There was a far more advanced cheat(a gamehack patch) called Soulburner's Editor that allowed to spawn items/monsters, teleport to any level and spy on other pl

There was a far more advanced cheat(a gamehack patch) called Soulburner's Editor that allowed to spawn items/monsters, teleport to any level and spy on other players with ghost mode(which allowed to join games unannounced) and various other hacks. It was my early inspiration to programming:you could convert earlier (e.g. 1.07/1.08)hacks(which don't work in new version) by searching for the offset where the code content was identical in hex editor(usually new patch just changed the offset) and trying if they work again or crash the game. That way you can make old hacks compatible with newer versions, but the code was still a mysterious string of hexadecimal digits that didn't make sense(outside of ascii content which looked like text in hex editor). Then i found out you can disassemble the strings and the entire game was a huge megabyte long assembler dump(which i had no idea what to search at first). There was a windows debugger called SoftICE which i got reccomended and i've started to tinker with it, it was extremely boring and tiresome pausing and single-stepping through thousands of lines of assemblers and if you modified anything wrong the game promptly crashed. Still it was a fascinating look into the "Diablo hacking scene" despite having near zero skills i managed to get a general idea how the "gamehacks" worked: they overwrote memory without touching critical code and the hex strings functionality was often very simple, its disabled jumps or set bytes to specific values. Some of them were small assembler programs which added new functions(like Soulburner's editor) but the mystery of how it was created in the first place was beyond me(the only clue was it hooking into diablo console to add its own console commands). It was obvious it wasn't incrementally added(like simple godmode cheats it was distributed with), it was tested and programmed separately. However i quickly got bored with it and diablo as a game itself, exploring everything it offered and even looking at beta content with MPQ editor and diablo-specific utilities. It was also extremely discouraging when many people enjoyed crashing games with various hacks and competed on who didn't get crashed(by using various anti-crash patches). The game turned into some online crashfest and real players migrated into password protected games and single-player.