November 2021 Update (CLEO Redux, patrons and more)

Last month was busy! The remastered GTA trilogy has been released and we've got three new games to mod! Despite the disastrous launch they are going to stay and may potentially be a good choice for practicing modding skills. Fortunately the underlying game engine did not change much, and many things, specifically related to my area of interest, remained more or less the same. It allowed me to adopt a newer CLEO (CLEO Redux) to GTA San Andreas: The Definitive Edition in just a few days.

There have been some challenges along the way though. First of all, all three games are now 64-bit, which I never previously worked with before. Classic GTA games are all built on 32-bit platform and it's much easier to deal with. x64 is bigger, has larger memory addresses, more CPU registers, different calling conventions, etc. Also the game is new and no known memory addresses are available. The second challenge was caused by the fact CLEO Redux did not support San Andreas before. I was mostly focused on GTA3 and GTA VC games, which share a lot of similarities in the code, whereas San Andreas stands aside (it has external scripts, for example). Prior to v0.8.0 CLEO Redux only worked with San Andreas scripts as a companion to CLEO4.

It was a buzz on Sanny Builder Library too. It got a massive update to support GTA III, VC and SA in three different editions (classic, mobile, remasters -- 9 games in total). Now we can properly list game opcodes in each release without mixing them. More work awaits us there given the fact we now have a lot of uncovered information about game scripts.

I also launched a Discord channel dedicated to Sanny Builder, CLEO and related questions. Feel free to hop on and join our growing community. It's also new to me, so any suggestions are welcome.

Finally in November I got my first patron supporting me. Yay! Thanks, DadlyPrey. It's actually the first donation I've received in my 18-years modding career. Not sure exactly how to best deal with it, but I'm very grateful!

That's all for now. There is a lot of things on my todo list, so thanks to everyone who supports me, shares their feedback and contributes. Happy holidays to y'all!