Transformers Online: Restored

Yes, folks, it's happening. The thing noone but me asked for. Alternatively: With the help of my amazing boyfriend @the-mcintosh we (read: him, his team and me as moral support) are trying to put the game back online! Once (or if, but let's be hopeful here) we manage to do it, we'll hopefully make the game widely avaible for the Transformers community yet again. And with the horrid lack of any transformers games lately (especially after the tradgedy that was Reactivate…) hopefully this can put us in high spirits!

Now, onto the technical side:

(Special thanks to the person from discord who after seeing an earlier message I sent DM'd me and gave us more game files, which turned out to be basically the finished product. I swear my bf was drooling through the screen when I sent them over)

Progress is going steady, especially today it picked up quite a lot once we've managed to get the files of the game's latest version, when up until now we were working with older alpha builds. The managed to get into the game's source code, which basicallu opened up the flood gates. It's amazing I'm making this as basically an introduction and will promptly give up the mantle of update making to my bf, who insisted on making his first post after he manages to get into the game's main menu. Right now, it "does not wanna FUCKING ACCEPT MY FUCKING BITCH ASS FUCKING DLL" Anyways, to finish: Here's some screenshots of the progress made. Hopefully this exites at least someone out there!

and some loading screens!

"look at all those juicy blue functions, i can't wait to dig in"

hello everybody!! welcome back to another update post on the TFOL restoration project i made the mistake of starting!! today's edition of the update post will include the discord messages i sent the screenshots with, because some of them i still find absolutely hilarious taken out of context lol (they will be in quotes and stylized with italics)

"wish me luck because my therapist will break down into tears once i tell her about transformers online"

i've been hard at work trying to get things to work - and working they have been. first of all, i've managed to bypass some entry level layers of debugger protection, which allows me to study the game better:

"I WILL KILL THE FIRST CHINESE PERSON I SEE ON THE STREETS"

most of the people i tried getting help from on the project backed out almost instantly after seeing the level of protection this stuff has (i dont blame them), but i've been slowly making progress by myself.

last couple of days, i've generally only worked on trying to get a window to render ingame and also prettifying the console logger, with this being the result:

"holy peak bro"

that's basically it for this update lol. i know it's quite small, so to make up for it's tiny size, i'm attaching the animated intro which plays every time you start up the game (yes. i've started up the game so many times that this intro is now engraved into my brain.)! enjoy!! see you in the next update!!!

Update 2, Unexpected Problems Arose

Hello, it is I, chief of operations on the project, mc-intosh... I'd like to start off this update post by telling you guys that everyone I've spoken to and everyone who's tried helping me on this, including myself, wants to, quote, "off themselves" after multiple (unsuccessful) attempts of trying to get this game to work. I'm working on this basically alone, apart from @domincja (who is constantly making sure I don't off myself because of this game) so it might take a while until we get the game past the intro sequence, into the main menu. I've already spent hours on reverse engineering how the Tencent Protect anticheat works and I believe I'm, slowly but surely, making progress on fully understanding it.

Why is modding this game so difficult?

Well, you see, Unreal Engine 4 has tons of tools available online made by the community to quickly find information required for setting up a mod project ("Offsets" of "GNames", "GObjects", etc. for those looking for technical details) which should ideally make the process streamlined and easy!! ...But unfortunately, none of them work on Transformers Online. Tencent has made some, in my opinion, very stupid choices when making this game, in turn making my job much harder than it needs to be.

First of all, they use their own, proprietary version of Unreal Engine 4.14.3, which features several inconvenient changes, such as offsetting some values in the game's files seemingly in order to prevent people from accessing the 3D models, textures, maps, etc. and encryption/protection of the game's main executable file in a way that obscures locations of useful text that could be used to get the previously mentioned "offsets" for mods and cheats.

Second, some kind of "TCLS Proxy" fails to initialize upon opening the game, which causes the game to close itself immediately after the intro finishes playing. My current goal is to either circumvent this initialization check using a custom patch made for the game or to somehow make this proxy work.

And last, (this one pisses me off the most) they published the game as a 32-bit application, instead of the modern 64-bit standard. Most Unreal Engine modding tools exclusively support the 64-bit standard, because it is set by default in new projects in Unreal and, sure enough, most popular and even niche games use it, but Tencent, of course, had to change this one setting and make my life infinitely harder. To my understanding, this choice was made so that Transformers Online can support older computers running outdated systems such as Windows 7 or Windows Vista, BUT STILL TENCENT FUCK YOU!!

What is the next step?

I discovered which part of the code is responsible for detecting modifications to the executable and most files. I will be attempting to patch this code in order to circumvent this check, so I can add other patches I need for the game to work into the executable. Wish me luck. After this, it will hopefully be less of a hassle to figure out what else is needed to get the game running.

Anyway, most of the work I've done between yesterday and today is behind-the-scenes, so for today's screenshots, you're getting some character models for Jazz, Sunstreaker and Optimus Prime.

Thank you for reading this far,

@the-mcintosh

(that was quick lol)

As I was making the first post the dreaded DDL finally let through! Hooray!