About DISE

DISE (dīs)—short for Dead Island Save Editor—is an app made by Steffen André Langnes for the purpose of enhancing the gaming experience and replayability of the Dead Island game series from Techland.

History

Shortly after the original Dead Island game was released in year 2011, it became apparent that bugs in the game could leave gamers with corrupted saves and the loss of all progress.

Steffen saw an opportunity to make a save editor with the ability to recover some corrupted state. A few weeks into the research of the game's internals, development began and that seemed to be the last time Steffen played the game for his own enjoyment.

DISE was taking shape with support for Dead Island on PC. Riptide was released later, and there were other platforms like Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as well. All of those things made their way into DISE somehow.

Adding full support for PlayStation 3 was quite an accomplishment. Steffen spent about one week researching the save mechanism for this game and platform, and analyzed quite a bit of PowerPC assembly code. This finally resulted in the discovery of a checksum algorithm that allowed the game to reject modified saves on this platform. After reconstructing the algorithm as C code, DISE could fully support the game on PlayStation 3.

Development of DISE slowed down exponentially since year 2013 while Steffen focused on life.

Steffen made a basic save editor for the game Escape Dead Island by Fatshark in year 2014 as a side project while making various improvements to DISE in secrecy.

Dying Light by Techland was released in 2015 and Steffen began researching the game's internals. This research was enough to make a save editor for Dying Light, and because the game was similar to Dead Island in many ways, development began to make major changes in DISE's monolithic code base to turn it into a modular master piece. After a lot of dedication, this turned out to be a disaster and effectively killed the remaining motivation to continue developing DISE at the time.

An experimental update from year 2014 was released officially later in 2015 after being in circulation unofficially for the past year.

Multiple attempts were made to extract and backport the most useful bits from DISE's grave over the following years.

Dead Island & Riptide Definitive Edition were released in year 2016 with no further updates in sight for DISE.

In year 2019, the project was resurrected with various improvements that had accumulated over the years, support for Definitive Edition and basic support for PlayStation 4.

DISE was open-sourced in year 2020 but when certain people's malicious intents came to light, the source was regrettably closed again in year 2021.