There should be a frame limiter - should be easy enough: hook into the display routine, and wait until the next frame should hit.

Trigger messages are mostly a developer feature, and should be disabled by default.

Ideally by implementing #6 we should have a list of supported features and keep track of them, and what's bad / good about them (or more specifically: who should be using them).

At the time of writing these are:

Integrated

(More information regarding these can be found in the respective PR)

• Replacing font0, font1, font2, font3, font4 with higher resolution versions ( partially in #3 ); graphics enhancement
  The existing font hacks also come with their own resource files, so applying them won't break the game for anyone.
  However, we do need legal remakes of the original fonts, and that work is not complete yet. The current fonts look "odd" so nobody should use the patcher.
  The files need to be licensed properly and a way to integrate them should be found. As generating *.raw or *.bin files using external tools is not the best option.

• Patch quality of streamed audio; audio enhancement
  This patch breaks the game for people, because suddenly all background music files would have to be stored at 44.1kHz . It should be optional or be enhanced to dynamically change the playback rate etc.

• Upgrade network play updates to 100%; network mode enhancement
  This patch is untested. It has been confirmed to work in hosting mode, but no other players were on the server at the time. It has also not been tested wether the DirectPlay GUID switching works, which should prevent players with this patch, to play with unpatched versions.
  Also see #5 .

• Disable podracer vs. podracer collisions in multiplayer mode ( #10 ); network mode enhancement

• Load sprites from TGA ( #11 ); development feature
  This was merged mostly for its support functions, to make it easier to integrate #14 .
  Note that this does nothing, if there are no replacement TGA files. However, if the TGA files exist, it might cause memory leaks or other issues.

• Add string display when a trigger is executed ( #12 ); development feature

Network mode enhancements also affect the games DirectPlay GUID, and combinations of enabled features should probably generate a unique combination for the GUID, so only versions with the same patches can play together.

Development features are pretty shady hacks and should not be used. They might break some things in the game logic, leak memory or do other bad things. They might still be useful for prototyping future hacks or tools.

While the ingame config is fully configurable (independent for each upgrade category), the select-podracer display is messy and only uses 1 kind of upgrade part level / health for all categories.

So the visual data from the menu and the actual handling would be out of-sync.
The patch should be ehanced so the configuration can be done freely.

This was a bit messy as I wrote it at 7AM without sleep. Needs a cleanup.

This should be changed by CMake as I'm not willing to compromise quality because of end-users.

The game looks bad when trying to display the fonts at smaller resolutions. The edges become very pixelated.

We should consider reducing our resolution to increase font-smoothing.
We should also review the games texture interpolation states for fonts.

Also, the font texture format should be changed from A4 to A8.

I think this is too hacky for OpenSWE1R and diverges too much from the OpenSWE1R idea.

I should add my typical readme for private projects with donation links and such.
Obviously I should still link to OpenSWE1R and probably also advertise that project in the patched game (with an additional text on the main menu for example).

I should also add a "thanks" for work done by @jordan4302 and ask about sharing donations and permissions in this context.

Ideally, these fonts should be integrated into the binary.
However, for the time being, we should at least handle this gracefully by spitting an error, and simply not patch the font in question.

Could replace the copyright message in the splash screen / main menu for example.

I think the gameplay changes should be kept seperated from the actual bugfixes.

The patcher should use some pre-made functions to read/write memory.

That way, it could also be converted into a loader which makes it impossible to re-distribute a patched binary.

The tool should detect patched files and reject them. This can easily be done by checking if the "hack" section exists already.

Need's #include <sys/types.h> added to compile on Windows.

We currently have issues running on Windows. We seem to break the Windows PE loader.
I assume that our poorly highjacked .rsrc section is the issue.
It's only a theory as I don't have time to debug this.

Other things which might go wrong could be file size alignment or the other size information:

SizeOfCode		000aa800
SizeOfInitializedData	00a22600

A hook / loader would be ideal, to avoid this mess altogether.
However, that would not be supported in OpenSWE1R and I'm not currently willing to integrate such enhancement hacks into OpenSWE1R either.

So, for testing, a better patcher would be ideal, because that would still work with OpenSWE1R which is my only way of testing.

An unconfirmed bug report.

I did a code review but could not see an issue? Needs testing.
The stdout should display the network GUID, so this should be easy to debug by running the game / loader / launcher via cmd or powershell

(This was reported by LightningPirate via Discord DM)