As I imagine this is frowned upon, would I run afoul of any licenses etc. if I modified the CC executable? For that matter, will I be warned for this post? I want to try patching menu text back into Brutality, but feel like I may end up violating something.

As long as you have bought the game, I believe it should be okay to edit the files you wish to edit.

There is no law against modifying your game for personal use, but distributing the modification is illegal. You'd have to contact Data about that.

Distributing the modified version, or the modification itself? I may be overestimating people's ability to apply a bspatch, but I don't think legality would be a concern in that case(unless it contradicts forum rules?) As for contacting Data, unless I'm missing something major, a) I would not expect a response within a week and b) it would make more sense to ask him to spend half an hour commenting out the relevant two lines of code.

I do not know, sadly, and I don't want to tell you the wrong thing, so again, I'd say get in touch with Data.
And contrary to popular lore, you can usually get in touch with Data within a few hours via IM. I'll ask him next chance I get to take a look at this thread and get back to you about it.

I doubt there's a problem with modifying it for personal use, but distributing the .exe file, whether modified or not, would be illegal, for obvious reasons.

Well in that case, @Data, could you by any chance

• Pull a copy of R26 source from SVN
• Disable actor hovertext
• Compile for various platforms
  and
• Post the patches in the Brutality Mod thread?

Pretty please :moony:
Which is why I request(/permission to make) a binary patch, which would contain only the differences from vanilla CC, and be useless to anyone without a copy.

I so wish data would create a open source version of Cortex Command, even its only B23 or B24 i would be happy.

what's this hovertext you speak of?

distributing a modification is fine.. we're not that anal.

Data: I think he means the text that hovers over actors and displays their health and team.

Yes, see this thread. As far as I can tell, Crow nulled out a bunch of resources in Base.rte, which produced the desired effect at the cost of menu text. Skipping the "draw stuff over actors and weapons" routine in code should work somewhat better.

It's a pretty hacky method, but you could always change the actorheight of everything to some insanely high number so you never see their hud.

Actually there's also a HUDvisible flag (or something like that) in lua you can use. A level script with "For all actors in moveablewhatsit actor.HUDvisible = false" would suffice.

Couldn't you just... change HUDVisible... in the .ini? Or am I missing something :/

I'm quite confident that distributing something like an IPS patch for CC is completely legal. IPS Patches don't distribute the executable itself, only the CHANGES, so basically if you made and distributed a patch of any binary modifications you made to the CC executable, Data can't really complain since you're just distributing YOUR work--not his.