Happy Anniversary!
A little retrospect: in late 2004, I started thinking about how there must be a goddamn way to get more countries and player colors into the game. Not willing to give up on this, I armed myself with a hex editor and spent hours reading on x86 assembly programming using hex codes. This evolved pretty quickly. I turned into a librarian for addresses in gamemd.exe and got squashed by a never ending and ever growing wishlist from the community for features in RockPatch.
In 2008, having experienced many issues that resulted from collaborative development in hex assembly, I got the crazy idea of injecting pre-written code into the executable at runtime. Surprised by the fact that it worked (thanks to Westwood for releasing uncrypted debug builds!), I realized that this would also set the foundation for a C or C++ library - Syringe and Ares were born.
However, I grew tired of the project because it was very exhausting in the early years. Luckily, the fresh C++ binding made it much easier for more people to get involved, and here we are today, seeing fresh releases and active development in 2015, a full decade later!
Therefore:
HAPPY 10 YEARS ANNIVERSARY!
Please don't get me wrong on the above. The laurels do not belong to me anymore and certainly never did to me alone. In the name of the project, I would like to express my biggest thanks to everybody involved in it. Developers, helpers, testers, users. A few special thanks now, because I feel a little cheesy today (it's a brainchild, after all)!
Renegade, for immediately granting a platform after DeeZire mods decided it was against EA's EULA to edit the game's executable and shut my thread down, for hosting and maintaining all the things around it (wishlist, bugtracker, website, forum, the list goes on and on), for helping clean up my messy C++ and for active development and contributions.
DCoder, for his huge knowledge of C&C's inner workings that helped a lot of times, for his overall sanity and reasonability, and of course for active contribution and development, especially around the time and after I parted.
Marshall, for the awesome promotion from the start and for creating the patcher and later the launcher! He practically did the work I hated the most - rounding things up for a release.
jonwil, I have sadly not seen his name for ages! Showed up out of nowhere and provided a great understanding of assembly editing! He helped me improve my skills a lot and was the first to take part in collaborative development. He's the one who realized that Westwood's builds were debug builds and provided me with knowledge about C++ to assembly translation, which is practically the only reason I could ever come up with Syringe. There may be no Ares without jonwil! Then at some point, he disappeared back into nowhere. Where's jonwil?
VK, besides all the damage he caused (still my view today), was an extremely important guy to have onboard. He also provided a great bunch of knowledge about C++ compiler practices and how they ended up looking in assembly. Even though I cannot name anything specific right now, I know that he managed to rearrange my thinking about certain aspects and helped me do things more efficiently. His contributions have also been very valuable at the time.
Bobingabout and Droke, who provided huge help with trying my test builds (the lab rats
), gave a lot of advice and were always good chat partners. I owe both of you a big sorry for cancelling contact very suddenly.
EA APOC alias Aaron Kaufmann, EA's community manager back in the days. There is no direct proof as far as I know, but he endorsed the RockPatch project and might have played a role when The First Decade was released. At the time, I e-mailed him about my concerns about how a new version of YR might nix years of work. In the released version, interestingly, the executable of Yuri's Revenge was not re-compiled (like RA2 or TS) but only minimally hex edited, maintaining full compatibility to RockPatch.
Whoever took care of the build management at Westwood, because he delivered uncrypted debug builds for the game's release. This caused some cringe-worthy moments reading unoptimized code, but if they didn't have it this way, I might have given up on the whole idea in 2004 already. No way the "search for string" approach to find a start would have worked.
CCHyper, for doing this for TS! I always outspokenly disliked TS and was not interested in doing any of this for TS. Luckily, there's this guy, the only C&C hacker who's capable of suplexing you around in a wrestling ring.
The current Ares team. I have to admit that I am not following this too actively and I cannot name all the people currently involved, but your work means a lot to me personally.
I would namely like to thank AlexB for keeping all of this more alive than ever and I know that Graion Dilach, Nighthawk and gordon-creAtive did a lot of work on testing, documentation and the work developers hate.
The community - sorry that I cannot name everybody explicitly, you know how this is. There are many names and it's been quite a while. You know you are meant when you read this. If it wasn't for your testing, your neverending wishlist, your praise, your complaints, your aspiration of YR modding, what motivation would there have been to do this?
In closing, I'd like to say: keep it up!
Happy coding, happy modding and good luck!
