decompiling, disassembling and resource grabbing

[GoaSkin 2]

Maybe, it's possible to grab out information from Simcity.EXE which is helpful for modding projects. Has someone experience with decompiling and grabbing out resources from WIN32-binaries?

[Tropod 144]

Topics like this have been made before, but never go far. Because of the legal uncertainty for something like this, anything like this that you do do, the information should not be posted on this site.

 

[Daeley 46]

well the game is getting a bit older these days and I think we've been held back by the invisible barrier with the .exe for long enough... besides, we're only looking, right?

[GoaSkin 2]

There is no law against decompiling and reverse-engineering in the most countries (it is prohibited in the USA) while you don't use the code for your own programs or to distribute a patch. We aren't going to release a patched simcity.exe - only to find out exemplar and INI settings useful for modding which are supported but never used by Maxis.

[Tropod 144]

That's all well & good & understandable, but the fact is unless you're a lawyer or have consulted a lawyer & know these things for a fact, then Simtropolis can not be seen as openly &/or knowingly supporting something like this without prior approval from Maxis/EA, or without the approval of an admin here, namely dirk.

 

[GoaSkin 2]

I was trying to contact someone at Maxis but that's difficult. The support forms reach employees at EA which don't know where to forward the more difficult questions.
The Maxis homepage gives no hint how to contact a developer. If we're able to contact the right person, we could get some hints.

In older postings I heard that there were users which have contacts to Maxis.

[DarkMatter 21]

There are ways to contact Maxis developers. Having met many of them in person myself, and having had the chance to ask them questions like this, I can tell you that reverse-engineering the .exe is not something EA will take kindly to. There are certain areas that are completely off-limits to Maxis developers, to the point where if you ask them, they will clam up and immediately change the subject, after telling you not to talk about the subject again. I recommend that you not try to hack the .exe (not publicly anyway ).

[Karybdis 34]

If you do such things, they have to be done on your own time as we cant support legal uncertainties. This kind of thing is deffinitely possible, but that's the essential problem

Maxis basically gives anybody who asks them, a cold shoulder on the subject, so take that for what you will.

 

People who do this kind of thing with other programs that THEY create normally use programs called Debuggers or Disassemblers, which translate their own code.

[builderman 3]

You can't use a debugger on SC4, at least not easily. A seperate program runs as an SC4 debugger (that's what the blahblah.tmp program is)