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Saturday, April 9th 2022, 7:06pm

For Alex SB2 Fix

Hope you are well...Saw you message on my YT site

You're lucky I still had it mate :)

Anyhow, here is the source code for my Sandbox2 fix.(It wont let me upload here) https://easyupload.io/ccy19d

No idea if it still works as its 12 years old now and I kind of left the scene shortly after, so not sure if any patches may screw it up.

its pretty easy to fix if it doesn't work as its just cycling through the windowhandles, hooking the right ones and then moving them in memory to where they should be in the right position on the screen

It was the only way I could do it in memory, as if I were to hack the exe, Crytek would have rained down on me as they dont like their exe's altered :)

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "Clivey" (Apr 9th 2022, 7:17pm)


Alex626

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Saturday, April 9th 2022, 7:26pm

Hope you are well...Saw you message on my YT site

You're lucky I still had it mate :)

Anyhow, here is the source code for my Sandbox2 fix.(It wont let me upload here) https://easyupload.io/ccy19d

No idea if it still works as its 12 years old now and I kind of left the scene shortly after, so not sure if any patches may screw it up.

its pretty easy to fix if it doesn't work as its just cycling through the windowclasses, hooking the right ones and then moving them in memory to where they should be in the right position on the screen

It was the only way I could do it in memory, as if I were to hack the exe, Crytek would have rained down on me as they dont like their exe's altered :)


Thank you so much, mate! I can't tell you how much I'm happy to see you here!

There's a lot of people in our Discord who's still doing modding for Crysis, and there are quite awesome projects, so if you'd like to talk with old-schoolers and some newbies, you're always welcome! The discord is international, there's only one channel in Russian language, people from around the globe got together in there.

Sandbox 2 still wasn't fixed, although a member named Comrade managed to create the Crysis.exe re-creation with his project c1-launcher. I hope your sources will help, as a lot of people (including myself) have troubles with SB2 on Windows 10 and 11. Maybe at least some bright people will figure out how to make an actual hack or patch based on these sources.

We are waiting for some Crysis mods to be released, like FarCry Remake and Crysis Co-Op, but at the same time the current CryEngine 5 seems to be total crap, it's totally not an important engine anymore.

I've heard some rumors when it was back in crymod.com days, that somebody crafted a level.pak file decompiler, but quickly removed the links to it. Wasn't it you?

Thanks God I've seen you on YouTube back then :) I hope you're alright. Thank you for coming, I was really happy to see you here!

3

Saturday, April 9th 2022, 7:57pm

Yes it was me that did the level.pak decompiler, but as I was the lead moderator on the official crymod forum, it didn't go down too well with Crytek, so they asked me to remove it and never release it which I agreed to as it was against the licence of the game.

I only created it out of curiosity, because I realised that if we could decompile it, I could create an app that could move/replace objects in a level, so in effect, you could have a app that randomly changed the buildings/object, making it a procedurally random, therefore every time you loaded a level, it would look feel a little different every time. I only really used it that from that point onwards to help people that had broken pak files.

They also banned me from releasing a mod called DynaFPS in Crysis, which tracked the FPS of the user and dynamically adjusted the visuals on the screen. So you could set it to 60 FPS and the mod would be dynamically increasing/decreasing the engine settings to maintain it. That didn't go down well with them as they were getting a lot of publicity of the "Can it run Crysis?" memes and that mod would have killed the publicity they got:)

Sadly, I don't have either of those anymore

What issues are you getting with Win10/11? If I get time, I might have a peak, just depends on what the issues are.

This post has been edited 3 times, last edit by "Clivey" (Apr 9th 2022, 8:20pm)


Alex626

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Saturday, April 9th 2022, 8:44pm

I only created it out of curiosity, because I realised that if we could decompile it, I could create an app that could move/replace objects in a level, so in effect, you could have a app that randomly changed the buildings/object, making it a procedurally random, therefore every time you loaded a level, it would look feel a little different every time. I only really used it that from that point onwards to help people that had broken pak files.



That's a wonderful idea! Although maybe it can be implemented with ModDLL, at least partially. Not so long ago I was experimenting with brushes, and I was able to reference each brush in the code and change their material layers (wet, frozen). Although vegetation doesn't have the required headers in Cry3DEngine. Maybe with some memory hacking it will be possible to change the level contents even in runtime.

They also banned me from releasing a mod called DynaFPS in Crysis, which tracked the FPS of the user and dynamically adjusted the visuals on the screen. So you could set it to 60 FPS and the mod would be dynamically increasing/decreasing the engine settings to maintain it. That didn't go down well with them as they were getting a lot of publicity of the "Can it run Crysis?" memes and that mod would have killed the publicity they got:)


Unbelievable! They undermined their own future... Performance was always the biggest issue with CryEngine. If such tool would be released today, it'd be greatly appreciated by everyone.

Sadly, I don't have either of those anymore


That's a shame. RaZoR-FIN was able to create the same tool for his Crysis Co-Op project, and he used it to extract Warhead levels into editable format, in order to use them with Crysis Wars engine.
Although today it's easier to mod CryEngine, because we have more experience, CryEngine 3 leaked sources (earliest CE3 is almost like CE2). But on the other hand there's less people in it. I was afraid the modding would die, but luckily people came together, and it seems like modding is slowly getting alive.


What issues are you getting with Win10/11? If I get time, I might have a peak, just depends on what the issues are.



Same as on Windows 7, the interface is broken, the coordinates bar on the bottom of the screen is missing, the viewport/helpers button is on the wrong side, and the music tab in Database View has one button missing as well.

5

Saturday, April 9th 2022, 11:31pm

If its moving controls around, then you can just simply add any new ones to the code I posted.

The easiest way is to use a spy tool like MS Spy++ or winspy, so you can just grab the handle and class name from Sandbox, get the location and force a new location in memory. Should be fairly easy to just add controls to my code.

Edit: The database button issue, if that database window is not part of the default SB2 window (i.e. the DB windows is opened by a menu/button), then you might have to add a timer in for scanning for the DB window every 1 or 2 seconds and if found, repaint the window after moving the button back to being visible.

Once the fix is in place, because you are still scanning every 2 secs, you can just add a Boolean to not apply it a 2nd time because the DB window has not bee closed yet. Then once the scanning detects the DB window is closed again, it can repaint it if opened up again by resetting the boolean.

It depends on how they coded the SB2 ie. they may destroy the DB window when its closed and create it on opening or you may find that is created once and kept in memory, in which case you will only need to fix it once

Does that make sense?

This post has been edited 3 times, last edit by "Clivey" (Apr 10th 2022, 12:44am)


Alex626

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Sunday, April 10th 2022, 5:10pm

If its moving controls around, then you can just simply add any new ones to the code I posted.

The easiest way is to use a spy tool like MS Spy++ or winspy, so you can just grab the handle and class name from Sandbox, get the location and force a new location in memory. Should be fairly easy to just add controls to my code.

Edit: The database button issue, if that database window is not part of the default SB2 window (i.e. the DB windows is opened by a menu/button), then you might have to add a timer in for scanning for the DB window every 1 or 2 seconds and if found, repaint the window after moving the button back to being visible.

Once the fix is in place, because you are still scanning every 2 secs, you can just add a Boolean to not apply it a 2nd time because the DB window has not bee closed yet. Then once the scanning detects the DB window is closed again, it can repaint it if opened up again by resetting the boolean.

It depends on how they coded the SB2 ie. they may destroy the DB window when its closed and create it on opening or you may find that is created once and kept in memory, in which case you will only need to fix it once

Does that make sense?


Excellent! Thank you!