---EDITED---

THIS PATCH IS A STUPID BROKEN MESS AND I SHOULD HAVE NEVER POSTED IT.

SEE MY POST (POST 15) FOR AN EXPLANATION

I AM REMOVING THE LINK FOR THE ACTUAL PATCH. PLEASE REVERT TO THE ORIGINAL EXE.



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I have patched One Unit Whole Blood's BLOOD.EXE to fix this one issue.

For those you don't know, when you load a game, the damage scaling is wrong. On STILL KICKING, the damage becomes MORE than Extra Crispy when you load. Likewise, loading an EXTRA CRISPY saves gives you damage almost as small as still kicking.


This is a very annoying glitch, and I have modified BLOOD.EXE to fix this.

I also offer a second version of the .EXE, which will freeze the damage scaling to that of Still Kicking, in any difficulty level, for those who wants to play Extra Crispy with all the extra monsters but want to stand a chance.

(THE PATCH HAS BEEN REMOVED)

CHEATED EXE with easy damage scaling: http://www.mediafire.com/?i9ww6654i0j6dva

Courtesy of Status Cruo on http://www.the-postmortem.com/forum/ for the patching program.


Links will also be available at http://sfjake.zxq.net/.

Please remember to BACKUP your BLOOD.EXE file before replacing it, just in case.

This is NOT an official patch. I'm just a fan fixing one my favorite game. Enjoy!

Thank you for the saved game fix. I wish my gog downloader believed I have netframework 3.5, then I could test it out. A small note about the difficulty reducer, Some of us old timers regard extra crispy difficulty as a rite of passage. Is there any chance you would be willing to rename the reducer to something different than 1.22 patch? It would eliminate the risk of confusion.

I wonder how many people truly completed Extra Crispy in its true glory before this :) Trust me, I save and load all the time, thought Extra Crispy was fine. Try it again with this, that new rite of passage is a heck of a lot harder than it seemed :) Only players who never saved in the middle of a level and only saved before the end of a level (to avoid the glitch, essentially) have -truly- completed Extra Crispy.

Can I change the name? Well, uh, I didn't think it would be confusing, that option is obviously a cheat and its labeled as such. I guess I could just not call it 1.22 at all.

Oh man, you're right. The thought that I've never completed Blood on its hardest setting is almost too unsettling. Thank you for reframing that for me.


Now here's one you may or may not have considered. That *bug* might not have been a bug at all. It may have been a feature. Somewhere in gaming theory it states that line about challenging player while maintaining enough of a reward system to keep subject interested. In modern games there's a lot of "dynamic" difficulty tuning that occurs in game, I'm sure you've noticed it. Said bug could have been a low tech approach to accomplish the same thing.

Just a thought.

Well I don't mean to offend, but when a dynamic difficulty scaling makes damage higher on a low difficulty setting when someone saves/load, that is one terrible system, wouldn't you say?

I don't see how that could have been an intentional design decision.

Yikes, just went back and read your post again more carefully, your right of course. I didn't even know about the still kicking part of it, just the extra crispy. Anyway, (lol) thanks again for your excellent patch. They say hex editing is hard work but I hope you'll leave the door open to the possibility of future Blood endeavors none the less, maybe something beyond bug fixing.

So uh... how do you feel about glide wrappers?




*Sneaks away in hope of avoiding a well deserved beat down.*

Bwahaha, if I can tell you one thing, its that I'm no programmer, I'm no hacker, I've actually almost never really done anything of that sort. I had basically no hex editing experience and thought "hey, lets try to do that". And I did it.

Logically, HEX editing anything heavy sounds absolutely insane. You need an incredibly patient guy or something. This fix was easy, because in the end, it was just about finding a few numbers together, and changing them, and that just worked. Any remotely complex bug I never could have fixed with my skills.

I wish I could do more, but this is the best I can ever do for Blood =P At least until the source comes out.

Does this patch include the CD audio loop fix?

That fix you mention changes dosbox.exe, while mine changes blood.exe.

Can you let us know the string of numbers and what they should be changed to? Upload sites are notorious for expiring file links and something like this would certainly be good to have documented someplace.

Certainly.

Original:

00 02 00 00 80 01 00 00 00 01 00 00 D0 00 00 00 A0 00

Fixed:

90 00 00 00 D0 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 30 01 00 00 70 01

Line starts at 14D4A8. Those were the damage scaling -after- load, essentially. I don't know why the game loads a separate set of values for it, but it does.

The normal damage scaling (that which you get normally) is basically the same line as the fixed one found in the original file. You can find it and alter it to, say:

90 00 00 00 90 00 00 00 90 00 00 00 90 00 00 00 90 00

...to have my 2nd cheated patch with easy damage scaling.

Awesome! Thanks for the patch! This has been bugging me quite a bit -- wasn't an issue since I played through on the middle difficulty during my first run, but now it'll be great to have.

Lightly Broiled is the only difficulty where the damage never changes, so by playing that you avoided the glitch, yes.

Here's a quick list.
The first number is the % of damage you take normally. The second is after loading.

Still Kicking -----------> 56% ---> 200%
Pink on the Inside --> 81% ---> 150%
Lightly Broiled -------> 100% --> 100%
Well Done ------------> 119% --> 81%
Extra Crispy ----------> 144% --> 63%

The numbers are rough but you get the idea.

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Well, well, well.

I'm removing the links and the instructions.

If anyone of the GOG team had considered including this patch officially, please don't.

Apparently I completely missed this obvious issue, everybody else did.

The numbers I was changing are not really the "bad" damage scaling values. Well, they are, but they're also the damage scaling on the monsters.

Basically, Extra Crispy is totally screwed up in this manner, with monsters always doing the damage they should yes, but now you can kill them very easily.

This means the game just references this section wrongly and I don't have the competence to change that, in fact I didn't have to spot this problem before I bloody posted the god damn patch everywhere.


The patch was crap. Please stop using it. I'll leave the "easy" one because this one works fine as a cheat but the patch is scrapped.

This is shameful and I'm truly sorry.