Does anyone here have experience with reverse engineering? I'd like to create a patch that completely removes all the animated horsecrap, but I'm not very experienced with this stuff.
The first thing I've done is use AssetBundleExtractor to load and browse through the .assets files, and more or less randomly remove entries with such evil sounding names as "Bloom", "Fire 1", "Fire 2" (as if one wasn't depressing enough), "DefaultParticles", etc. Just to see what happens. An example: the "Fire 1" entry in the file "sharedassets2.assets" seems related to that idiotic OnAboutToTrash fire that consumes your cards whenever you play a trasher. Removing the entry or doing as much as editing its values (which is quite a cumbersome procedure: you need to dump the data to a text-file, edit it there, remove the entry in the program, then import the text-file), however, turns the already dreadful fire into an even more dreadful purple mess (see the screenshot above). Because I suspect the animations are generated at runtime anyway, I doubt that simply patching the .assets files is the answer.
My next attempt was to load the .dll and .exe files into various .NET decompilers. The standard Unity .dll files decompiled splendidly, but they only contain standard Unity functions, the altering of which would be of little help. Dominion.exe, on the other hand, is apparently not a valid .NET assembly file, even though it's listed as using .NET 4.6, which either means my tools are lying to me or MF have used some sort of obfuscator.
The next step was to load Dominion.exe into everyone's favorite IDA Pro and try to find and remove the animation calls from the assembly code, but as it turns out, assembly isn't quite my mother tongue. Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
Another option might be to inject code at runtime that fills the memory locations of those malicious movies with transparent bliss. However, while I do know how to locate and change numerical data and strings, I'm not sure how to do the same with graphical information, even without the additional difficulties of possible GPU acceleration.
As an absolute last resort I could re-iterate my request to MF for an option to simply turn all this horrible nonsense off, but yeah... dream on.