Reverse Engineering Age Of Empires 

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It felt like you only just got started! As others have said it would be appreciated if you make these videos longer, and maybe even a part 2 of this video where you go further would be amazing!

The AI in AOE1 is controlled by 3 files. The AI file lists the build order, PER their general behavior towards what they've built and towards other players, the PLY file defines how the AI attacks other players. The AOE Heaven website have guides for each file, but they're not all-encompassing since the AI wasn't publicly documented, it's sourced from modders and what they could find.

Love it when people try to reverse engineer stuff in old games. There's a guy that spent years working on a 23-year-old WWII 2D real-time tactics game of which the source code was lost to time, and he managed to get modern screen resolutions working which nobody in the last two decades managed to do successfully (the game was hard coded with a crappy resolution with square aspect ratio). The difference it made was absolutely huge and it works flawlessly.

I came for the Wololo, stayed for the dissection of one of the games I played as a child.

This popped up in my feed and I audibly gasped. Eagerly and excitingly watching now. Keep this great content coming!

I really appreciated this video Nathan. When I was about 10 years old and first getting into computers and I had access to this game. Curiosity drove me to try and unpick installation files in notepad but obviously didn't get anywhere. 20 years later I'm an IT professional and write software and for a living. The desire to learn how things work has not gone away. You've made the process of reverse engineering software as accessible as I think it can be, which is an real achievement, well done!

One interesting AI quirk is in the original Dungeon Keeper. There's a map where you're pitted against an AI keeper, rather than heroes. If you spend too long building your dungeon, the AI keeper essentially just runs their own dungeon into the ground and all their monsters leave. You spend you're time building and training the perfect army to take them down, and when you're finally ready to go steamroll in and take them on all you find is a husk of a dungeon with a load of empty rooms and maybe two or three flies.

This was a great watch, hope you can do more AOE debugging in the near future.

Yeeesss! This is the type of content I love from you Nathan. Take a game, and do a walkthrough analysis of exploiting it. Amazing, hope you can do more, and in way more detail!

Really interesting reverse engineering! Especially the reveal of “this can’t happen before that”. It’s been 25 years since I did this kind of things and I’ve forgotten a lot of my tricks, so it’s really nice to follow along.

I would love to see a in depth analysis on the grid path finding system it uses

Oh man the music throughout the video takes me back.. Really enjoyed this!

longer videos please!

This is great content. The format of walking through your thinking process and working through reverse engineering something is a great way to teach and get people excited about this subject. Thank you, keep it up!

It’s fun seeing your channel grow! Keep at it :)

12 minutes that was almost sure no less than 12 hours. No matter what, you have all my respect. That’s no easy feat.

Incredible video, as always. Keep it up!

This has the same vibe as watching National geographic on those investigation and historical shows. Had fun watching this video and hope you do a series of this. The end results does not matter, it was the vibe and the journey that was entertaining

mate, you're my hero. I loved doing this sort of thing as a kid but never mastered it like you. I want to get back into it. Thanks for this!

Would be amazing an analysis of Worms 2/Armageddon AI

You have also got to think about things like player interaction. Like if you went over and destroyed their barracks, they would need to replace it to continue making troops. That 4th column definitely looks like it's where the action needs to be done. -1 just seems to be like universal, placing buildings etc which you wouldn't need to click on something to do. Whereas Man is 109, which looks to be the TC, and archer is 87 which looks to be the range.. Pretty cool tbf! Would be very easy to tailor the instruction set to difficulty by just making the build order absolutely perfect or making it terrible haha.

Thank you for these videos! ❤

This was great and all, although very short

turns out I most needed to hear the AoE menu music today then learn something cool!

It is easier to debug a game or app that uses DirectDraw to run in fullscreen mode on a 2-monitor setup. You use one monitor to run the game and the other one to debug. Alternatively, if you have 2 computers, you can use the remote debug feature (run the game on one computer, and debug on the other one).

I only reverse engineered the cracked version not being properly cracked back in the day. Fun-fact was that the RZR version was like 30 megs and contained the full game, while the full with CD was much bigger (also when installed I think) so I preferred that. However they only seem to have cracked for single player and multi did not work so I did it with softice, HIEW and some other similar tools. How great days they were - good to see people still do these kind of stuff 🙂

the person who wrote userpatch for aoe must have done a fair bit of reverse engineering, because he managed to enable modern resolutions, increased population, update and improve ai capabilities, and fix many bugs in the map editor. interesting to see the tools used. can they generate c as well as asembler?.

Saw the title about shit my pants lol

Please make more of exactly this :D

Wololo. Great vid once again!

Mr. Froddo Baggens of RE, why not you use your Ring on Starship Troopers, the 1st old RTS one, you command like 10 soldier with different abilities, in 3rd person; the thing is, the game will just bail, sometimes not even a error message; there's a specific mission I remember that will trigger this probably: is a mission where the Engineer, in a 'Mech Suit has the unique opportunity of all the missions, to deploy as many land-mines as you can set, you'd be alone, so be careful, and when deploying like 500 of them, the game crashes, other missions also have unknown limitations like that. Also DID F-22 ADF when you go at the right edge of the map, it'll exit without error, you don't actually get to the edge, but very close to trigger the exit. If you could fix these and increase the capacity of the buffers, or whatever gets overrun, and teach ud how to fix it, would be great and have our eternal gratitude

Can you do a video on lego racers, love to see how everything works.

Great tip about dumping the sources, thanks. Also it seems that you cut it way too short, I could watch many more of these videos.

Hi, wondrous job. Just i think you partially reinvent the wheel. Check out "How the AoE2 AI Thinks (ft. Promi)" by Spirit of the Law. It breaks down AI concepts of AoE2, sure it will be different but some parts might be similar enough so you will not start from 0.

The Spiffing Brit has shown that people do watch long-form videos. Something like this needs a good chunk of time devoted to it.

have you ever done a video on how to use Ghidra for absolute noobs? like explaining what everything is, useful hotkeys and configs, etc. I think it would be very cool to learn from you

I've been a programmer for over 30 years and I'm still not even near the debug-magician Nathan Baggs seem to be. I feel like it would really up my game, but there's so many new things to learn too. =)

I would love for you to check out the code for Full Spectrum Warrior, Idk just for fun, I like these videos so much for some reason. Oh and Ghost Recon as it's main menu resolution is "hard coded" which is so low it makes it unplayable on some monitors.

are u familiar or heard of userpatch, capture age, openage, freeage, aegis aoe engine?

Please do more age of empires reverse engineering

Nice one, indeed RE takes a lot of time ey. AOE1 was also one of the first games I hacked/modded as a kid

Nice work.

I see "Age of empires" in the title. I upvote immediately!

I've always wondered why Microsoft chose to name mangle basic functions by adding an underscore. I suspect it had something to do with not wanting name conflicts with kernel functions, most of which don't use an underscore, but I guess I'd have to ask someone from Microsoft that question. However, it is odd to me that Ghidra wouldn't automatically correct that name mangling.

I want these skillz!!!

It would be awesome if someone could show how to do this sort of thing (windows exe reversing) alongside wine on linux 😉(though I really should probably just look it up myself at some point). As a bonus you wouldn't have to patch the app to stop it from forcing focus or a resolution globally for all other apps.

Nice format. In a short video a lot information.

You make it look easy. I tried to reverse engineer a 1mb command line program using Ghidra and it was too hard (1 yr later the company open sourced it anyway).

Kids, this is why you pay attention in Computer Science class

i agree, we need this guy

killer thumbnail dude

4:58 an asterix? Like the comic character? :P

really Nice video

can you check if the remake uses the same system? maybe you can't debug it because of the drm (unless you get it from a questionable source)

I'd be hyped to see more reverse engineering of this game. The pathfinding in particular always seemed a bit broken.

I hate that thing with debugging a fullscreen application in the same computer because of focus. I always use remote debugging for this reason, usually I run the debugee in a virtual machine.

It's "asterisk". Asterix is the comic book character. Otherwise nice video!

I liked this and checked the worms vid out, subscribed

So after decades of waiting, our suspicions are finally confirmed. How does the AI work so well? It cheats🤣

You are insane man❤

You remember Tormentium? He knew everything about this game. He tore it apart and built an online hack for it back in the 90's. Spoiler Alert!!! I beat him 1v1 while he was using hacks once. Up a hill in ArcherWar. If you know you know. Among Koren 9 year olds, my stiff old man hands are legendary. There's nobody on this planet who's played AoE online competitively that I haven't beaten in a 1v1. I was always too SLoW for em. The way the script works is there's a base behavior for the starting villagers. They always build houses, a storage pit, and then prioritize between fishing, berries, or hunting, based based on the map seed. The script changes based on local resources and map placement. THEN it goes to the Civ specific AI. The map seed determines most of the behavior prior to the development of civ specific buildings and units. Little shortcut from back when there were no clear paths to begin with. I sacrificed the print on many a keyboard and put a few thousand miles on some mice to this game. Good stuff.

nice to see

Maybe you can fix the pathing for us

I wonder how badly the AI ‘cheats’

Where's the next video >:( 5 hours passed already

When you want to patch out an instruction, what is the next step to run the patches version of the game? Does it need to be recompiled or…

I once tried to extract the sprites of this game for fun, all these sprites are store in SLP files, these binary files are not compressed, it's not difficult to read and extract the data if you know the structure.

now get KSP2 source code and let's make it open source :D

Wololo Wololo like this video

But can you find out why sometimes Computer Player tries to convert gaia elephant with their priests? lol

Amazing.

Low level shenanigans had.

Does chatGPT can help reverse engineering? If you paste the assembly

wololo

Dude I would really like to get your help or the help of someone from your community (discord maybe?). I have been trying for about a decade now (on and off) to understand the savefile format of PatricianII / PatricianIII. It's such an amazing game and there is huge potential for automation if only I could read and write savefiles (they are used for ship navigation). But they seem to use some sort of ancient archiver or something on top of some datastructure and eventhough the archiver.dll is tiny and mostly calling default windows functions I could never understand anything that is happening. I would mean the world to mean if someone could have a quick look at that.

Are you aware of the custom AI diffficulties that people have made for AoE2?

Decent. Fun poking around aint it.

bigdaddy

❤❤❤❤❤ 👌 wowowowow

So they hard coded the AI and didn't even use a deep neural network? Weak.

Is it just me, or is this video a little quiet?

Do AoE 2 or we're not watching. Thumbs down.

I'm almost done making a game that is better than this

wololo