Topic: Item descriptions

[chillyfeez]

Well, for the record, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to reward that item description before Cecil uses it on the FloatEyes anyway.
But you could make an item description that says "elemental damage to all enemies" that could apply to all three of those. Or you could say just "elemental damage" and it could apply to even more previously dummied items. You could likewise say "heals status ailment" for all the maidens kiss/eyedrop/echo screen/etc items.
Just a couple of suggestions to deal with the space constraints there.

[Rodimus Primal]

Thanks to Bahamut Zero, I figured out how to open up the descriptions in FF4kster, but now space is a major issue. There is almost no space in the item message bank to fit anything. Like you said chillyfeez, it might be better to apply simple descriptions but there's barely any room at all!

[chillyfeez]

It would probably be pretty easy for me to relocate the item description bank to a larger empty space in ROM, but then you'd have to do all of the text edits in a hex editor - it would make it so FF4kster wouldn't be able to find them. It would also make assigning the descriptions to items difficult, as FF4kster wouldn't be able to find them for that purpose, either.
Still if you want, I could give it a go...

[Rodimus Primal]

Like you said, assigning them would be the difficult part. But once assigned, it's just a matter of editing them. It would also mean I could clarify items that are similar Potion and Hi-Potion can be specific. As long as I have the room to work with I'm cool with that.

[chillyfeez]

What we could do is...

1) You go through Namingway Edition in FF4kster and assign descriptions to the items without writing the full descriptions - i.e., just write "1," "2," "3," etc.

2) I'll multiply the maximum number of characters allowed in the item description window by the amount of item descriptions you need altogether (probably still a maximum of 60), and find an empty area in ROM with that much space, then manipulate the assembly to relocate the bank there.

3) Then you could go in and write out the descriptions in the order already assigned in step 1. What I would do to un-complicate the process (as long as I can find a large enough space, which I should be able to do, I think) is give that maximum amount of space to each description, so when you're actually writing them out, you would just fill the end of each description with spaces. e.g. If the item descriptions were allowed to be 35 characters long, you could write for the cure1 potion, "Restores(sp)a(sp)small(sp)amount(sp)of(sp)HP.(sp)(sp)(sp)(sp)(sp)"

[Rodimus Primal]

That will work. I can get started on assigning them and I'll send them your way. The only thing I'm concerned about is the max number of characters actually available in the various menus.

[chillyfeez]

Various menus? Do item descriptions appear in more places than the basic item selection screen?

[Rodimus Primal]

Sorry, poor choice of words. What I meant is that the item descriptions I believe only have enough room for 19 characters across in the description and its only one line across. That should be enough room for a basic enough description even if we are expanding the bank used for items.

[chillyfeez]

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that's not very much space at all, is it...

[chillyfeez]

Good news!
You're gonna have 57 characters to work with instead of 19.
... Provided I can find an empty bank of ROM that is 57 x (# of item descriptions needed) bytes long, anyway.


 
So there definitely isn't an empty bank that is 3600 bytes long, which is what would be needed to accommodate 60 descriptions using the method I had originally planned.
But I did discover that the method by which the messages are indexed is much simpler than I had originally anticipated, so unless you make sixty descriptions that literally use 57 characters each, a bank that large won't be necessary.

What you should do is, assign the descriptions as planned, then practice-write them out to determine how many characters will be used (still using 19 characters per line, but up to three lines per description), then add 3x(number of descriptions) to that total. That will be the size of the empty bank I'll need to use for this little project.

So, for example, if you end up needing 40 unique descriptions, and altogether (including spaces) those descriptions take up 2000 characters, the size of the empty bank I'd need would be 2120 bytes. That's still a lot, but there is at least one empty bank in ROM that size (I checked).

Did that all make sense?

[Rodimus Primal]

Wow, just wow! I just finished assigning every item the number (1,2,3,etc) the description needed. 57 characters is a lot to work with indeed. I'll type out what I need to say for each one so that I can tell you how much space I need. Because of the limit of 60 items having descriptions, I'm using the same description for the Summoner's Orbs. That will end up with 59 unique descriptions total. I'm going to PM you the ROM that I have ready for now.

[chillyfeez]

So I got it working, and it works like a charm... except... It breaks FF4kster compatability.
I did some research and was able to pinpoint exactly what change I made that causes the trouble.
The bad news is, it's unavoidable. The good news is, I can put together a workaround. It'll be a small pain in the ass, but it will enable you to have long item descriptions and still edit other aspects of the game in FF4kster.

I'll probably have everything all set by tomorrow. Tuesday at the latest.

[dn]

Question: What is preventing us from expanding the ROM, as we have FFVI?

[chillyfeez]

Question: What is preventing us from expanding the ROM, as we have FFVI?

FF4kster. It won't load a ROM that isn't 1000000(h) or 1000200(h) bytes. My understanding is that that's how Pinkpuff programmed it to tell the difference between a headered and an unheadered ROM. It makes so many other editing tasks to convenient, though, that in most cases I'm willing to gfo to extreme measures to maintain FF4kster compatability.

[dn]

Had a suspicion it was that.

Unfortunately, changing it to check for 1, 2, 3, and 4MB files is probably not happening. It'd require a few extra checks and a minimum of code, I imagine, but I don't think pinkpuff is working on it anymore.

The game is so tight on space though that expansion is basically unavoidable if you want to do much.

Thinking . . .

In the short term, at least, as long as all you're expanding is text and assembly, you could probably do some rom swapping and data cut/paste to make it work. Trying to think of how it would be done though. Any map expansion though would likely become problematic unless 4kster were modified to work with it.