, this patch isn't being used in any fan project, although it was integrated on UE's DLLs. Sample mission code which uses the Leech functions can be found here. Scatter Gun patch - This patch recreates the WC4 scatter gun in WCSO. It monitors each time a bullet is fired and splits every bullet type marked as "scatter" into 5 bullets with slightly different exit vectors (see screenshot). Very deadly at close range btw:) This patch is easy to adapt to provide other similar functionality (such as a Helix cannon, alternating dual-firing guns as seen in the WC4 Banshee/Excalibur, etc) Patch status: Completed! Currently, this patch isn't being used in any fan project. Z-Axis rotation patch - This patch was made specifically for Killerwave, for use in the Omega Dreadnought in his B5 Commander project. Normally, WCSO allows rotation of ship components around the the X or Y axis, but not on the Z axis. Although by using a rotation matrix to rotate the coordinate system it's possible to overcome this, the rotation matrix is re-initialized every time the player autopilots, messing up the rotation on the second nav point. This small patch avoids this problem, by preventing this re-initialization to occur. Project status: Completed! Currently being used by the B5 Commander project. Font patch - This patch allows changing the font type and color used in several parts of the game. Project status: Completed! Currently being used by the Wing Commander Standoff project, in order to change fonts to easily fit the new "green" cockpit theme. Expanding some limits of the WCSO engine - This patch consists in changing some of the limits on WCSO, such as the number of active ships in a nav point. Having more than 250 active ships simultaneously was acheived (screenshots available here and here), as well as increasing the number of VDUs usable by Secret Ops and increasing the number of asteroids supported by the game. Project status: Completed! Currently being used by the Unknown Enemy project. Multiple UV2 patch - Now that new comm videos can be imported using the FMV patch, it was essential to break the limit of UV2 files Secret Ops can handle (UV2 files are used for comm animations). This patch allows using 90 more UV2 files on Secret Ops, which should be enough for any Secret Ops fan project :) Project status: Completed! Currently being used by the Unknown Enemy, B5 Commander and Wing Commander Standoff projects. Miscelaneous cosmetic changes - With the release of the High-res patch, it became necessary to adapt several other aspects of Secret Ops that weren't included on the High-res patch at first. Initially created for the Unknown Enemy project, this research included: centering menus, fixing the credits screen, centering splash screens, using the most detailed fighter LOD regardless of the distance, a way to increase the Direct3D Z-Buffer to 32-bits, and more. Project status: Completed! Currently being used by the Unknown Enemy, B5 Commander and Wing Commander Standoff projects. Most of these improvements have also been integrated on the latest version of the WCSO High-res patch (v3). New Secret Ops mission script commands - In order to better implement some scenarios, i implemented some mission commands that provide very useful functionality. Among others, i implemented functions to empty a ship's fuel, reload ammo-based weapons, get some info regarding the state of comms on the player's wing and determining which object is being targetted by a given ship. Project status: Completed! Currently being used by the Unknown Enemy, B5 Commander and Wing Commander Standoff projects.
Downloads:	The source code of the Unknown Enemy DLL, which is available of the 2003 section has implementations of nearly all these patches.