In the following video I am demonstrating a proof of concept for an Achievement system. You can see "activation", "finishing", "failing" of sample achievements. For now, the achievement status is only shown in the "status label" on the right of the achievement title.
Unfortunately for you, the Achievements app is only in proof of concept state right now. It is not in the slightest ready to be published. There is still a lot of work ahead. But I wanted to show you what I have so far and I would love to hear your feedback on this project. Is the community even interested in such addition to the game?
So far I am testing the app only in singleplayer and LAN. Meaning that at this point I am not sure if it will be possible to use it while playing online. There are 2 reasons for that:
- It is quite possible that the same memory offsets won't be applicable for both, singleplayer and multiplayer. This would be solvable but it would require twice as much work.
- And then there is the second, possibly more problematic, reason. I wasn't checking if MedianXL has any anticheat active. The Achievements app kind of behaves like a hacking/cheating software. So trying it out online might result in a ban. This is something I need to discuss with the MedianXL dev team.
Also, before you start throwing at me hundreds of awesome achievements that I should add, you should understand that making a new achievement is not a simple task. Reason why I am showing only very basic achievements such as "don't lose health", "get from the area A to the area B" is because these were quite easily implementable. Basically for any value that I need for an achievement I have to dive deep into the game's memory to find what I am looking for. And for any reasonably complex achievement that you know from other games you need multiple such values.
To put it simply, it requires a lot of work to add any new type of achievement. To make this process faster I would like to ask for help:
- The MedianXL dev team - it would be immense help to know some internal data structures and memory layout. Please let me know if you would be willing to help.
- The community - I would need some people to help me with determining (or at least pointing me to the right direction of) addresses of various values in the game's memory.
My original plan was to get the app into a public Beta version before the Median patch 2.4.0 but it came earlier than I anticipated and I am nowhere close to being done.
UPDATE 1:
Few days after posting this I had some spare time and I made significant improvement to the app's core. Which means that it made a big leap closer to being in somewhat stable alpha version.
UPDATE 2:
Some time has passed and I am very close to being done with programming of the app's core. There is no major feature I want to add before pushing the app to the alpha testing stage.
However, right now I am little stuck with memory analysis. Certain values are more difficult to track than I anticipated.
My goal is to get the app into alpha version (for internal testing) before Christmas.
