RockPatch
The RockPatch was an unofficial patch or "exe hack" for Westwood's Yuri's Revenge, created by pd and later continued by VK. Major code contributions were also made by jonwil, and Marshall frequently wrapped the releases into a convenient patcher, before he eventually created an automated program for the coders to do this themselves. RockPatch gained fame through the fact that, for the first time ever, someone overcame rules(md).ini limitations and modded YR in a way that could not be done via INI modifications1. It was also revolutionary in a different kind of way: it finally proved that the key to extending or modding the engine were not the often-cited .TLB-files, but the game(md).exe itself.
Having been created on January 14, 2005, RockPatch ran for two and a half years, until development was ceased on June 08, 2007. As of now, it has been superseded by the Ares project.
The highest created RockPatch version is 1.10, and it can be downloaded from VK's official site, as well as from mirrors here or here.
The History of RockPatch
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The new thread
Sheltered from DeeZire's evil influence, developement skyrocketed. Soon talks of a "real", community-issued YR 1.002 started, and more and more features were added to the game. The thread spawned a wishlist and several other pages at ModEnc2, and is currently the most-visited, most important and most-posted-in thread at the Renegade Projects Forums (1,267 replies, 64 pages).
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The End of RockPatch
On June 05, 2007, pd revoked VK's right to use the name "RockPatch". VK ignored this, and released RP 1.10 #0036 a day later. After some more discussion, on June 08, 2007, VK declared the project ended due to the technical limits of the YR engine being reached. In the same post, he announced that he was going to write his own engine (joining the ranks of several other projects already running). For some time, this seemed to have been the end of RockPatch. VK continued hacking the exe with his new "NPatch" project, a thinly-veiled continuation of RockPatch (using 1.10 as its basis), but as his style of work didn't change, the community mostly followed him out of necessity (him being the only exe hacker around) rather than enthusiasm.
A New Hope
After some work behind the scenes and a silent pre-announcement a few days earlier, on October 19, 2007, pd officially announced the development of RockPatch 2 (currently known as Ares. Contrary to VK's "let the users find the bugs" mentality, pd made it a point to say
The purpose of this should be clear: RockPatch2 is to be bug free, and I must say I have done a good job until now for that matter.
While this announcement is sure to win over the hearts of many who have loathed the bugfest that were the later RP versions, he also announced that he "will not do everything VK did for the NPatch and if you need a certain NPatch feature badly, you will have to use NPatch instead."'
The Death of NPatch
On November 6, 2008, after almost a year since the last release of NPatch, one of Revora's community members spoke with VK about the status of NPatch. VK replied that he wouldn't return to finish NPatch, and declared it a dead project, and that if he returned, he would create his own engine.
Footnotes
1 ↑ Truth to be told, there were actually some projects re-enabling the third campaign button through a similar method. However, there's a big difference between looking at game.exe, looking at gamemd.exe, and then filling the gaps, and adding entirely new code and features into the game.
2 ↑ At the time of the original writing, the page "YR 1.001pd Wishlist" was actually the most popular page on ModEnc, with 7,589 views, followed by the Main Page with 5,025 views, and then by the other two RockPatch pages, YR 1.001pd Votelist (3,757 views) and YR 1.001pd Status (2,899 views); due to the deletion of these original pages after moving RockPatch to its own namespace, these statistics are lost.
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