Home » Renegade Discussions » Mod Forum » About Westwood's Scripts
| About Westwood's Scripts [message #448075] |
Fri, 27 May 2011 06:16  |
TNaismith
Messages: 86
Registered: May 2006
Location: Canada
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I'll lay out the background story first. If you want to skip to my question, feel free to jump to the bottom of the post.
Background Story:
My work in Level Edit primarily revolves around co-op mapping/mission/level making, and the extensive use of pre-written, public-released scripts are necessary for setting up bot behavior, trigger zones, checkpoints, mission objectives, mission messages, and so forth. I don't have the knowledge to code, script, or write my own. Neither do I think will I ever have the invested time/interest to do so... never adequately proper ones at least.
The custom scripts released by jonwil, and subsequently contributed to by various scripters/coders over the past years in the Renegade Community, have formed an impressive collection of usable scripts that, if you do your own little online searching, can yield helpful documentation in form of (this).
If you do enough self-research, you might stumble across (this) site, a SourceForge download page from jonwil which allows you to download and access some of the following files in the image below. Take note of the highlighted .txt readme(s). Each one corresponds to any of the scripts included in jonwil's 3.4.4 scripts by other contributers in the community. In addition, each of them (as of the 3.4.4 scripts) are lightly to moderately helpful documentation and explanation(s) of what the scripts do and how they function. The effort the folks spent typing this up and including it with their work is almost candidly appreciated by grunt mappers/modders like myself whom work in co-op missions where humans oppose the AI, and whom don't have the skills or invested talent to code or write our own scripts.
The Deeper Story:
For those wanting to get that extra bit of background information, here is the full scenario of what was going on prior to writing this post.
The question was posed earlier yesterday during a co-op map testing about the kind of script available for bots that would make them follow the player (escort-style) throughout the mission once being deployed from a GDI transport chinook. Doing what felt like some light and quick research at the time, I opened up Level Editor and skimmed through the list of "M01_" scripts -- Someone had mentioned that we should check to see if a script from M01 where GDI friendly bots drop near the Church area and escort you via poke was actually available for use. After locating the area in the Level Editor
I checked things out and tried to determine how Westwood had setup those GDI bots to follow and escort the player upon being poked. After some probing and research, I found the following scripts to be the most likely related.
M01_CHURCH_Chinook_Spawned_Soldier01_GDI
M01_GDI_Escort_Conversation_Controller_GDI
I confess this might not be everything there is to how Westwood did it, there could very well be other scripts that are being used which I missed/didn't find. However, going with what what feeble results I had, I created a new map to reproduce the scripting setup in Level Editor that Westwood had done for M01. Placed a GDI bot on the map, attached "M01_CHURCH_Chinook_Spawned_Soldier01_GDI", and created a Daves Arrow with the script "M01_GDI_Escort_Conversation_Controller_GDI" attached to it.
At this point, it might be important to note that the way Westwood had set things up for this scenario was via a cinematic.txt file. Using XCC Mixer, I was able to open "Always.dat" (the existing one after installing core patches and scripts 3.4.4, aka, this wasn't "Always2.dat") and locate the cinematics file "x1i_gdi_church_troopdrop.txt", which seemed most reasonable to assume as being used for the Church area GDI bot drop-off. Peering inside, this was where I found "M01_CHURCH_Chinook_Spawned_Soldier01_GDI" and tried to then proceed with reproducing the scripted situation on a new map.
I assumed that the cinematics procedure wasn't relevant or necessary to executing the scripted situation Westwood had done, and went ahead to test my reproduced version of a GDI bot being poked and escorting the player. Unfortunately, it didn't work. I'm fairly sure (as far as I understand) that the cinematics system isn't necessary for making this script work, but I'm welcome to hearing alternative theories or evidence to prove other-wise.
So after this attempt didn't work, one thing I decided to find out for myself was that I would need to learn more about the scripts I was attempting to use. Where for jonwil's "JFW_" scripts, or any other of the custom scripts, I could simply open up some of the readme files and get adequate explanations or expanded details around the scripts like in (this) manner, Westwood's scripts, as I may have mentioned before, and will mention later, have no such official or easy-to-read documentation as the custom scripts in 3.4.4 do.
As you'll read in a few paragraphs below, the only hints or explanations of what some of Westwood's original scripts do are in very obscure manners or do not fully cover the full library of Westwood's original scripts included with C&C Renegade.
Perhaps out of desperation, I made an attempt to find out if scripts2.dll could contain some form of documentation for Westwood's scripts, even crude and in the form of rudimentary coding comments. After realizing I couldn't open the file with a simple program like notepad, I did some research on how to open a .dll file, and came across results like this:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_open_dll_files_to_see_what_is_written_insid e
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_open_.dll_files_to_see_what_is_written_insi de
There's a lot of different things to consider, it seems; A few possible methods to open .dll files using what they call a 'com+ application', but only if you trust the .dll source, the possibility of opening the file up in Visual Studio only if it was developed/compiled there, and a foreboding warning that .dll files are often written in machine-code and that requires reverse-engineering and steps into the realm of legal liability. One might consider the next thing to try would be opening the scripts2.dll in Visual Studio (as per suggested above). However, I'm unaware of whether this will properly work for Westwood's scripts2.dll file, and more importantly, whether this is actually stepping into any legal grounds with Westwood/EA. My farthest assumption has been that some of jonwil's work with scripts 3.4.4 (and earlier versions), as well as TT's upcoming 4.0 Patch may be based on official permission from Westwood/EA either granted privately/individually or from some existing legal, official statement from EA/Westwood granting public use or access to reverse-engineer the scripts2.dll file.
I am unclear in this area and would appreciate some clarification if possible.
The Problem and Question:
The problem is that while these custom scripts are immensely useful and varied, and will continue to be so for those in the realm of co-op mapping, there is also a huge library of original Westwood scripts that have little to no known documentation released for public use on the internet. The only primary documentation attempt I could ever locate was (this) one started by Canadacdn on June 17th 2007, right here on the forums, which eventually made it onto some of the (old) renhelp sites, (like this one), becoming part of the archived history of tutorials for "Everything C&C Renegade!". There is also some indirect hinting at what some of Westwood's original scripts did among the documentation from jonwil's "JFW_" scripts for 3.4.4 (see here). This is all aside from the Westwood scripts that had somewhat obvious names to make guesses from. (See here again)
But here's what it comes to...
Question: Is there no official documentation (or in a format like this) released on the internet, or embedded in the scripts2.dll, from Westwood, that explains the huge library of original scripts shipped with C&C Renegade, available in places like when using the Level Editor shown (here)?
~ TNaismith
Thank you in advance for any replies or helpful answers, and an extensive nod of gratitude to both Westwood for creating Renegade, and the many players/contributors across the community that have made custom scripts available for public use or helped build up the helpful knowledge base for using them.
If at any point there are broken links or images in this post, please send me a private message here on the forums and I'll see about fixing it.
[Updated on: Fri, 27 May 2011 08:51] Report message to a moderator |
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