When did you start doing this?

[spicybung]

Q: When did you start reverse-engineering and making scripts for Leeds/Stories/Manhunt games?

[spicybung]

A: Going through the .WDR file format for GTA IV was something I did off and on in 2024, although I didn't have much success understanding, as I'm always learning, and that was definitely my rookie days in the first 2 years, moreso than now. In May 2025 however, I had a lot of free time and something just clicked. I was able to progress on my from there really fast; learning about pointers, offsets, etc was fun. I managed to progress through reading the file, getting down to the vertices, but ran into issues with getting their proper offsets. I almost gave up on re-ing entirely, when for some reason I decided to drop a public message with a tag to someone in the Codewalker discord, who happened to be Utopiadeferred. I ended up explaining my situation, and he was really kind with his help - going a step beyond even. While this helped me complete parsing WDRs(pretty much all; besides explaining that WDR vertice data is seeked with physical size + offset, he also helped with vertex strides), I also felt a surge of luck and interest in the Stories game, as I'd known a little bit before hand that modding tools for it were sparse, but I had no idea this sparse. Ever since then in May, I was working on and off on the Stories format, until starting more full-time work on it in June, sacrificing my other tools/scripts.