øAslickproductions.org/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=5f0fck550j2m4m2fpbtkj2vkm1&action=profile;area=showposts;sa=messages;u=261e:/My Web Sites/Slick Productions - FFIV Message Board/slickproductions.org/forum/index5ac0-2.htmllayedslickproductions.org/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=5f0fck550j2m4m2fpbtkj2vkm1&action=profile;u=261e:/My Web Sites/Slick Productions - FFIV Message Board/slickproductions.org/forum/index5ac0-2.html.zxhþg^ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÈ°UÕ3OKtext/htmlISO-8859-1gzip@øÕÕ3ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÑHTue, 10 Mar 2020 21:10:22 GMT0ó°° ®0®P®€§²ð®gþg^ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ·VÕ3 Show Posts - General Public

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1
Game Modification Station / Re: FF6 Improvement Project
« on: December 30, 2013, 04:24:33 PM »
Quote from: skyepie on October 30, 2013, 11:33:11 AM
Well, crap um... okay separate issue now.

The game kept freezing at the airship scene where you try to recruit Setzer. I thought it was due to the King of Vanity patch not being applied. So I applied it and it seemed to work fine except that Celes remained a peculiar pink throughout the scene. So I applied the accompanying 'Antipatch' thinking that'd work but now Celes is stuck with Terra's colours >_>. How do I fix this?

Quote from: asdf7890 on December 13, 2013, 06:51:49 PM
You can get around the stuck parts by switching  a save state from ZSNES between a patched and non-patched rom.  I have no clue what casues these crashes, it'd be nice if someone can fix it though.

I know exactly what causes those crashes, and I already did fix them, it was discussed on page 42 of this thread. The official 1.07 patch is buggy and I fixed it. Here is a patch that doesn't have those problems, which I posted back on page 42 in a post, and am posting again here, it is something I call FF6 Improvement Project FIX v1.07a: http://www.sendspace.com/file/trxm7v Just use that patch until version 1.08 comes out. Oh, and that link is only going to work for 30 days, which is annoying. So it will stop working 30 days from now, on January 29, 2014. Download it before then! And umm, find some better place to upload it. I can't upload it as an attachment here, the file size is too big. And use the Base or Complete patch, not the Translation patch (it comes in all 3 editions). The Translation patch is known to crash in various parts of the game, which doesn't happen in the Base or Complete patch. The Base patch is what to use if you will apply other patches afterwards. The Complete patch is what to use if you aren't going to apply any other crashes and just want to play the game as bug-free and improved as possible. This is basically the same as FF6 Improvement Project v1.07 except with 6 bugs fixed. If someone knows of a place to upload files where they stay longer than 30 days please upload it there and post a link in this thread. Thanks.

2
Slick News / Re: A call for help
« on: July 24, 2013, 08:12:20 AM »
Ah, it's good to know that my submission (the FF5 mute graphics finally being in English instead of Japanese) didn't vanish and that somebody will eventually process it. I'm also sort of lazy (for instance my personal website's hosting provider went offline 2 or 3 years ago and since then I've done NOTHING about it so my website is still offline, and as another example, I haven't checked my email in years, and although I am on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, I have pretty much zero activity on any of those sites and never use any of them anymore). So I wouldn't recommend myself for this job, if I volunteered for it I'd probably do a good job at it for a few months, but you'd just be in store for a letdown after I lose interest after a few months and then you'd have to find someone else. Anyway, I understand your lack of motivation completely, I have the same exact problem myself, I'm certainly willing to forgive you for that because I'm exactly the same (probably even worse, since I have HUGE amounts of free time, and am just too lazy to do anything productive with it). I mean, yes, I did manage to produce a patch for the one part of Final Fantasy 5 for Super Famicom that RPGe never translated, namely the Mute graphics, but that was just because I personally got annoyed with seeing large Japanese symbols on the screen whenever my characters used the Mage Masher daggers as their weapons, during a period when I was spending loads of time re-playing Final Fantasy 5 (for some reason, that game never gets old, at least not for me). Right now I'm taking a break from Final Fantasy 5, since there's an item I forgot to steal from one of the types of enemies in Exdeath's Castle in World 2, and I'm getting annoyed with having to go back to World 2 again and then having to replay all the progress I made in World 3... at this rate I'll NEVER get to the Cleft of Dimension in my current playthrough, because of my silly obsession of having a perfect game and having as many of every item as possible (although I do use a certain trick to steal 99 items at once, making it a bit easier). My obsession with having a perfect game causes even more problems in Final Fantasy 6, since in that one I also have to fight every possible enemy formation at least once so that they all appear on the Veldt for Gau to get his rages. Anyway, as you can see, I'm more focused on that sort of thing than on other stuff, so I'm probably not the right person to help out with this, although I do think my video game obsession may come in handy and allow me to produce more patches and hacks. I've also developed a super-expansive .CHT file full of Pro Action Replay codes for Chrono Trigger, that is so long that it crashes Snes9x and only works with ZSNES (apparently Snes9x can't process .CHT files larger than a certain size). It maxes out all the stats for all 7 characters as well as doing a few other things (maximum Silver Points, maximum cats and cat food, Pyozo dolls for everyone, auto-revive status for everyone, having 99 of whatever is in the first item slot, having different level-changing codes for Crono so you can fight each version of Spekkio, etc.) That comes out to like, over 100 PAR codes all in one file, I don't even know how many, a huge number, it crashes Snes9x to have so many but ZSNES is fine with it. So yeah, I'd suggest someone else besides me for this job, I tend to become completely obsessed with one thing at a time and lose interest in everything else, but it's always temporary and then after a few months my obsessive interest shifts to something totally different and I forget about the previous thing I used to be obsessed with and spend all my time on.

3
Submissions / FF5 Mute English Graphics Patch v1.0
« on: June 14, 2013, 06:13:39 AM »
The original graphics for the Mute spell in Final Fantasy 5 are in Japanese. These graphics are 48x48 pixels and were never translated by RPGe Translations for their patch. Now, finally, I have translated the Mute graphics into English, and when you cast the Mute spell, you will see the word "MUTE" in the graphics, in English! Also includes an anti-patch to remove the patch. Oldff5mute.png (inside the archive) is the "before" picture, and Newff5mute.png (also inside the archive) is the "after" picture, for this graphic. It includes a verbose readme file full of all relevant information, and plenty of other information too. Please include all 5 files in the download (the patch, the anti-patch, the before and after PNG images, and the readme file). Thank you for your consideration.

- General Public

:edit:

Text to display in the description on the download page (a bit shorter than what I wrote above):

Quote
The original graphics for the Mute spell in Final Fantasy 5 are in Japanese. These graphics are 48x48 pixels and were never translated by RPGe Translations for their patch. Now, finally, I have translated the Mute graphics into English, and when you cast the Mute spell, you will see the word "MUTE" in the graphics, in English! Also includes an anti-patch to remove the patch.

How to credit me:

General Public (it's a username I use on a lot of websites, obviously not my real name)

URL to use for my website:

Currently my website isn't working and I'm between web-hosts, so I don't have one at the moment. So linking to my profile on these forums, have that be my homepage for now, at this URL, in case anyone who downloads the patch wants to contact me they can do it here (I think this is the correct URL for my profile here):

http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=261

I might have a working URL for my website later but it's not up right now.

4
Final Fantasy V Research & Development / Mission Accomplished!
« on: June 14, 2013, 06:01:02 AM »
Well, somehow I managed to produce the patch I was wanting to either make myself or have someone else make. Instead of using the graphics from FF3US I made a new version of the Mute spell graphics based on the one in Final Fantasy 5, only translating the Japanese characters in it into English, but leaving the circle around it the same.

Now I am proud to announce a patch for Final Fantasy 5 to translate the graphics for the Mute spell from Japanese into English (the one thing that RPGe didn't translate back in 1998).

It is here as an attachment. I'll submit it to this site for approval as a patch for anyone to download on the main FF5 patches page.

5
Final Fantasy V Research & Development / Re: How do you edit graphics for the Mute spell? (Patch request)
« on: June 13, 2013, 11:09:20 PM »
Quote from: Jorgur on June 10, 2013, 03:09:28 AM
According to my old docs, attack animations are stored in the D9 bank, in GB (3BPP) format. I can't quite remember exactly what that information is, but it could be a good place to start. FF5 generally does not compress graphics at all; it should be visible if you set up the tile editor to use the correct format for it.

It will probably be difficult to find someone to simply make the patch for you. Most people lurking around here are either just checking in or working on their own projects. However, if you are determined to create the patch yourself, I will be glad to give you some assistance along the way. The goal actually isn't that difficult to reach, the challenge lies mainly in locating the graphics.

Some useful information:
http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=1167.0

If you are new to ROM hacking, I recommend the Romhacks.net tutorial. For information related to battle animation graphics, see Light Phoenix' Animation Guide. You may also want to have a look at the ROM overview in my hacking docs.

 :edit:
Oh, and good luck with the project!  :happy:

Thanks for the info. Heh, I don't even know what "the D9 bank" means. I am not very good at ROM hacking, at least not yet. I need to study up a lot more on this stuff. It is all so confusing!

:blits:

I will try and look at those tutorials and see if I can make any sense out of them. HiROM, LowROM, FastROM, SlowROM, it is all so confusing... I do know all about how to make and use IPS patches, and can edit single tiles such as characters in an 8x8 fixed width font in a ROM by using a tile editor. I know all about using emulators but I'm pretty beginner-level at ROM hacking. Most of the ROM hacking stuff is just way too confusing for me right now. Maybe I'll be able to learn it and after then I might even find it easy, I don't know. I am glad you could point me in the right direction at least, by telling me the graphics in FF5 are not compressed and that they are visible if you set it up with the correct format. So right now my biggest unsolved mystery, at least here, is figuring out how exactly the tiles in a multi-tile graphic are organized in a ROM.

:omghax:

Oh, and the Mage Mashers (or MageMashes for short)... those daggers inflict "Mute" on enemies about half the time, so you get the "Mute" graphics (and sound too) if you use the "Mute" white magic spell or if you use that type of dagger, and then that circle with the Japanese text appears, the 48x48 pixel graphic I would like to replace with the one from Final Fantasy 3/6 US that has a similar shape and size and palette but has the word "MUTE" in English and all caps. I did do a pretty good job of making a .PNG graphic with transparency out of screenshots of the "Mute" graphic in Final Fantasy 5, that attachment I had on the original post. I was also trying to do it for the graphic of the "Mute" graphic for Final Fantasy 3/6 US too, but it was taking too long to edit it pixel by pixel and put in all the transparent pixels in the right places while keeping all the ones from the graphic and I was getting bored and wanted to post my message already so I posted it with only one of the 2 graphics I was originally going to include since I got impatient when working on the 2nd one. It took up less bytes as .PNG than as .GIF. Anyway, my pixel graphics editing skills ought to be good enough for editing this graphic once I figure out how to find it in the ROM and how exactly the various 36 tiles are arranged to form a single 48x48 pixel image. It probably has something to do with these "banks" and with the "mappers" that map the memory to those banks. This article I found here about what these "banks" are just reads like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to me now, I don't know enough about this topic for it to make any sense yet. Apparently SNES addresses and ROM addresses are different, and both of them have "banks"... quite a complicated system, especially with the HiROM and LowROM differences and all that, not to mention the fact that an SNES header and SRM header are totally different. It's going to take me quite a while to wrap my head around all this info before I can understand it fully. At least I understand IPS patches and several other things really well, that helps make up for all the things that I don't understand at all.

:wtf:

I am going to read a bunch of tutorials now... BRB a thousand years from now when I'm finally done.

:banonsmash:

:edit:

I have found the location of the graphic in the ROM! There is a map of the ROM at a Japanese website here. From the Google Translate, I got "190000 - magic effect graphics [24Bytes * 1326] [3BPP SNES format] ". Also, 256 bytes = 100 in hex and 512 bytes = 200 in hex, so the 512 byte header of a headered ROM means adding 200 to the address. So in a headered ROM if I go to address 190200 (the 200 added for the header), there are the magic effect graphics. And selecting the codec "3bpp planar, composite" in Tile Molester works as expected.

It does not take up 36 tiles in the ROM! The graphic appears to start at the exact address 193F98 (in a headered ROM). Finally found it! (Without a header the address would be 193D98.) If you go directly to that address in Tile Molester you'll find it. It appears that for the outside rim, only some of the tiles, for the upper left quadrant of the circle, and for the Japanese text inside, are in the ROM. Apparently the ROM code does horizontal and vertical flips of the outside rim of the circle so only the upper-left part of the circle is needed, as it can do a horizontal flip for the upper-right, a vertical flip for the lower-left, and both horizontal and vertical flips for the lower-right. As for the Japanese text inside, the tiles for it are not flipped. I should be able to work with this now.

6
Final Fantasy V Research & Development / How do you edit graphics for the Mute spell? (Patch request)
« on: June 09, 2013, 02:47:40 PM »
The Mute spell in Final Fantasy 5 has an animation which includes a circular graphic that 48x48 pixels and includes very large Japanese text that (I assume) means "Mute". Final Fantasy 3 (or rather 6) for the U.S. has a Mute animation that is also large and circular but has the English word "Mute" in it, instead. Does anyone know how to edit graphics for the Mute spell? I am wondering which tile editor to use, how many bits per pixel, whether the graphic is compressed, that sort of thing. I have attempted to find it in Tile Molester 0.16 but not really found the graphic in question. I would like to fine a way to replace the Mute spell graphic in Final Fantasy 5 with the one from the English Final Fantasy 3 (or rather 6).

If anyone knows how to do this and is able to do this FOR me and make an IPS patch that changes the Japanese Mute graphic in Final Fantasy 5 to the English one from Final Fantasy 3/6 for US, that would also be fine. Or you could try and teach me how to do this. I'd really like to hear from anyone who understands how to do this sort of thing. As a 48x48 pixel graphic, given the 8x8 pixel tiles, that is 6x6 tiles (although the corner tiles are empty because the graphic is circular in shape). I know how to edit SINGLE-tile graphics that are just 8x8 pixels in a tile editor. But this one is much harder to figure out, I can't figure out how to do it, in fact I can't even find the graphic when I open the ROM in the tile editor.

The palettes for both versions of the graphic appear to be similar, maybe the same: white and shades of gray, as well as clear pixels. It appears to have 7 colors besides the 1 color reserved for clear colors, based on looking at the graphic from a screenshot in a picture editor. So that would mean it's 3 bits per pixel.

Anyway, attached I have the 48x48 Mute graphic from Final Fantasy 5 with the Japanese text in it, with 7 colors and 1 transparent color, just so people can see why this graphic doesn't exactly belong in the English translated version of the game (yet RPGe did not patch it in version 1.10 of their translation, so apparently this must have been too hard even for them to do). I can definitely tell that this is hard to change.

I wonder if anyone can figure out how to change this to a graphic that says "MUTE" in English, such as the one from FF3US? I am totally baffled by this.

In fact, if you can figure out how to fix this, it is probably better if you make the IPS patch for it and post it on this site than I do, because this seems to be rather advanced, to edit such a large graphic that takes up so many tiles on the screen (6 tiles high times 6 tiles wide equals 36 tiles). Oh, and I just checked, the 8x8 squares in each corner, each of them has 1 pixel in the corner that is lit up. So it really uses all 36 tiles, even the corner tiles. Take a look at the 586 byte PNG file attached and see for yourself. Hmm, and I just calculated that 48 pixels by 48 pixels with 3 bits per pixel comes out to 864 bytes uncompressed, if there isn't any overhead (48 times 48 divided by 8 times 3). So if the graphic were completely uncompressed it would take up 864 bytes in the ROM... quite a lot!!! I guess that means SquareSoft must have compressed it somehow. Perhaps somebody here knows what compression algorithm SquareSoft used for graphics in SNES RPGs such as Final Fantasy 5? Even if it were only the size of the PNG file here, that would still be 586 bytes, although probably most of the PNG file size is due to overhead. Then again, the ROM is 2 megabytes, so I guess if they really wanted to, they could just put the whole 864 bytes of this image in there uncompressed. I am guessing that the compression method is probably the same one used for monster sprites, because monster sprites are also similarly large graphics.

Anyway I'd REALLY appreciate it if someone can figure out how to do this. And just think of the possibilities it would open up, you could also edit all the other compressed graphics in Final Fantasy 4, 5, and 6 (assuming they all use the same compression algorithm, which might not be true). I don't see a lot on graphics-hacking in Final Fantasy 5 in the documents here. A lot more work seems to have been done hacking Final Fantasy 6, I would assume the graphics compression in Final Fantasy 5 would be done the same way, or perhaps in an easier way using a less advanced algorithm.

Even if you don't know how to do this, if you can think of any helpful ideas based on what you know about how the Final Fantasy 5 ROM does things, like if you know how it stores graphical data, or if you can find a pointer to the animation for the Mute spell and thereby figure out what section of the ROM holds the Mute graphic in it, that would be great.

7
Game Modification Station / Re: FF6 Improvement Project
« on: June 07, 2013, 06:29:25 PM »
Quote from: Poco Loco on June 04, 2013, 01:30:38 PM
these patches if put last shouldn't cause any freezes or bugs

but testing it wouldn't hurt at all

Yes it seems to work. At least, the Base and Complete versions. But not the Translation version. It is known to crash when you find Shadow in the Cave in the Veldt in the World of Ruin. This is probably because one of the 6 patches in question is an event fix for that event, which involves dialogue, and the Translation version updates all the dialogue in the game. This probably also means that other event fixes out of those 6 that involve dialogue won't work in the translation version. But ones that don't involve any dialogue, such as the Duncan jumping around in his house one, work perfectly fine in the Translation version. Haven't run into any problems at all in the Base or Complete versions with my testing so far. And all I did was re-apply the 6 patches in question to the Complete and Translation versions, and un-apply them to the Base version, because those patches are supposed to be present in the Complete and Translation versions but not in the Base version, and they are also supposed to be the patches applied last of all. So, it should work fine in theory, except of course the Translation version, because it changed the text in the game, including the text that was ALSO changed by some of these 6 patches. So that makes the Translation version conflict with some of the 6 patches, unfortunately, because both of them patch dialogue in the same parts of the game, but don't patch it in identical ways, thus leading to a conflict, it seems. I don't know how to fix the Translation version to work with the 6 patches and not crash in those places but I am sure DarkMage can fix it when he reads this thread and gets around to it. I've done as much as I'm able to do, getting the Base and Complete versions to both work fine.

Then again, I don't think DarkMage is going to release another version until the timing thing in the opera is done, if what I've read earlier in this thread is correct, since that seems to be his focus now. I wonder if I should PM him. I think it would be unnecessary to PM him, I am sure DarkMage reads this thread whenever he works on this project. So he'll figure out what to do regarding the 6 bugs related to those 6 patches the next time he reads this thread, and fix everything in the next version, I'm sure of it. Once he fixes it, the Translation version won't crash either. That will be great, I am looking forward to it. Until he comes out with a new version, I'll just use my unofficial fix for his patch whenever I play this game, the one I have called FF6 Improvement Project FIX v1.07a.

Anyway I'm glad to hear you think the way I did things will probably work and stop these bugs from happening, that seems to be what the preliminary testing all shows. But I've only tested my version on the Duncan jumping around his house event and the finding Shadow in the Cave in the Veldt event. The other 4 events happen earlier in the game and I haven't tested them yet. I'd have to start the game over to test all 6 of them, and that would be rather time-consuming for me to go through all of that again. Half the reason I made the unofficial patch was so I could play it myself... the other half, of course, was to try and fix these bugs for other people too, and see if these fixes could be tested to make sure it works.

And here are my predictions for which bugs still occur in the Translation version and which don't, based on whether they involve conversations/dialogue:
1) Shadow Leaves One-Man Party - probably still occurs (involves dialogue)
2) They Only Jump Left in Zozo! - probably doesn't occur (doesn't involve any dialogue)
3) King of Vanity - I'm not sure, 50/50 chance (doesn't involve text but does modify scripted events, the blushing of certain sprites by altering palettes, during a conversation)
4) Edgar Revealed - probably still occurs (involves dialogue)
5) Duncan stays put - definitely doesn't occur (tested it and it works)
6) Shadow is NOT a Girl! - definitely does occur (tested it and it's broken)

8
Game Modification Station / Unofficial Test Version
« on: June 03, 2013, 12:55:23 PM »
I have produced a new unofficial test version based on FF6 Improvement Project v1.07, which I am calling FF6 Improvement Project FIX v1.07a.

Basically, I combined the 6 patches that were having compatibility problems into a single patch and also made an anti-patch for it.

Then I applied the combined anti-patch for those 6 patches to the Base edition of FF6 Improvement, and applied the combined patch for those 6 patches to the Complete and Translation editions of FF6 Improvement.

Based on preliminary testing, it appears that the bugs I found have now been fixed in both the Base and Complete editions. The Translation edition is so-so; some of the bugs have been fixed, some still don't work.

Anyway, this requires people to test it to see if those 6 bugs related to those 6 patches still occur.

Please download and test it to see if it works. This testing will probably help DarkMage in developing his next official version, hopefully.

Also please consult the updated README.TXT file if you have any questions.

Again, this is an unofficial test version to see if I can fix the 6 bugs I found in FF6 Improvement Project v1.07, it is not official, it may crash, it does not come with any warranties or guarantees, it is for testing purposes only, and has not been endorsed by DarkMage, me, or anyone else.

If and when DarkMage releases a future version of FF6 Improvement Project with a version number higher than 1.07, this unofficial test version will be considered obsolete and anyone using it will be strongly urged to upgrade to the latest official version by DarkMage.

Not intended for use by people who don't understand how to switch .SRM files between patched and unpatched versions of the same game's ROM when they encounter bugs that crash the game.

Enjoy! But also... beware! Now download it and try it out... see if it works! Have fun! And you want to play the game all the way through without it crashing and without having to switch back and forth with the original unpatched ROM, don't play the Translation patch, I already know it still has bugs, instead use the Base or Complete patch, they work better!

Here is a download link (it's too big for me to put here as an attachment):
http://www.sendspace.com/file/trxm7v

If that download link doesn't work I can upload it to another site.

9
Game Modification Station / Re: FF6 Improvement Project
« on: June 03, 2013, 07:30:23 AM »
Quote from: TheNattak on June 02, 2013, 02:39:26 PM
Yeah this improvement patch & usme definitely hates mblock's patches XD

True. I have continued my playthrough of FF6 Improvement Project version 1.07 (now testing ALL THREE versions of the patch) and found 2 more bugs:

Going inside Duncan's house north of Narshe in the World of Ruin crashes the game. This is related to mblock129's patch "Duncan Stays Put". This bug appears to be present in the complete+translation patch and the complete patch but NOT the base patch or the original game.

Rescuing Shadow inside the Cave in the Veldt in the World of Ruin crashes the game right after you beat the SrBehemoth. This is related to mblock129's patch "Shadow is NOT a Girl! fix". This bug appears to be present in all 3 versions of the patch (even the base patch!!) but NOT the original game.

So I have confirmed that 5 out of the 6 patches in question listed in the readme as incompatible with FF3usME v6.7 have led to bugs in the complete+translation version of FF6 Improvement project v1.07, and the 2 most recent ones I tested, I tested on all 3 versions of the FF6 Improvement project. It appears that all 3 versions of the FF6 Improvement Project are at least somewhat affected. The only of the 6 that I haven't tested at all yet is "Shadow Leaves One-man Party" by Imzogemlo, which is also one of the 6. In order to test that one, you need to be in the World of Balance and have completed the 3 scenarios and successfully defended Narshe from Kefka, and witnessed Terra turn into an esper and fly away. At that point in the game, you can form a party with JUST Gau in it (nobody else), then take Figaro Castle to Kohlingen, recruit Shadow to join you, make sure to save often so that Shadow doesn't leave you, then take Figaro Castle back to the Figaro/Narshe region, go through the Figaro Cave to be in the South Figaro/Sabin's House region, go through Mt. Kolts and then the next valley to get to the Returner Hideout, jump into the Lete River and take it to Gau's father's house, go south all the way into the Phantom Forest, go through the forest all the way and out onto the world map again and then into the cave to jump off the waterfalls, then jump off the waterfalls onto the Veldt, then have Gau jump onto a pack of monsters in the Veldt so that your party is JUST Shadow by himself, then have Shadow go to the Cave in the Veldt and take the Serpent Trench to Nikeah, then take the ferry to South Figaro, then go back through Figaro Cave towards Narshe, then enter Narshe... and then the game will probably crash. I have not tested this, but, most likely, this bug is also present too in the FF6 Improvement Project 1.07 complete and complete+translation versions (and possibly also the base version), the S.L.O.M.P. bug (Shadow Leaves One Man Party bug). All 5 of the other 6 patches listed there cause the complete+translation game to crash at those story events, so I'd be very surprised if this one was any exception.

So now I shall test what happens if I re-apply those 6 patches AFTER the complete patch or the complete+translation patch and see if re-applying all 6 of them afterwards fixes it, and as for the base patch, I'll see if applying ANTI-patches for all 6 of those gets it working. If I manage to fix all 6 of those bugs, I'll create new, fixed versions of all 3 patches and add them as an attachment here so they can be downloaded and tested by others as well. Anyway, it looks like all 3 versions of the FF6 Improvement Project are at least somewhat affected by the compatibility problems with the 6 patches in question, even the base patch, which I didn't expect, since I didn't think the base patch had any of those 6 in it.

Quote from: Lenophis on June 02, 2013, 10:39:41 PM
Actually, I would recommend you stay away from Holy Randomness Batman, since extensive testing has revealed that it's not nearly as random as I had hoped. PB has a much better RNG in it than this patch, and I've been thinking about releasing it, but there's a LOT of work I would have to do since I need free space in a bunch of places.

I have found that Holy Randomness Batman DOES make things more random in Colosseum fights, at the very least, for what that's worth. It used to be that if you saved a state when you were on the list of items to wager at the Colosseum, then any fight outcome would be predetermined based on what item you pick and which of the characters in your party you pick, and the fight would go exactly the same every time. But with Holy Randomness Batman, the fight outcomes at the Colosseum no longer appear to be predetermined when you are at the item screen, and the fights actually go differently each time you reload from that save state and try again with the same item choice and character choice (as long as your timing in when you select an item is different). So that is one positive outcome I have found based on the Holy Randomness Batman patch. So, at the very least, it IS more random that Final Fantasy 6's original Random Number Generator and it's an improvement on that. But you are right that it isn't as random as it could be. I have found that under Holy Randomness Batman, "random" enemy encounters still occur in a predetermined pattern like in the original game. So it would not help in situations like the Floating Continent where some enemy formations have only a 1/64 chance of appearing and you might be locked into a sequence where certain enemy formations never occur no matter HOW many fights you fight in a row, since it would just repeat the same sequence of 256 fights over and over again forever if you kept fighting over and over longer than 256 fights. At least I THINK that's how it works... I read about it in the GameFAQs document by Master ZED about Setzer's Slot command, which has lots of useful information about how the Random Number Generator works. So yes, Holy Randomness Batman does have room for improvement (e.g. "random" enemy encounters), but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's STILL at least a moderate improvement over the original Random Number Generator (e.g. what happens in Colosseum fights). It certainly doesn't make things any worse than the original game. But it is very encouraging to hear that you have developed an even better Random Number Generator and are working on it. It would be quite impressive if you not only got "random" enemy encounters in most places to actually be random instead of following a predetermined order, but if you also got the "random" enemy encounters on the Veldt to be randomly chosen as well, instead of following the same order every time (an order described in great detail in Djibriel's rage guide on GameFAQs). If each Veldt fight were totally random and you couldn't predict it based on the previous Veldt fight, that would be awesome. The most obvious part of the Veldt pattern is when it goes: Commando either x1 or x4, random fight out of 8 possibilities, SrBehemoth, White Drgn. Needs to be randomized.

10
Game Modification Station / Re: FF6 Improvement Project
« on: June 02, 2013, 01:03:33 AM »
2 more events that are bugged in the same version of the game (Complete + Translation version 1.07):

After Celes does the opera thing and everyone is onboard the Blackbird to talk to Setzer, there's a scene where you are talking to Setzer and the game freezes. (The opera itself is a bit bugged in this version but you can get through it by choosing the right options, no game freezes.) This seems to be related to mblock129's "King of Vanity" patch, one of 6 patches that are in the complete but not the base version of FF6 Improvement Project.

In the World of Ruin, after Celes and Sabin follow Gerad and the Crimson Robbers to the basement of Figaro Castle, right after Gerad sends the rest of the Crimson Robbers to get the treasure and let him fight the obligatory Japanese Tentacle Monster that's gumming up the works in the engine room... just like in the Zozo jumping and in the talking to Setzer on the Blackbird after the opera, once again, the game freezes... right before you were about to fight the Tentacle Monster in the engine room. This seems to be related to mblock129's "Edgar Revealed" patch, one of 6 patches that are in the complete but not the base version of FF6 Improvement Project.

Also, a suggestion for a patch to add to this:
Holy Randomness Batman! v1.6a by Lenophis (link here or here). The Random Number Generator (RNG) in Final Fantasy 6 is not even remotely random. Very often things that SHOULD be possible, you can't get to happen no matter how many times you try (such as certain enemy formations appearing, or getting rare drops or steals), and there are also exploits of the original Random Number Generator that some players use to achieve desired outcomes such as using an Echo Screen to get Joker Doom with the Slot command. That particular exploit isn't possible under the FF6 Improvement Project because of the Slot Derigging Patch by Master ZED that you already have included in the project, but there are other Random Number Generator exploits too (for instance, related to the Mag Roader fights when you are leaving the Magitek Research Facility). Anyway, this patch ought to improve the Random Number Generator a bit.

Quote from: Lenophis on May 29, 2013, 10:35:38 AM
Sounds like an attempt to fix the "always facing left" bug was in place, and it did the same thing PB did initially.
Heh, at first I didn't even know what you meant by PB, but then I found the thread about the Pandora's Box project and read about it, and looked at your videos on YouTube about it. Very interesting. Too bad I can't download it. It does have an impressive number of bugs squashed, just like this project.

Quote from: Poco Loco on May 30, 2013, 12:46:10 PM
this issue was stated in the readme if I'm not mistaken as well
Yes, it appears all 3 of these bugs I have encountered while playtesting the "complete+translation" version 1.07 of FF6 Improvement Project are related to patches by mblock129 that are listed in the readme as being incompatible with the editor FF3usMe v6.7. I would guess that the Zozo jumping bug is related to the "Miraculous, Death-Defying Always-Left-Facing Jumps in Zozo" patch by mblock129.

Anyway, it seems that at least 3 out of the 6 patches listed as incompatible with FF3usMe v6.7 are completely broken in the "complete+translation" version 1.07 of FF6 Improvement Project. I wouldn't be surprised if the other 3 are also broken, too, and if I just haven't run into those bugs yet in my current playthrough. To quote the readme:

Quote
These are patches which were meant to be included in all versions of the patch but are left
out of the base version for hackers, as FF3usME v6.7 overwrites the locations where these
patches reside. Apply them after all your changes have been made:

Duncan Stays Put (mblock129)
Edgar Revealed (mblock129)
Shadow Leaves One-man Party (Imzogelmo)
Shadow is NOT a Girl! fix (mblock129)
King of Vanity (mblock129)
They Only Jump Left in Zozo! (mblock129)

Since those all seem to not work, it seems the "base" version of the patch is probably the safest one to play if you want to avoid errors. Definitely the "complete+translation" version has bugs with at least 3 out of those 6. As for the "complete" version without the translation, I have not tested it yet, so it might work perfectly fine, or it might be just as broken as the version with the translation. All 6 of those patches in question are event-related and only occur at certain points in the game.

11
Game Modification Station / Re: FF6 Improvement Project
« on: May 29, 2013, 05:20:01 AM »
Bug report from playtesting the patch version 1.07 (complete + translation):

In Zozo, when you are jumping between buildings, after you jump left across several buildings the first time, you get stuck in that building and if you ever try jumping from that building your character sprite gets stuck in place and you can't move (but the music keeps playing and other sprites on the screen of Zozo people continue moving around normally). This happens the first time you go thru Zozo on the way to find Terra. So it seems version 1.07 cannot be played all the way thru because it crashes in Zozo. Anyway I have attached an .srm file of the SRAM of my game right outside Zozo right before this bug happens. Yes my characters are level 99 with great stats and have much better equipment than they should at this point in the game, but that does not matter, since I have tested this .srm file, which was played entirely in your complete version 1.07 with the translation, with the original version of the game, and with the original game, this bug of getting stuck in Zozo does not occur and Zozo is playable, using this same .srm file. Obviously attaching a save-state would be pointless since those are emulator-specific and change with different versions of emulators, but this .srm file should work in any emulator and allow you to easily reproduce the Zozo jumping bug. I packaged it in a 7z archive to minimize the file size. Good luck figuring out what's causing this bug, I have no clue.

Anyway, please try loading this SRM with your patched version as well as the original unpatched ROM, and see whether or not you get stuck after the first time you jump across buildings in Zozo, the next time you try jumping across buildings. This seems like it might be a serious bug in your patch. If anyone here can try out this .srm file and find out what the problem is with jumping in Zozo with the latest 1.07 patch that would be great, anyway excellent job on the patch, I enjoy it very much, hope you can fix this bug. And yes, yes, I did use an .srm file editor, FF3h version 5, by Lord J, to achieve having the characters level 99 with great stats and having awesome equipment, but as far as I know, that editor does not have any bugs, and anyway, this bug does not occur with the original unpatched ROM if I use this same exact .srm file, so I can logically deduce that the problem was NOT caused by using the .srm file editor or by which emulator I am using but rather was caused by your patch, since whether or not I am using your patch is the factor that seems to determine whether or not this bug occurs.

Or if you would like to independently verify this problem without using my .srm file, just play the game through until the part where Terra is in Zozo and see if this same bug with jumping between buildings happens. I am not sure what would happen if you did that, this error might only occur with some games or it might occur in all games at that point in the story, who knows?

But anyway, yeah, thank you, please try out jumping between buildings in Zozo using this .srm file, with the complete+translation version of your patch 1.07, and then see if you can come up with a solution. Thanks.

12
Game Modification Station / Re: FF6 Improvement Project
« on: October 19, 2011, 10:27:00 PM »
Hello I am Rich McGrew, someone who earlier combined together 47 Final Fantasy VI patches (mostly bugfixes, hardly any that change things not considered bugs) into a mega-patch, available at my website (the server is sometimes down though): http://www.richmcgrew.com/downloads.html

If you have trouble accessing my website it is because I use a free web-hosting service, and there are some problems with server downtime and also I have been unable to change the contents of my website for a few months, but I haven't updated my Final Fantasy VI mega-patch since November 2007 anyway.

Early on you looked at the list of patches I had used in my patch, and it seems you are using many of the same ones (and many more).

Anyway, I want to congratulate you on the good work you are doing, and clearly you have progressed further than me.

I have been playing the game again recently using the version with my own patch and would like to warn you of a few bugs that may occur, which do not occur in the original game... these are bugs I did not know about when I last updated my patch and the website, but are obviously introduced by some of the patches I used, so since you use mostly the same patches, you might also have them:

1) In my mega-patch version, the ThiefKnife does not steal, it just does damage like a regular weapon. I know for sure that this doesn't occur in the original game.

2) There seems to be some problem with certain characters not being able to learn the Ultima spell from the Paladin Shield (it may also occur with learning other spells from other shields but I have not tested that yet). I encountered this problem when using the Paladin Shield on Relm, Gau, and Setzer, and there might also be other characters it can't teach Ultima to besides those 3 (I was teaching Ultima to half my characters with the Ragnarok Esper and the other half with the Paladin Shield at the same time, so I didn't manage to test it on all of them, although I did confirm that the characters who can't learn it from the Paladin Shield can learn it from the Ragnarok Esper), or it might be different characters in each game, who knows. I'm pretty sure the Paladin Shield didn't have this problem in the original game.

3) There seems to be some graphical glitch at the beginning of a battle if Gogo is in my party, where Gogo flashes between looking normal and being black all over. I am not sure if this was in the original game or not.

These seem to be the only 3 bugs I have noticed so far, and some of the patches I put into my mega-patch have newer versions now (for instance the Gogo and the Cursed Shield Fix has a newer version from earlier this year of 2011... my patch used version 0.6 but now the version for that is 0.9), since I made the mega-patch back in November 2007.

Anyway, these bugs MIGHT also occur in YOUR project, but they DEFINITELY occur in mine, and if I ever manage to put out another version of my mega-patch I will try and track down the cause of these bugs to get them fixed. Meanwhile I suggest that anyone playing the game with your patch check for these bugs... it won't be until the World of Ruin that you can get Gogo or the Paladin Shield, although the ThiefKnife does occur fairly early in the game, so that one should be easy to check. I haven't looked into your project in as much detail as I want to, but clearly you are combining all sorts of bugfix patches from all over the place so that's cool.

Also, there are more bugfix patches available from different people now than before (for instance, Novalia Spirit's and Mblock129's patches were not in my mega-patch because they apparently hadn't been made yet), and I am not sure if you know about all of these bugfix patches (and some that are not bugfixes but more mods), so I will post a bunch of links here (you probably already know about all of these, but just in case you don't know 1 or 2 of these, take a look):
Assassin17's own patches
Assassin17's hosted patches
Drakkhen's patches
Imzogelmo's patches
Lord J's patches
ManuLöwe's patch
Master ZED's patches
Mblock129's patches
Novalia Spirit's patches
Phantasian Productions' patches
Romhacking.net's patches
RPGOne's retranslation patch
Slick Productions' patches
Terii Senshi's patches
Zophar.net's patches

Anyway, I am very glad to see someone else doing something along the lines of what I was doing, namely combining together all the bugfix patches in order to have one patch to fix ALL of them. When I put out my mega-patch, the only person who had done anything similar that I knew about was ManuLöwe. My mega-patch is rather out of date and I have found 3 bugs in it that I listed earlier, and I just listed them in order to warn you that you might also suffer some form of those bugs too, maybe. However, if you are going to be making changes to the game that are not bug fixes, like renaming monsters, renaming items, renaming commands, etc., maybe you could have 2 versions of your patch, one that just has the bugfixes but doesn't change things that aren't broken, and another that includes all the changes that you wish to do to mod the game. The goal of my mega-patch was to mostly only include bugfixes and things that would make the English game more like the original, but without renaming any monsters, items, commands, or anything, and I wanted to maintain the Psycho Cyan glitch and the Vanish-Doom Bug so that players could still count on those if they wanted to take advantage of them. I did include a few things that could be considered new features or improvements, such as the alphabetized rage list, the Slot command being unrigged so you can get any outcome with enough skill, the color coded MP digits, etc. And while I did consider changing the fonts as I had done with my patch for Final Fantasy IV (editing them pixel by pixel for that game to get it just right, as a nice, large serif font), I decided I really liked the Final Fantasy VI fonts just the way they were (FF6 fonts are based off the Chicago font from Mac OS) and didn't modify them. While I am not against editing fonts, and actually enjoy it, I do find FF6's default font on the SNES to be the best looking font for that particular game, although for FF4, I designed my own font, which you'll get if you apply my FF4 mega-patch available at my website (when my website's server isn't down, that is)!

So sorry for rambling, I really like what you've done here, and while I haven't play-tested your patch yet, from what I've read so far I'm pretty sure it's way better than mine, although it goes further than I would go in changing the game, because the 1 thing I won't do is rename stuff like items, characters, monsters, commands, etc., as that will make things confusing for people who use walkthroughs or other guides, and I just like things being a straightforward IMPROVEMENT that mostly just fixes bugs and where the names of everything are the same so nothing will confuse the reader of a walkthrough. And I wanted to warn you about the 3 bugs I know about SO FAR from my mega-patch, just in case you have them in YOUR patch too, or in case anyone is thinking of playing with my mega-patch, so you know to expect those bugs. And of course I wanted to list all the other sites that have patches just to make sure that you didn't miss any, since you have taken up the mantle of fixing this game after people like me who didn't go as far.

One last thing, you are now linked to from the Final Fantasy wiki thanks to my edits (along with all the makers of other patches):
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Bugs_and_Glitches#Final_Fantasy_VI

I didn't include my own mega-patch on the links in that wiki because, honestly, I think the quality of my FF6 mega-patch is not good enough, given that I alone have found 3 bugs in it and others can probably find more, and I have not updated it in a few years (I last updated it in early November 2007, which was when I publicly posted it on my website after playing through the patched game on my own, and I can't remember if I noticed any bugs in it back then or not... I noticed the 3 bugs I told you about in the last month or two).

Anyway, good job!

- Rich McGrew (a.k.a. General Public and various other names on different websites)

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