Aslickproductions.org/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=5f0fck550j2m4m2fpbtkj2vkm1&action=profile;u=14;area=showposts;sa=topics;start=30e:/My Web Sites/Slick Productions - FFIV Message Board/slickproductions.org/forum/index239a.htmlslickproductions.org/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=5f0fck550j2m4m2fpbtkj2vkm1&action=profile;area=showposts;sa=topics;u=14e:/My Web Sites/Slick Productions - FFIV Message Board/slickproductions.org/forum/index239a.html.zxݼg^ЋOKtext/htmlISO-8859-1gzip8:Tue, 10 Mar 2020 16:30:44 GMT0 0Pݼg^, Show Posts - Pinkpuff

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Topics - Pinkpuff

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31
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Can the "life" effect be achieved on arbitrary spells?
« on: August 16, 2013, 11:34:32 AM »
It appears as though changing any given spell's effect to "raise" (revive a KO/dead character) does not seem to have the effect you'd expect. Or, if I understand correctly, any effect at all. Only the Life, Life 2, and Asura spells can actually achieve the effect of raising a fallen character. Why?

Presumably there is some kind of index check going on where the game is like "only spells with these indexes can raise people" but the questions then are:
  • Where are these checks and how do we manipulate them to point to different spells?
  • Can they be made to point to more spells than the original? Or fewer?
  • Can we affect whether they revive the characters to full or (Vit * 5)?

32
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / How does the game signal "earth damage"
« on: August 16, 2013, 11:29:04 AM »
Spells such as Quake and Titan will miss floating/airborne enemies. However, as far as I can tell from the spell data, there is nothing signalling that. Can you change, say, Fire 2 to miss floating enemies? How?

I'm assuming there is a check somewhere that says "spells with this index / these indexes miss floaters", but where are these checks?

33
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Changing spell effects outside of battle
« on: August 16, 2013, 11:22:38 AM »
Some spells have effects outside of battle and some don't. However, it is not obvious from the spell data which spells have such effects and which don't, not to mention what they are. This can be annoying for hacking since if you decide to change a spell, say, Sight, into something completely different, it will still have the effect of Sight when used outside of battle, which is probably not what you want.
  • How and where does the game store which spells do what outside of battle?
  • Is it possible to change what spells correspond to what out-of-battle effects?
  • Is it possible to disable certain effects altogether such that no spell has that effect?
  • Is it possible to have the same out-of-battle effect correspond to multiple spells?
  • Can we change what the effects themselves do, or (more realistically) their parameters?

34
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Changing details of Dark Wave
« on: August 16, 2013, 11:15:19 AM »
This command seems like it should have some straightforward parameters that would be great to be able to edit.

I believe it is known where to go to change the amount of HP the caster loses but I can't find off hand. Also I seem to recall it only allowing for 1/8, 1/4 or 1/2 of Max HP. Does anyone know what I'm talking about and where that address is? Is there a way we could jury rig it to be able to subtract different fractions, or maybe even have it "damage" a different stat or something?

Also I don't think anything was ever discovered with regards to how to change the damage dealt. On that note, is it possible to, say, make it dark elemental? Remove the check for undead, or make it check for different monster types? (Maybe you could make it into "Light Wave" or "Harm" that only affects undeads! Or maybe some kind of "Dragon Wave" or something for Kain for example.)

35
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / How to make/change auto-berserk on weapons?
« on: August 16, 2013, 10:58:24 AM »
The Avenger seems to be an odd anomaly in the weapon list. It is the only weapon that causes auto-berserk in battle, yet there does not seem to be any kind of flag that indicates that in the weapon data. Presumably there must be a check somewhere that essentially says "make the weapon with this index an auto-berserk weapon". For hacking purposes, it would be great to know:
  • Where this check is located
  • Whether it can be disabled (so, no weapons are auto-berserk)
  • Whether it can reasonably be changed to affect multiple weapons rather than just one
  • Whether the status it auto-adds can be changed to a different status (e.g. auto-calcify, a weapon that's powerful but slowly turns you to stone!, or auto-blink or something)

In another thread some progress was made on this (http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=1754.msg18091#msg18091) but as far as I can tell it was never completely cracked. We could change other weapons to be auto-berserk in addition to the Avenger, but could not turn off the auto-berserk-ed-ness of the Avenger itself.

36
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Unknown info from FF4 that would be great to know
« on: September 10, 2012, 10:27:11 AM »
    During the process of creating a comprehensive ROM editor for FF4, I have been compiling a "wishlist" of sorts, of info that I would love to be able to program into the editor, but cannot due to the addresses and/or processes involved being not yet known to the community (or if it is known then I have not been able to find it despite considerable research).

    I will probably be adding to this list as I think of things or come across things as I continue my work on the editor, and if others have things they'd like to add to the list feel free to do so as well. And of course, if you happen to know some of this information I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to know about it. The more information that is known and posted about this game, the better the editor will be when it is done.

    • Weapon properties:
      • Two-handed: There seems to be a flag that is set on all two-handed weapons, and unset on all one-handed weapons. However, changing this bit does not change the actual in-game behaviour of the weapon when you try to equip it. I'm assuming there's something in the "equip an item" code checking the index of the weapon to see if it's two-handed rather than checking the bit. Interestingly, the two-handed weapons do appear to be all next to each other index-wise, so it seems likely that it is a range being checked. Even if it were possible to change that range it would be a huge improvement.
      • Equips as bow / Equips as arrow: Much like the two-handed property, there are flags for "equips like a bow" (in the off hand, half attack power, etc), and "equips like an arrow" (half attack power, consumed when used... sometimes...) but changing the settings on these flags does not appear to actually change the behaviour of the weapon. Once again, the weapons with this property are all next to each other and it is probably checking an index range in the "equip an item" subroutine. Being able to even change the range on these would be great.
      • Auto-berserk: A property of only the Avenger, there seems to be no indication in the weapon data itself that this weapon causes its user to start Berserk. It's probably in the battle code or something but being able to turn it off, or even change it to a different weapon index, would again be a huge step up.

    • Armor equip slots: The armors have flags that seem to be set corresponding to what equip slot the armor goes in (Head, Body, Arms, Hand). However, like with the weapon equip properties above, changing these bits has no effect on what slot the armor actually can equip. I suspect that as above something is checking the index range, as once again, the armors of the same equip slot are all next to each other.

    • Key items: The game seems to treat some items as key items (they appear yellow in the item list and you can't drop them or sell them) and the item data does not seem to have such a flag corresponding to this property. It could be that there's a table or list of them somewhere; in any case being able to change this would definitely be a huge plus to anyone doing any kind of major hacking project.

    • Dark Wave parameters: There are lots of things that would be great to edit with commands, but this stands out as a notable example. Being able to change the amount of HP loss and/or damage dealt by Dark Wave seems like something that should be simple to do, it's just a matter of tracking down the right byte(s).

    • Spell casting animations: By this I mean, some spells when you cast them produce a green ring around your character and the black magic casting sound. Others produce white cubes and the white magic casting sound. As with the item properties above, it seems like these are hard-coded by index as there does not seem to be any flags in the spell data indicating this information, and the ones with like properties are next to each other in the list. It would be great to be able to change this property so that you can, say, replace a formerly black spell with a white one and not have it produce a black casting animation when your character casts it.

    • Out-of-battle effects of items and spells: There was some discussion in the thread for the editor that mentioned that these kinds of effects appear to be triggering map events of some kind. It would be great to know what spells are triggering what events, and even better would if it would be possible to edit which spells and items trigger which events.

37
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / How does dialogue bank 2 work?
« on: May 27, 2012, 05:50:54 AM »
For the purposes of the event editor I'm working on for my FF4 rom editor, I was trying to figure out how the dialogues are encoded. Banks 1 and 3 were easy enough to reverse engineer from the information given in Phoenix's FF4Tools. There is a chunk of data representing the list of messages, preceded by a list of pointers, each one pointing to one of those messages. However, bank 2 seems to work somewhat differently.

For one thing, the bank 2 pointer table given by default in FF4Tools does not seem to appear anywhere in the ROM, and I found what looks like a pointer table immediately before the bank 2 data, but it doesn't contain a pointer to each message, just certain ones.

Does anyone have any information on how this works?

Thanks.

38
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Developing FF4kster: a comprehensive editor for FF4
« on: March 13, 2012, 07:41:05 AM »
Hi folks,

I know it's been a long time since I posted anything here but I've still been lurking a bit. Anyway, I decided a while ago that I want to create an all-in-one comprehensive rom editor / hacking tool for FF4 (well FF2us really, but if modifying it to also accomodate 4j isn't too difficult then I may look into that as well). I already have a start on it and you can right now edit:
  • weapons
  • armors
  • items
  • shops
  • spells / monster techs
  • spell sets/progressions
  • actors
  • commands (certain features only; what spells they point to, chances of working, etc)
  • event code
  • jobs
  • characters
  • event triggers
  • npcs
  • dialogue
  • battle messages
  • map properties
  • monster stats
  • monster AIs
  • monster formations
  • monster encounters
Also, I know how to do and will "soon" (read: eventually) have incorporated editing of:
  • At this point, everything I know how to do has already been incorporated into the editor. However, I will still be adding things as they are found and documented well enough to do a proper job of it.
Some unique/interesting things I'm trying to go for with this editor:

  • I'm trying to use config files rather than hard-coded strings for as many labels as possible. This includes things like element names, status names, shop names, map names, etc., basically whatever things you need names or descriptions for that can't be read from the ROM directly (things like character names and job names will be read directly from the ROM you're editing and the labels will display as such). Thus, if you change DKnight in the ROM to DarkKn or something, then all the labels for that job will show DarkKn rather than DKnight. Likewise, if you decide you want to have a different elemental scheme, then instead of having to remember "ok whenever I see 'fire' in the editor that means 'water'", you can just go into the config file and overwrite the string "fire" with "water", and the editor will display "water" for you.

  • I'm trying to get the editor to incorporate as much graphic data from the ROM as possible. For example, it currently reads the menu and font graphics from the ROM you're editing. This has a couple of advantages. First of all, if you changed the font/windows in your hack, the editor will look like that as well, so it adds to the look/feel/atmosphere. Secondly, if you changed some of the symbols to something else (like, let's say you took out the Whip weapons and added in, say, the Book weapons from FF3, so you changed the whip font symbol to look like the book symbol), then those changes will appear in the editor (so instead of having to remember "ok whenever I see a whip symbol that means book", you would just see the book symbol you put in there). Ideally though, I'd like it to also display things like, the weapon graphic for the weapon you're editing, with the correct palette (as opposed to the text description it has there right now). Likewise, the monster graphics and so on.

 :edit:
This is now being hosted on Romhacking.net!

http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/914/

How you can help if you're interested

For starters, you can download the demo and let me know what you think of both the idea itself and the implementation:

Windows XP (though it should work on pretty much any modern Windows)

I can also compile it for Unix if need be.

As well, if you have any information with regards to graphics; where the graphics (and particularly the palette information) for various game objects are stored, that would be most helpful. I know some of that information is posted here already, and I will certainly go digging for it when the time comes, but I think it's mostly related to characters and portraits. It'd be great to be able to read the graphics and palettes for spells, weapons, monsters, map tiles, etc. as well. Alternatively, if you know of a reliable technique for finding this type of information, that would be a great help as well.

Cheers!

The version hosted on the timecave in the link above will still be the more up-to-date one at any given time, but I will definitely be submitting periodic updates to RHDN.

 :edit:
=== FF4kster is now on Github ===

For a variety of reasons, I am no longer actively developing FF4kster. However, I have uploaded all the source code to Github just in case the community wishes to pick up the torch. The code is in FreeBASIC and isn't very well commented, but I will still be actively responding to messages, so feel free to send me any questions you may have and I'll do my best to answer them.

I'm glad to have had the opportunity to contribute to the FF4 hacking community in a significant way.

FF4kster Github: https://github.com/pinkpuff/ff4kster

FreeBASIC homepage: http://freebasic.net/

39
Game Modification Station / FF4: Bows and arrows hard-coded?
« on: December 13, 2008, 10:18:18 AM »
I was fooling around with changing some of the weapon data and I tried making a weapon that used to be a bow into a holy sword. Sadly though, clearing the "bow" flag didn't seem to affect the way it equips on the character. Poor Cecil de-equipped his shield which promptly disappeared (I guess the game thought it was a quiver of arrows?), and after de-equipping the weapon in question, he was then able to equip it on either hand for a pathetic +1 attack power increase.

So it would seem as though the game gets the information about which weapons equip like bows and arrows and which ones don't from a different place from the rest of the weapon data.

Does anyone know where that might be? I tried searching the forums here as well as JCE3000GT's FF2US hacking doc, and even DragonFox's TBL file and couldn't find anything relevant.

40
General Discussion / Trouble with Lynx
« on: August 12, 2008, 04:48:40 AM »
Lynx is a text-based web browser that I've been using in DOS for years. It's great because, since it doesn't bother with graphics and sound and such frivolities, it can load web pages like lightning. It can also view secure http sites (such as gmail) which Arachne, my other DOS browser, cannot.

Lynx has served me well for years, however a couple of days ago it randomly stopped working for some reason. When the program begins to load, it used to say "configuring through DHCP..." but now it says "all attempt (config-file/DHCP/BOOTP/RARP) to get a IP-address failed" and it won't load the program at all after that. Arachne still works fine, however, so I know it's not a problem with my computer's connection to the internet. Also of note is that there is no noticable pause of any kind before the message is displayed so I'm suspicious of the thouroughness of its "attempts" to get an IP address...

I tried looking for some kind of online documentation detailing this issue and a way to solve it but found nothing. I even tried deleting the works and re-installing it from scratch but nothing changed. I know it's a longshot but I was wondering if by some fluke of luck there might be someone here who has used this program and may have encountered this issue or can think of what may be wrong and how to fix it...

Thanks

41
Game Modification Station / Changing spells cast by Gird & Pray
« on: March 20, 2008, 02:33:34 PM »
How difficult would it be to change Gird to cast another spell on the caster rather than Protect? Or similarly Pray to cast a spell other than Cure 1? Or for that matter Medicine or any other skill tied to a spell?

I was thinking it would be cool to have a skill called "Rage" that would berserk the user for 0 MP and give it to Cid instead of the silly "Scan" command. And as for Pray, it doesn't do enough to warrant the turn it so often wastes. I was thinking it could cast at least Cure 2, or maybe a multi-target Esuna or something.

42
Game Modification Station / (Another) FF1 Hack
« on: March 05, 2008, 08:29:53 AM »
Download

This is sort of a work-in-progress, so I'm open to suggestions.

So what is different in this hack? For one thing, all the character, weapon, armor, spell, and monster data has been re-done from the ground up. I tried to balance things as best I could.

In addition, there is no class-change. Rather, there are twelve classes selectable from the beginning. Some of the graphics for the classes look buggy on the character selection screen, but they are fine throughout the rest of the game.

The spells, weapons, and armors are more organized. There are now weapon and armor types, as there are in later Final Fantasy games. As well, there are four spell types, but each spell has two types: it is either black or white; and either red or time. Black represents offensive/attack magic, white represents defensive/healing magic, red represents direct magic, and time represents indirect magic. So as an example, FOG is an indirect defensive spell, so it is white and time. FIRE is a direct offensive spell, so it is black and red.

The layout of some of the dungeons have changed a bit. The overworld also has some differences, and as well the order of events is a little different, both in order to make the game a little less linear. For example, getting the KEY is now an optional side-quest.

There are also several completely new dungeons, and a total of eight elemental fiends (although you still only need to beat the original four to finish the game).

I moved the "circle of sages" from Crescent Lake to Coneria and had them give you advice about the game (such as what kinds of characters can equip what kinds of gear or cast what kinds of spells, and so on).

I applied a variety of bug-fixes (as many as I could find) such as the Monk armor bug, the elemental weapons bug, running, and so on. Although some bugs are still intact such as the House/MP bug, but as soon as I find a way to fix them I will.

I think some work still needs to be done on the monsters, especially in the late game. It seems like some of them are much too weak while others are much too strong.

Anyway, enjoy! Any comments or input would be greatly appreciated!

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