I'm Reverse Engineering Crusader because I'm still obsessed about the game

This morning's progress:

adding globs to the map and picking them from a list
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The more I think about it the more globs are great, they make it really easy to quickly make big maps, the first phase would be creating a layout out of globs and then filling it out with fixed geometry to shape it further.

I found out there exists some kind of "patch map data" feature that might allow loading new map data into the game without replacing the original data files, I'm researching if it can be used to make modding easier
 
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So fun fact:

The japanese version can run on windows 11 through dxwrapper (use the ddraw.dll stub) but it has some glitches with text rendering and the game goes incredibly fast, but this is really cool and I might be shifting the decompilation and modding effort to the JP version instead. I documented about 90% of the DOS executable but this seems like a much more approachable version, also there's a chance that raw hex modding doesn't crash the whole thing immediately like the DOS version does

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Interestingly, I was wondering all these years (decades, actually :)) if the world/map editor was somehow integrated into the game itself, but was just 'disabled' and effectively hidden. I remember many examples of the games from the 90's where you could enable and run a level editor by simply appending a command switch to an executable. For example, one of the earliest cases that I remember is the game Abuse, where all you needed to do was to type "abuse.exe -edit" and that was it.

What I understand so far from your work is that debugging tools were integrated and could be enabled, but the map creator was not. Right?
 
JC Denton said:
Interestingly, I was wondering all these years (decades, actually :)) if the world/map editor was somehow integrated into the game itself, but was just 'disabled' and effectively hidden. I remember many examples of the games from the 90's where you could enable and run a level editor by simply appending a command switch to an executable. For example, one of the earliest cases that I remember is the game Abuse, where all you needed to do was to type "abuse.exe -edit" and that was it.

What I understand so far from your work is that debugging tools were integrated and could be enabled, but the map creator was not. Right?
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Map creation was definitely an external tool Origin made, in the decompiled evidence I didn't find anything that ever supported a presence of a map editor or similar features.
All I could find was an usecode debugger meant to debug the game's scripting code but that one requires a companion file with offsets so the debugger knows which part of the code to correlate to which line, however when the game was shipped some critical parts for its functioning were removed. No Remorse is missing the bootstrap while No Regret has it and allows hacking a command to launch the debugger but it still cannot work because both games are missing another component that links the debugger to the usecode so it's completely useless at the moment.

The other debugging feature I found was a standard support for attaching an external debugger, the DOS version has one that supports standard DOS debugging tools and as a result it's compatible with the DOSBox debugger, the windows version uses the standard debugger protocol that is still supported today and I've been trying to attach ghidra to that debugger.

If there were other debugging features they might have been removed as part of the release build process as well and aren't present anymore
 
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