Warning: This post is long and potentially very boring. Do not read it if you have better things to do then try to help a hacking newbie (who doesn't know how to trim a post's size) replicate a genocide cannon he accidentally made with a hex editor.
I'm new here, but I have been sulking around in the shadows of this forum for quite some time now as a guest and somehow got the idea into my head of hacking the level 3 Polar Star (the other two look wimpy
).
My original intention in the experimentation was just to experiment, I guess, so I grabbed a copy of the FAQ and got to work. After a while, I made a simple modification to the gun that could do 127 damage to any enemy (and tons more to "weak" ones like Ballos that take lots of damage very quickly, but usually have lots of HP, plus it doesn't even let the Mannans turn into fried shadows or energy capsules give you energy), heal the enemy (quite fun if someone wanted to make a Nemesis upgrade in which level 3 actually healed the enemies), travel quite a distance (I don't know exactly how far because it goes screen-lengths off the screen), go through tons of enemies, have tons of shots on the screen at once, and so on. My stopping point was the flags (I wanted to make it go through walls).
Those nasty flags, I never really understood how to properly use them. First, I checked the snake's values for "Ignore solid" and "No destroy on solid" and copied them over. No good. After that I tried numerous values before giving up and putting 0xff in for both. I'm not sure if that was all I did, for I was never able to fully reproduce the result, but I got a gun that not only shot through walls, but killed everything within a radius of the gun (I think).
I decided that this gun was great (Ballos with that gun was easier than Monster X [treads] or Misery [takes only two un-aimed shots, but teleports in between and shoots stuff during the process] with it) and might have potential for an appearance in a mod. Level 1 of the "Superbomb" (ingenious name, huh) would have this bomb-effect, level 2 is undecided, and level 3 would heal the enemies, making power crystals dangerous. I'm not exactly sure on how to make the player actually have a chance of hitting a power crystal, as the range is really large and all it takes is a tap to obliterate enemies you didn't even aim at.
Pushing the down sides aside, I proceeded to change level one of the Polar Star, but to my dismay, the weapon only worked its magic in a straight line, like a sniper rifle that also shoots backwards, can damage infinite numbers of enemies, and goes through walls (a formidable weapon... but I miss my ability to hit all enemies without even aiming).
If someone actually had nothing better to do than read my excessively long and boring post (I'm better at writing essays than pleading for help hacking), could you bother to give me a word of advice? Unless this is a strange game mechanic I'm missing that says only the level 3 Polar Star can become a weapon of mass destruction, I can provide the little bits of hexadecimal I edited (I can't find a disassembler that allows you to assemble code, and I can't find either of those for a good dialect -- at least I think ASM has dialects
) and even my executable if you think I blundered elsewhere, but I, myself, am certainly out of ideas of how to reproduce this.
