Greetings, my quest brought me here!

[InterdimensionalSailboat]

Hello! my name is Stefan and i have landed here through a series of events.
I was moving,
I got tired and realized i needed something chill to do and pass the time with after a bunch of it was done.
I bought a wii and started playing wii sports.
I at first thought i would be bowling a bunch but i ended up addicted to golf.
During play I eventually thought it would make for a relaxing livestream.
So i set up to stream it on twitch.
Then while playing, the game dev inside of me wanted to make a couple changes and additions to the game.
I was frantically looking around to see how i could edit the game files and make the changes i was eager to make.
things seem to be looking incredibly difficult.
there was this team that made a modpack with the last update in 2021.
A couple people showing how to edit the image files and maps but only to a certain degree.

A lot of this was happening on or adjacent to this website so i decided to join in.
Hello!

If you have any info that would put me on the right track to getting basically full control of how the game operates:
placement of menu elements,
what actions those menu buttons would perform in terms of scene and in-scene loading,
custom way of loading/generating maps.

Then I would massively appreciate this as I've been at this for ages and will continue to look around.

I have come as far as installing dolphin on my ubuntu laptop and extracting the .wbfs to its component files for now, will continue from there tomorrow.

Thank you for reading,
I don't know a damn thing about forums.

 

[FAST6191]

Menu elements placement is usually a graphics thing, and somewhat jumping in at the deep end compared to most edits where you effectively edit in place/replace like with like or have simple positioning maps. You also have the logic and even more so if this is a Wii game where you point things and have to click on them that will need repositioning.

Actions for menu operations. Usually not so bad to find out, I normally find some action that happens in the game as a result of the menu action (can be anything from a sound effect to character HP to something graphical) and set a breakpoint on that. You can go the other way and watch for controller states and things referencing that though. It gets more fun if you want to add further options to a menu as well as you will then likely run into limiting aspects (only press down 10 times say, after that start from the top or block further things, you then getting to edit that).
Maps wise if the game does not have a user created option then yeah editing time. Most things are not going to be PC like and parse a folder and instead most will start out altering an existing level. For 3d games you tend to have two aspects and some further stuff. Said aspects are the 3d model that the level probably is and the collision and other data (Mario Kart KCL files being a nice case study).

For this you will want a debugging emulator. Not sure what Dolphin has these days, I recall something about it speaking to SDL a while back but you might also have to go several versions back to when its debugger was more prominent.

 

[InterdimensionalSailboat]

This sounds very promising as to what is possible.
Currently i have only come as far as clicking on the binary files with file types I've never and it basically not opening like your every day unity scripts (duh, but still idk what else to do yet).
If you have any cheat sheets and/or tutorials laying around on how to get to editing anything (especially logic related.) that would be immensely appreciated.

 

[FAST6191]

https://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2016-edition-out.73394/ has some stuff for the GBA and DS, the principles of ROM hacking apply everywhere though.

https://www.romhacking.net/documents/361/ is another for the GBA I tend to link in scenarios like this, the rest of the site is also probably the main general hub for ROM hacking (though Wii stuff is

Debugging in general.
Memory viewers are fairly straight forward, hopefully you can already make cheats https://web.archive.org/web/20080309104350/http://etk.scener.org/?op=tutorial
Breakpoints are where the fun starts (you can also have log/watch points that note things to an external location).
Following the standard model of computer memory.
Break on Read.
Break on Write.
Break on execute.
Respectively they stop execution, say here are the last ? commands, here are the registers and so forth when the area is read from, written to or has code on it executed.

The following is using a very old device but I rarely see a better example of the mindset required.


https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Main_Page covers some of the wii hardware, and generally for any given system the source code for whatever emulators you have tends to also double as hardware reference. The wii is also enough of an overclocked gamecube that http://hitmen.c02.at/files/yagcd/yagcd/index.html is probably also useful.
https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Debugging covers some methods of debugging, more aimed at homebrew so you probably won't have nice debug flags to play with but eh.

https://wiki.tockdom.com/wiki/Main_Page should find some nice stuff on KCL files if you wanted that.

The Wii uses a fairly obscure flavour of the powerpc instruction set, powerpc in general being different in many ways to other assembly languages. You can go find a listing if you want, though for that sort of thing I generally point people at the X86 world and say follow that to grasp the basics and then pivot back to what one you care about.
https://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/
https://stuff.pypt.lt/ggt80x86a/asm1.htm

 

[InterdimensionalSailboat]

I first of all would really like to thank you for providing these resources to learn the trade.

This is basically chinese to me and i don't speak chinese yet.
Ill try to make heads or tails of it.

Rn i was just trying to open a carc file with NARCTool but it wont work for some reason with it needing 12 byte buffer to decompress or unpack don't remember (whatever that means).
I popped it into a hex editor to see what that would yield, i saw you mentioned that in another thread, not very clear yet but there were some words in there and it wasn't yelling at me that it can't read it i guess.
Lots of terms in that program i do not understand yet.

I promised myself i would look at this more tomorrow like three hours ago.

Good night! xD

 

[CoolMe]

Hello @InterdimensionalSailboat and welcome to GBATemp!