Topic: FFV Viewer

[samurai goroh]

That sounds great, congrats Squall :)

I already left some comments there ;)

[Squall]

Thank you very much, samurai goroh!

BTW What are you doing this summer? Any interesting thing with FF5?:)

[samurai goroh]

The only activity related to FF5 I'd done recently was playing the Four Job Fiesta (Berserker), but that was a month or two ago.

I need to fix some RetroAchievements for the GBA version, but still have no clue why that triggers when it really shouldn't...

[Squall]

Interesting, is RetroAchievements like achievements on Steam?
I have 93/96 there, somehow I missed a mob and didnt get AllTreasure achievement. I need these 2 to get the grand achievement: "FINAL FANTASY V Master" 

BTW what is 'Final Fantasy V (J2E) (SNES)'? I think I have seen J2E somewhere else but I dont know what is it.

[samurai goroh]

In a way it is. In RetroAchievements (RA for short), you track the memory addresses and when all the conditions met, then the achievement will trigger.

As for what is J2E, is probably just an acronym for "Japanese to English", which means that the ROM needs a patch that translate the game to English. Also, I think it was the name of one of the teams that developed translations patches, but can't remember right now...

[Squall]

I see. Did you get Master on Steam?

[samurai goroh]

Nope, for some reason I seemed to have missed a treasure, so I couldn't get the last 2 achievements. Haven't had the willing to play it just for that, but some day I may...

[Squall]

Hey guys,

its been a while a have done something for the Viewer. Recently I stumbled on info about FF5a font format. So here is my preliminary work:


It seems GBA uses 3 fonts, all vwf and that is the reason to have gray columns. I wonder if it was you, what feature you would like to see done in the Viewer? Currently I plan to:
- show all 3 fonts,
- show some info about their metrics,
- maybe text experiment - you can type a sentence and it will be rendered with selected font

[Squall]

Here is preview of the new feature (tab). You may see all 3 fonts, you may see their metric. You can experiment to see how a text is rendered in the game - ANSI or native for GBA. You can click on the font to see it character metric and also preview it in the native part.


P.S. If you have any suggestions please don't hesitate to share!

[Squall]

I have added the new version 7.2 for download on the first page!

Currently I'm working on number of things that are mainly for the GBA versions:
- Portraits - I need all the info - tiles, palettes, reference tables
- Job Sprites - I have found tiles & palettes. I need info on tile-maps and the Master table containing the indexes in the 3 tables.

To keep things synchronized I would like to expose Fonts of SNES version similar to GBA. If you guys know anything about RPGe implementation of VWF please share it.

[x0_000]

The only info I have for portraits is that they are located near 081446a8, you should try using GBA graphics viewer to narrow it down more. The simplest way to find tables is to search for pointer references, i.e. if something in a table is located at 08XXYYZZ do a hex search for ZZ YY XX 08 (or worst case YY XX 08 if the code offsets it by some fixed amount.)

[Squall]

Sorry slick was down for so long ... Actually I found almost all in EU version:

Code: [Select]

Portrait Table: $1465A0, 24 bytes per entries
  Portrait 1 tiles - 4 bytes (absolute memory address), LZ10 compressed, 4B aligned, shape 4x5
  Portrait 2 tiles - (same as above)
  Portrait 3 tiles - (same as above)
  Portrait 1 Palette - 4 bytes (absolute memory address). 40 bytes. 8byte header (4B type(03) + 4B PalNums)+ 32 bytes PalEntries
  Portrait 2 Palette - (same as above)
  Portrait 3 Palette - (same as above)
* Physically data is stored in the same order: Portrait1, Portrait2, Portrait3, Pal1, Pal2, Pal3
Some questions were left:
I don't know what the 3 portrait are used and which pal is applied. Pal1 is 16 color. Pal2 is 16 shades of blue. Pal3 is 16 shades of gray.

[Squall]

OK I made a screenshot from my new tool: Visual SAK

FF5a store 3 tilesets and 3 palettes for each person. If we apply the pal1 to tileset1, pal2 to tileset2, pal 3 to tileset 3 will result to a picture that I have attached. It seems to me that tileset1 is the main, tileset2 is darker version and tileset3 is an inverse (negative). If you check palettes, Pal1 - normal colors, Pal2 - grayscale, Pal3 is monochrome blue.

So the question stays - have you seen these 3 variations and do you know when/for what each is used?

[Xardas]

So the question stays - have you seen these 3 variations and do you know when/for what each is used?

I have never seen any other version than the first one.
BUT I have an answer for you, which might be just right (disclaimer: I don't know it, I just use my commonsense/thoughts)
Tileset 1 is the normal version used for dialogue. We all agree on that.
I suppose Tileset 2 and 3 were never made for dialogue - but for the main menu! Let me elaborate:
Tileset 2 is not a "slightly darker version" imho. Look closely - it's a black and white version. It was probably created to display a petrified character.
And Tileset 3 was most likely created to display a KO/dead character.

I am pretty sure because a b/w tileset and an invert tileset were both actually used on FFIV Advance to distinguish petrified and dead characters on the main menu respectively. Since the remake style of the 3 Advance releases (IV, V and VI) are very similar (window color, font, title screen, bestiary/music player, post-game content...), I think it's not far-fetched to say that "petrified" and "dead" menu portrait tilesets were prepared for FFV Advance as well, after being used for FFIV Advance.

While being appropriate for the FFIV menu, it got dummied out for FFV. I suppose the developers dicided to stick with the sprites since it's much faster recognizing which job the characters are using. If the portraits were used on the main menu, you would have to read out the jobs - which wouldn't be too bad, but still imho taking more time than recognizing 4 job sprites within a single blink of your eye.

[Squall]

Good, I was afraid I'm the only one missing second and third portrait in the game :D

Your explanation make sense. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with FFIVa to observe described behavior, but as you said there are plenty of similarities between both (for GBA), while FFVI is quite different ...

Tileset 2 is not a "slightly darker version" imho. Look closely - it's a black and white version. It was probably created to display a petrified character.

Hehe you made me laugh so much, more then most comedy do :D
Anyway, I know its black and white (actually its gray-scale) since I already said that in the previous post. What I mean is that if I use Pal1 on Tileset2 we will get a darker version.