thehologram - Comments

I'm not aware of any at the moment.  I've unplugged from various scenes I was involved in over the years.  I'm sure there are discords and what not but I'm not a member of any of that.  nexusmods will likely enter the picture at some point for distribution if its easy to useful mods that work. I'm pretty much stick to this forum and fearlessrevolution.com for my hacking away at stuff.  I noticed they had hacking boards here so I joined in.   

A lot of times discussion is diffuse because the hacking tends to be related to a specific game and a lot of talk is on those forums like this one but the tools used work on a lot of games so those devs are elsewhere.

On the data access front, I haven't found the exact code but the behavior seems to be very cache oriented.  Basically the C# objects look like they get a cache of the real data periodically.  So for example click on your manager after hitting continue and it will load the manager object from the game_plugin.dll object and marshal it to the C# object.  It will use that data for display until you press Continue or similar event.   They did this occasionally in the older games to speed up data access on some screens.  I think the implication is that you will not be able to make direct changes to the underlying object from C#.  It is likely used for display only and changes will got through methods which are called.

Not entirely unreasonable for performance but it makes it more difficult to write in game editors and what not.  For direct edits, CE may still be the better tool this time around.   Not 100% confident in the finding but seems to be the case based on data access patterns.

If you can ask the code decompiler to generate a different syntax do that.  Otherwise unfortunately you need to change the syntax.   If you have Claude or Copilot you could ask the AI to do that for you I guess.   Probably just easier to edit every file.  Maybe sed/awk your way through and change namespace XXX; to namespace xxx { then add } to the end of every file.

Alternately use a different compiler to compile it.  Not sure your setup.   I think you can externalize Unity to compile with a Visual Studio instead.   Its been a while since I hacked inside Unity directly.

The code generator is generating newer syntax than the mono compiler supports I guess.  Its just a compiler syntax thing.

namespace FM.UI;

public class PersonReference {}

When it should be something like this for C# 9

namespace FM.UI

{ 

    public class PersonReference   { }

}

No need.  I'm sure he is aware of the game and took back the CE table from me for FM24 and did a lot of extra work to it.  Probably capable of doing the work themselves.  Also I think that discussion might be more appropriate in another one of your other threads here.

The console is this.  Haven't updated the public repository for years as I just keep private forks for whatever games I'm toying with.  The challenge with il2cpp is that we have to remap all of the mono_ apis to the il2cpp_ equivalents and recompile it.  Doable but usually of questionable value.  Also a lot of newer unity games ship with jit/reflection apis disabled so you have to swap out one of the System dlls which I'm not sure how that would work with il2cpp and might not allow reflection at all which would break the value of the python scripting.

https://github.com/TheHologram/unity-console 

On that note I was able to get the core of my FM23 CE table partially working.  That is found vtable offsets for player, clubs and whatnot.  The challenge now would be correlating the C# objects with the underlying player objects assuming there is some thing useful.   Next will be to get some stable way of matching what is on screen with those objects.  To get that table working.

I used Il2CppDumper and it worked fine to produce something valid that loads up in dnSpy.  My cursory review of the api is that what is exposed looks barely useful.  Not sure if they even have the raw memory pointer available in the underlying reference objects.  Will need to actually wire that up to confirm.  I think they have the database id so there is probably an api to look up objects from the id or hopefully done automatically. Seems like it might be convoluted to get access to underlying data.  A lot of it was very generic wrappers so for example no obvious way to navigate through teams to squads to players and staff from just the C# api.  Or to just get all attributes on a player or even their name.  Probably still easier to go straight at the underlying raw pointers in something like cheat engine like before. I'm really not sure if I'll have time for a while to hack around seriously so I guess tdg6661 may need to step up for cheat engine again.  I guess we will have to reverse engineer the underlying screens to see how they are using the data-binding and object marshaling for better examples.

That kind of disappoints me so I just hope I overlooked something obvious as I only spent 30 minutes or so on it.

 As an aside, I've never converted my IronPython-based scripting console to Il2Cpp even though I suspect it has a decent chance of working.   I would love to do that if the api was more pleasant to work with but I'm not sure it would be so probably still not the time to fix that up.

Gold mine of a video. They say that they started with UI Toolkit but quickly realized that they needed to roll their own so probably just need to wait and find out.  While UI Toolkit took on those features they wanted they kept the home rolled version.  The video is a year old so maybe they went back.  I'd sort of be surprise if they switched back though unless they think it will result in less maintenance. They already sunk the cost in to a custom system though.