Decompiling and recompiling an abandoned mod with Diplomacy for Warband

[Robustosaurus]

Hello.

I am relatively new to Warband modding, however, I had found one mod to be quiet enjoyable when I rebalanced it, it is called The Last Age of Calradia mod (LOTR but in Calradia). Sadly, the developer abandoned the project around 4 years ago, and while many aspects of the game were horribly unfinished, I decided to modify the mod with Morgh and Tweakmb, then it began ballooning into the scripts and then decompiling.

My Version of the mod is still quiet a way off for a more balanced, fun and less terrible version of the 2.25 beta, however, it has a lot of holes I am generally struggling to fill.

The plus side is that the Orcs/Uruks are not MMA super soldiers anymore and (outside of the Uruks) you have to painfully cross through awful units before getting to the good ones. Also added some lore-friendly halberdiers for the Rhodoks, and made the Manhunters, Peasant Women and a new Enslaved Rhodok easily available by having bandits always having them as prisoners (althought I might have to tone them down by 3 times because I gathered a rape army too quickly). Still in the works.

I then sent a message to the original developer regarding the original source files so that I could recompile it with Diplomacy, PBOD, Freelancer and other quality of life improvement mods to make the game more fun. The mod developer was willing to give the source files, however, he said he had lost it which is why I came to this forum, I in a bit of a pickle.

The only way I can possibly fix this issue is somehow decompiling the txt format THEN recompiling it back by using the normal Warband module + Diplomacy, PBOD etc. However, I really don't have the coding knowledge to do this which is really killing my mood unfortunately.

 

[SupaNinjaMan]

Typically discussions of decompilation are against the rules, but, I would feel that if you post the proof of the original developer giving you permission to do so, it would clear you of any potential wrongdoing. At that point, it is just a matter of code and mod preservation.

Of course, that is just my opinion as a mere forumite, not of a person who can make these sorts of judgements for the community at large.

All that being said, it does take a lot of knowledge and more importantly patience to implement things like Diplomacy and other popular OSP Kits. You might wait until you're at that point in your understanding of the Module System to try to tackle it.

 

[Robustosaurus]

Typically discussions of decompilation are against the rules, but, I would feel that if you post the proof of the original developer giving you permission to do so, it would clear you of any potential wrongdoing. At that point, it is just a matter of code and mod preservation.

Of course, that is just my opinion as a mere forumite, not of a person who can make these sorts of judgements for the community at large.

All that being said, it does take a lot of knowledge and more importantly patience to implement things like Diplomacy and other popular OSP Kits. You might wait until you're at that point in your understanding of the Module System to try to tackle it.

If you are really insisting on asking for proof, here is the chat I had had between the original mod developer and me and myself on Moddb, I have changed my profile quite a bit after realising my 14-year-old self had signed in through Facebook back in 2014, so I have partially changed my profile to keep a bit of privacy.



It is unfortunate that I have to do some compiling and decompiling, so far the only one I have found is Cellius's decomp, but I don't know how to start that one up if I am honest, then there is the issue of compiling it BACK with the module system with Diplomacy and other mods.

 

[SupaNinjaMan]

The main issue you will run into with decompiling is that it obfuscates things by losing local variable names, slot names, custom flags, comments, etc. The more complicated the mod is, the more difficult it will be to integrate Diplomacy and whatever other systems you wanted.

If you are familiar with the Module System, this will be a pretty difficult task.

 

[Robustosaurus]

The main issue you will run into with decompiling is that it obfuscates things by losing local variable names, slot names, custom flags, comments, etc. The more complicated the mod is, the more difficult it will be to integrate Diplomacy and whatever other systems you wanted.

If you are familiar with the Module System, this will be a pretty difficult task.

I am partially familiar with the module system and I have found a way to decompile the hole mod now. The big issue however is that I have truly hit a very big wall.

The source file for Diplomacy isn't like freelancer where each section of the mod is independent and modular. Diplomacy is the whole damn module itself which complicates the development massively.
Right now, I see only three ways to avoid this issue.
The first issue is splicing each of the Diplomacy files into The Last Age .py files, this can be extremely painstaking and will most likely result in a lot of crashes or errors because I forgot to set one line of code in the wrong section or botched it during copy/pasting.

The other way is quiet literally reverse engineering Diplomacy with The Last Age's models, items, troops, banner and troops.
Super daunting task that will most likely take a year which was not my intention at all, this was just a spruce up from the original mod to make it more stable.

The first option is more attractive, otherwise, I may as well make my own mod with diplomacy.