What is Omnified? Madness Hacked Into Games.
If I’m not dying constantly, I’m bored. I enjoy completely ridiculous struggles in video games. Most games these days, just don’t offer this kind of experience. So I rip them apart, disassemble their code, and write hacks that turn the game into something I call Omnified.
But just what the hell is Omnified? Read on for a general overview of what it is I do — or, if you’re the visual/audio type, sit back, relax, and check out the video below.
Omnified: The Basic Definition
A game is Omnified after it has undergone a process of me disassembling it and writing magical and oh-so-clever CPU instructions (assembly) that turn the game into an absurd carnival of death. An Omnified game is unfair, incredibly intense, hilarious, and absurd.
I decided to embark on the difficult journey of learning how to Omnify games because I was tired of being reliant on both other people’s mods as well as the generosity of developers in regards to the availability of modding tools. I wanted to learn how to be able to tweak any game I decided to stream. And I did.
Indeed, it doesn’t matter if the game supports modding or not. If it runs on the PC, I can Omnify it. No game is safe from me! But every game is different, incredibly different at the machine instruction level. This means that each game requires an expert eye in order to figure out how to make it Omnified.
And that constitutes the core of my hackpad: analysis of my disassembly of the various games I stream on my Twitch channel. To read about the Omnification of a particular game, just expand the Games category in my site navigation tool and click on the game of interest. Sadly, only games Omnified since the start of my hackpad will have articles posted on here.
A History of Omnification
When I first started streaming, I had a desire to show to everyone a number of games I played that had a unique assortment of ridiculously difficult mods applied to them. Specifically, Baldur’s Gate and a number of Elder Scrolls games.
My Baldur’s Gate in particular has an incredible amount of amazing mods applied to it, with 1,600+ changes made by myself, together forming a truly ridiculously difficult, and just plain ridiculous, version of one of the best games ever. I still play this wonderful game on stream, on Fridays. I no longer play any Bethesda games on stream since they tried to get me banned for Omnifying Doom Eternal.
Both of these games would’ve been referred to, at the time, as Omnified. It had a definition back then; basically, it meant that the game was modded (using traditional mods) to be really hard and crazy, and that I was streaming it. So I tried to stream as many of these games as I could, but eventually ran out of choices, as there aren’t a ton of a games out there that both a) allow modding and b) have tons of difficulty increasing mods.
It was during the later period of 2019, November I believe, that I redefined what I do and what it meant to be Omnified. I decided I was going to learn how to reverse engineer software binaries and figure out how to manipulate them to make them nutty. A tall order, for sure, but I felt it necessary in order to find my purpose once again on this platform.
First Were the One Hit Kill Hacks
The first game to be hacked was the death-filled Grecian journey that was Omnified Assassins Creed: Odyssey. I did all the hacking on the stream, and as it was my first game, my ambitions were quite small: to make it so any successful attack from an enemy instantly killed the player. So, live, on stream, I learned how to dissect the game and make it so that damage from enemies was always fatal.
Even though my goals for this game weren’t lofty, doing this sort of thing is never a truly simple affair. I didn’t want to die from any hits if they were successfully and perfectly blocked, for example. But in the end, we had my very first Omnified hack in the very first Omnified game. Let it also be said that this and every hack I did from there on were entirely of my own creation — I wanted to learn how to do amazing things, and to do that would require figuring it on my own, and not piggy backing off others.
And it was a success! There were over 1000 deaths during the playthrough! It made what was probably a fairly boring game by itself, a really cool game. I have difficulty appreciating other aspects of a game if I’m not getting my ass kicked by the gameplay.
For the next few games, I did it again, implementing code that would kill the character after one successful attack. Examples of games that had this include Omnified Jedi: Fallen Order and Omnified Red Dead Redemption 2. Eventually I fancied up this hack a little bit, like applying different damage increases for shield vs health in Omnified Mass Effect, but I knew we needed something more than just one hit kills.
And Then There Were Speed Hacks
After learning my way around assembly and developing my reverse engineering muscle a bit, I decided to attempt a new challenge, starting in Omnified Mass Effect 2: to make the enemies move ridiculously fast. This was an entirely different kind of hack than the one hit kills, requiring me to learn how creature movement was effectuated, and how I could manipulate it so it was to be faster.
And thus, the “dirty Omni speed hack” was born. The difference between original and updated coordinate values would be calculated at the point of update, and then that would be multiplied before being applied back to the original.
Soon Omnified games of all shapes and sizes featured enemies that moved ridiculously fast. Of course there were definite problems that would occur when I implemented a dirty speed hack, and more refined methods surfaced along the way.
This sort of hacking continued for a number of games — until later on around the time of spring/summer in 2020, we started to establish designed, game-neutral systems to implement in games, as well as a formal definition for the term Omnified.
Omnified: The Three Pillars
Eventually, a formal definition came to be as to what makes a game actually Omnified. No longer is it just “a game with some hacks by Omni that make it tougher”, instead there are some very specific criteria that must be met in order for a game to get that Omnified certification.
This was all made possible with the advent of my game-neutral system design. These are gameplay replacing systems that are coded so that they are able to perform their intended function in any game. This is quite the innovation given how different each and every piece of software is down at the assembly level.
Currently, in order for a game to be considered Omnified, it must have support for the following three game-neutral systems injected into it:
- Apocalypse
- Predator
- Abomnification
The Apocalypse System
The Apocalypse System completely overhauls how damage being applied to the player (and to enemies to some extent) works. Instead of simply applying a static damage, a multiple sided die is cast, and a nasty effect is applied that is based on that damage — from teleporting the player to their deaths, to multiplying the damage by 69x. It also connects with my OmnifiedDisplay library to output all these events to an event log and statistics window for displaying on a stream.
I’ll eventually be writing an article that discusses the Apocalypse system in greater detail, however until then, feel free to check out the below video which will provide you a general overview.
The Predator System
The Predator System is an intelligent speed hack for the AI. Much more than just a dirty speed hack, it is designed to enhance enemy movement in a manner greatly aiding their efforts to kill you. At the same time, it has a number of safeguards that prevent enemies from flying out of control, or launching attacks that go way past you.
I’ll eventually be writing an article that discusses the Predator system in greater detail, however until then, feel free to check out the below video which will provide you a general overview.
The Abomnification System
Arguably, my craziest game-neutral system yet. This causes all NPC’s to constantly change shape and size according to randomly assigned morphing modes and other morphing related parameters. It essentially causes everything to look like you are tripping balls on a high dose of acid.
Not only does this make things look hilarious, it also really increases gameplay difficulty in ways that are very hard to predict. It becomes much harder to read enemies, and (just like if you are on acid) just because something looks a certain shape, it does not mean it is that shape. So, you have to adjust where you’re aiming or whatever accordingly.
I’ll eventually be writing an article for the Abomnification system discussing it in greater detail as well, and will link to it here when that is complete. Sadly, I still need to create a video for it as well! So patience please, all in due time.
All of the above game-neutral systems make up the Omnified framework, which is written in assembly and is housed in the library file Omnified.lua. This file is imported into all my hacking projects.
The assembly for each of the systems will be covered in each system’s article on my hackpad. I will also be writing another article that discusses how I create assembly library files and have them automatically imported into my hacking scripts.
You Now Hopefully Know What Omnified Means
It is my hope that you have gained a greater understanding as to what a game being Omnified entails. Hopefully you are able to enjoy what I do on my streams now as well.
To gain even greater understanding as to how I Omnify games, pay attention to this site and read all the articles I post in Games, as these will all cover me Omnifying different aspects of many different games!
You can learn with me, and maybe one day do something crazy all on your own. If you do, make sure to let me know! Nothing would give me greater joy.
Until then, see you all next time. 🙂
-Omni