A patcher for Rise of Nations: Extended Edition which allows reassignment of up to three nation powers for each nation. I've been kicking around something along these lines since about 2019, but Chinese modder Stack Pointer had a variant of the same idea which they had applied to Thrones & Patriots and they asked me to port it to the Extended Edition. This was the result!
It's a quick-and-dirty implementation i.e., ugly, mostly unoptimized, and with very limited error handling. It's also my first time using the ancient WinForms library/framework, so I don't even know what I'm doing.
The patching itself occurs in two parts:
- A copy of the game exe is made, and a "pre-patch" is applied to the copy that adds some handwritten assembly to the game exe. This assembly has been explicitly designed to make programmatic patching relatively straightforward.
- Since the pre-patched exe has a known structure, write locations can be dynamically calculated, with the bytes to write translated from UI entries.
For the sake of completeness the main block of assembly is included in this repo, but the intended method of distribution is via Steam Workshop, which includes the bsdiff patch files required to do the pre-patching.
- Relies on the BsDiff library.
Code and documentation are licensed under Big Bill Hell's License (BBHL). An audio copy of the license is included.