VN Hacking Guide

[zoom909]

http://proger.i-forge.net/Stage_Once_-_a_Visual_Novel_hacking_tutorial/IPD

I posted it b/c, sure one can try to learn Japanese if you're geared toward languages...OTOH if more into the tech side of things, maybe someone could try to learn hacking instead.

Of course you could always Google for things like

Win32 API

x86 assembly language

x86 debugger

C/C++ programming (or whatever language you're interested in)

And don't forget that the source code for To Heart 2 has been published

[Guest]

is this related? http://visualnovelaer.fuwanovel.net/tag/hacking-guide/

[zoom909]

Yeah, doggone it, it's the same one all right :-) Explains why I could've sworn I'd seen it somewhere, yet I didn't think it was on the forums...

[Guest]

i get grade S for stupid.

i didnt even check the link you linked to was the exact same one i linked to...

sry... just ignore me

[Gork]

pretty cool, looks hard but doable... if i had more experience with debuggers and hadn't just loaded my self up with some projects for the summer i would try my hand at this sort of thing.

Im used to finding errors in my C code with a metric ton of printf("is it here\n"); or printf("val is %d\n",val);

then again ive also done some assembly programming and that is a real pain to debug

maybe ill volunteer myself if i ever finish any of my projects lol.

[zoom909]

pretty cool, looks hard but doable... if i had more experience with debuggers and hadn't just loaded my self up with some projects for the summer i would try my hand at this sort of thing.

Im used to finding errors in my C code with a metric ton of printf("is it here\n"); or printf("val is %d\n",val);

then again ive also done some assembly programming and that is a real pain to debug

maybe ill volunteer myself if i ever finish any of my projects lol.

yeah I guess you can't just sprinkle a bunch of print statements in the middle of assembly code...well, I suppose that's why someone made a debugger :-)

I figure the whole "running the debugger to find out how the game loads and parses its data" is needed in the worst-case scenario, when nothing is known about the engine at all.

But, there's also the times where you can use one of those magical extraction programs like they have on TLWiki like CRASS, if you're lucky and the game uses an engine that someone already debugged.

[REtransInternational]

What isn't mentioned is that almost all VN engines are going to be approximately 10-100x bigger and more complex than the toy example used, and making random changes to files is not going to be very productive in understanding (even ignoring things like encryption and compression.) Don't look at the data files any longer than necessary to check that it isn't in some stupidly obvious format (again, the result of this check is going to be negative most of the time), then load the executable in a disassembler and start analysing, or even better, a decompiler. You need to understand what the code is doing, and ideally to the level of being able to deduce what the original source code was, to ensure that you don't miss those edge cases and small details that mean the difference between getting a 100% working insertion or one that seems to mysteriously crash or glitch randomly.

Doing RE well requires a good knowledge of programming too, and the latter tends to be something that either you get, or you don't. Being good at maths, logic, and reasoning correlates well with that.

[zoom909]

Yeah, the tutorial's definitely not perfect, I guess (it's kind of a hard thing to write a guide for), but the thread seems to be serving its purpose...to give people the general idea of what they might need to know, and what's involved, if they're interested...

[REtransInternational]

Or put another way, if you can't figure out the tiny example he used, then you'll be even more lost when it comes to the real thing.