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Hidden stuff in the E3 Exe

Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 4:18 pm
by glitchhunter09
https://tcrf.net/Proto:Jurassic_Park:_T ... le_Strings

https://tcrf.net/Proto:Jurassic_Park:_T ... ript_Stuff


So Divingkataeweirdo, a sysop and big contributor on The Cutting Room Floor Wiki, decided to take a look at the E3 executible in a Hex editor. Turns out there's a lot of text strings still stored in raw ascii and highly legible.

Among the things he found were evidence of a debugger in the engine which still has parts of it in the final. There's currently no known way to access this but it's assumed it's working. (perhaps cheat engine would be an option?)

He also found evidence of Dinosaur behaviors that were removed from the executible in the final. Notably, dinosaurs were planned to be able to grab and throw things as well as being able to slash with their claws.

Some of these were removed because they couldn't properly implement them. others were removed because there were commands made already that were similar to them. I suggest you guys check the links above for more information. I have no idea if any of these are still in Trespasser's source somewhere.

Re: Hidden stuff in the E3 Exe

Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 7:33 pm
by Hilwo
Interesting, hope someone will be able to do something with it!

Re: Hidden stuff in the E3 Exe

Posted: Sat May 06, 2017 6:13 pm
by glitchhunter09
I highly doubt it unless there's still remnants of it in the source. Chances are there may not be though as there's no information for these in the final's executible, unless it's compressed (like it should be in a normal final release situation.)

As I said above, the debugger might be. There's also a chance it may be leftover data from the GUI App. It's assumed in the early days of development, the devs used the GUI App to render some of the pre-1998 ingame screenshots. (it's common knowledge that the real engine wasn't started until January 1998 by now.)

If Lee were more active, I'd ask him if he's found any information about it during his research on the source.

Re: Hidden stuff in the E3 Exe

Posted: Sat May 06, 2017 6:25 pm
by tatu
Nice find!

It could be commented out, that way it is not included in the final exe.

I'm pretty sure you should be able to find it in the source yourself, as it should be clear text in one of the files. But I'm pretty sure machf's script reference would have them included if they were still present.

Re: Hidden stuff in the E3 Exe

Posted: Sat May 06, 2017 6:50 pm
by glitchhunter09
Yeah because even the commented out behaviors are on his T-Script reference. So I don't think these behaviors made the cut.

Re: Hidden stuff in the E3 Exe

Posted: Sun May 07, 2017 1:04 am
by machf
IIRC< those are in the source code, but they are empty...

Re: Hidden stuff in the E3 Exe

Posted: Fri May 19, 2017 3:29 am
by Slugger
Like others have indicated, those dino actions are just empty functions in the source code, with comments describing their eventual implementation.

And the exe contains a bunch of strings for various errors that are most likely left over from GUIApp, as the two shared similar code bases.