Let's face it, EuroScope is ugly. The green color it has doesn't even match the real-world TopSky system, and it just looks bad. It matches the real-world Matias system from Hungary, which is great if you're controlling Hungary, but if you're controlling elsewhere it's just ugly. Should you be a controller for not Hungary, here's a solution! This will make your EuroScope a pleasant dark gray.
This is distributed as a binary patch to avoid copyright issues.
The steps are simple:
- If you have already installed this patch and are installing a new version, restore the original exe through whatever means. (running the installer in repair mode works.)
- Get DeltaPatcher and extract it somewhere.
- Make a backup of your EuroScope exe. You can always repair the install with the ES installer, but it's handy to have.
- Once you've gotten DeltaPatcher and extracted it, open it up.
- Select the EuroScope exe as the original file.
- Select ESDarkGray.xdelta from this repository as the XDelta patch.
- Press apply patch.
Your EuroScope is now dark gray. If you would like your TopSky to match, copy the lines from this repository's TopSkySettingsLocal.txt into the file in your EuroScope profile directory of the same name. The chat box will stay green by default, but you can fix that in the symbology settings.
This second screenshot shows the TopSky color scheme working too:
#262626#4b4b4b#6d6d6d#131313#000000
For now this is an unrealistic dark gray, but if enough people want it I can probably make a light gray too some time.
There were two nuts to crack here. The first was relatively easy -- there are several bitmaps inside the EuroScope executable that contain a lot of icons and knick knacks. I had to extract these, edit them by hand to match the new color scheme, save them, and stuff them back in the EXE. Once I found a suitable tool (RisohEditor works the best, from my testing.), it was merely a question of editing these bitmaps en masse and then stuffing them back in. Repetitive, but relatively simple, except in the case of text. Text in these bitmaps seemed to be dithered, which meant I couldn't just toss the paint bucket on it. I've tried my best to match the text as close as possible, though dithering has been removed, and some text has been re-rendered.
As for the parts that aren't bitmaps? That was a doozy. I pulled out Ghidra, thinking "oh I'll just
search the program memory for 0b4136 (one of the primary colors)". It was not that simple.
See, Windows's drawing APIs (at least the ones used here), store colors as BGR, instead of the
standard RGB. Note that this isn't a little-
vs big-endian issue -- Ghidra accounts for that when searching. Microsoft documents this, I just had
to find it. I spent quite a while trying to search for just the individual components in case that was
how it got constructed. Eventually, though, I thought to look at calls to FillRect. I read the docs,
and that led me to look for calls to CreateSolidBrush.
I was still getting nowhere. The calls I could find left me disoriented and confused when I tried
to trace back the calls. Eventually, I once again looked at the documentation. I thought maybe
Microsoft was storing the colors in a weird way. Sure enough, they were. BGR. Once I realized that,
I searched for 36410b and instantly found what I was looking for. After doing that, I just had to
identify all colors needing replaced, and replace all instances. I did that, patched the exe, and bam.
My EuroScope is grey.