Topic: Developing FF4kster: a comprehensive editor for FF4

[Dragonsbrethren]

Underscore enters an ellipsis. Being able to insert any font character anywhere would be nice, though.

You can.

How? Insert only does the default icons and /chr is limited to the start of the font glyphs.

[vivify93]

This is where reading the instructions comes in handy...

http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h109/51793Moeman/umm_zps7e5cf1f4.png

It'd be nice if I could, but the readme displays as a jumbled mess when I download the .ZIP file.

[Grimoire LD]

Do you have Wordpad by chance? Opening it in Wordpad should make it look fine.

[Pinkpuff]

How?

Using insert in any text box, or the codes in the large text box.

Insert only does the default icons and /chr is limited to the start of the font glyphs.

That's all there is.

[Dragonsbrethren]

That's all there is by default. You can add new icons and whatever else in the blank font space. Some of them can't be used in field dialogue because the DTE code makes use of those values, but the menus and battle are fair game for the most part (the old Japanese DTE is still enabled in them, but utilizes the values used by the icons and above, so that's basically a non-issue.)

[Pinkpuff]

That's all there is by default. You can add new icons and whatever else in the blank font space. Some of them can't be used in field dialogue because the DTE code makes use of those values, but the menus and battle are fair game for the most part (the old Japanese DTE is still enabled in them, but utilizes the values used by the icons and above, so that's basically a non-issue.)

Ok now I understand what you mean.

I'm not sure how the program could detect that you've added new characters like that in, and including them in the insert menu be default would confuse/annoy people who aren't doing that (I'd wager most of us) by having all these blanks.

If I can think of a simple and unintrusive way to solve those issues then I'll consider including that feature at some point, but it's not very high priority.

In other news, I have an idea for how to trivially handle unheadered roms! So that may be coming soon but I'll have to do a couple tests first.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Unheadered support will be cool. As for inserting new font characters, I'd suggest adding a new key which would just display all 256 possible font characters in a table and let you select the one you want with a cursor. No need to detect new characters. If you don't want to do that, a key that works the same as insert but allows you to go through everything would be an okay solution.

[Grimoire LD]

I was wondering how the old RPGe translation managed to have a Lot more icons than were in the normal game. I guess it would make sense that it's using much of the Kanji space for that purpose. That would be a pretty neat addition, if it can be easily implemented.

[vivify93]

I wanted you guys to know that after I restarted and imported my old changes, everything's working now. After editing the battle messages in both ff4kster and Windhex32, everything still loads fine. I must've messed up badly somehow last time.

Thanks for your help anyway and I'm sorry for pointing fingers.

EDIT: I have another question! :) Do you intend to let the editor modify item descriptions?

[Grimoire LD]

No problem, glad to hear everything worked out.

Item Descriptions are interesting, but we know that several of them already aren't used. And last I checked we're not sure how to implement them (Things like "Caller's Orb - Teaches Spell" or whatever is in the game's message banks, but isn't used in it's proper place (the Caller's Orbs have no description)

[Pinkpuff]

To be perfectly honest, I completely overlooked item descriptions somehow! I don't foresee a problem with adding them into the message editor or more likely the appropriate item editors. Maybe the ones that are never displayed in the game normally can be flagged or highlighted in some way as a warning that unless you patched the game you won't actually see the message or something even though you're free to edit it.

Also it turns out my kludgy hack for handling unheadered roms appears to be working perfectly so far! At first I was hesitant to include unheadered roms because I thought it would mess up all the pointers and such but then it occurred to me: I can check the filesize of the file it's being given to determine whether it's headered or unheadered. If unheadered, it sets a flag and adds a dummy header of all 0s to the beginning! That way everything lines up correctly and for all intents and purposes it is a headered rom. When it goes to save, it checks whether the aforementioned flag is set and if so, deletes the header.

I haven't uploaded an update becuase I don't think this is a major enough change to warrant it but next upload will of course include this fix.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Fun fact: The Japanese descriptions include strings for spells as well.

 

And a table of assignments that I completely forgot about, yet knew existed at some point. The magic menu never seems to read the table, so it can be safely overwritten with more item descriptions. (Even if the menu did read it, it's obviously not showing anything, so it'd be safe anyway )

[Dragonsbrethren]

I worked out item descriptions this morning:

http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=1804

Allowing the item range to be changed is painless enough, but there's only 44 usable descriptions with the default text offset. Moving the text is probably beyond the scope of the editor, but you can use this data to at least read expanded descriptions in a modified ROM if you want (it would be nice for letting us set them, but again, probably a lot more work for you and beyond the scope of the editor).

[vivify93]

Please excuse me if I'm not my usual sunny self.

I have another suggestion. Why not make some sort of shortcut to get to certain dialogue entries in the "messages" menu, at least for banks 1 through 3?

The reason I bring this up is because in my project, I'm currently editing dialogue a lot. Sometimes the editor crashes from me trying to delete too much dialogue at once, and I have to reload and scroll, one increment at a time, to get back to my place at message, say, 330 from message 1. I can just hold down the arrow key, yes, but it lags and it keeps scrolling moments after I've let go.

The kind of shortcut I suggest is typing in the number would take you to the specified message, e.g. pressing 459 would take you to message 459.

[Pinkpuff]

Please excuse me if I'm not my usual sunny self.

I have another suggestion. Why not make some sort of shortcut to get to certain dialogue entries in the "messages" menu, at least for banks 1 through 3?

The reason I bring this up is because in my project, I'm currently editing dialogue a lot. Sometimes the editor crashes from me trying to delete too much dialogue at once, and I have to reload and scroll, one increment at a time, to get back to my place at message, say, 330 from message 1. I can just hold down the arrow key, yes, but it lags and it keeps scrolling moments after I've let go.

The kind of shortcut I suggest is typing in the number would take you to the specified message, e.g. pressing 459 would take you to message 459.

I feel your pain, believe me... I'm trying to work on a solution to the lag in general, but I also think that in the meantime I will likely add a "page down/up" funcitonality to all the menus. Hitting Page Down or Page Up in the "expanded" menus (the ones where you can see more than one row at a time) will take you down or up to the next entry that isn't already visible (or to the first/last entry if you're already at the top/bottom "page"). It's not an ideal fix I know but I think that those keys should be included regardless and it will certainly be better than what's there now.