Topic: Developing FF4kster: a comprehensive editor for FF4

[Rodimus Primal]

That's exactly where it happened when I did so. So I think we both can say NPC1 is off limits.

[chillyfeez]

"NPC1" probably should be removed from FF4kster altogether...
See, "NPC1" is the NPC with the identity "00."
When FFIV looks through the list of NPCs assigned to a particular area, that list is terminated by a "00." So, when you set NPC1 as an NPC in any area, what you're effectively doing is setting an end to the list of NPCs.

[Rodimus Primal]

Well that's good to know. As of now, I successfully added NPCs to the Training Room. I'm currently working on the NPCs in the Developer's Office. What I've run into is the NPC limit. I need two more Underground NPCs for the sign and the Magazine.

[Bydoless]

The battle command screen in the current version of FF4kster doesn't seem to work with vanilla versions of the FF4 Rom but seem to work with Unprecedented Crisis. For instance, using the battle command editor with the vanilla rom shows all kinds of random shit for everything, and scrolling to one of the Dummy commands freezes the editor. Meanwhile, Unprecedented Crisis has no problem and shows everything as intended.

[chillyfeez]

Sounds like you might not be using a version 1.1 US  ROM, Bydoless.
Many data locations that FF4kster edits are the same whether you use 1.0 or 1.1 (or in many cases, even the Japanese ROM, I think), but the battle command data is definitely different. Opening the wrong version ROM in FF4kster, therefore, will show weird shit in the command editor.

[Pinkpuff]

Version 0.8 is now on RHDN.

[Grimoire LD]

Wonderful! I saw this put up last night. Is there any changes from the version you've had available here, from the new RHDN one or is it just the version you've had here with the aforementioned bug fixes?

[Pinkpuff]

It's just the Timecave one that's been available for a while.

Also, I know I said I was going to move on to other things, but... I feel really bad leaving FF4kster without at least finishing overworld editing. Especially since that's been all thoroughly researched and should be fairly straightforward to add, it's just a matter of the interface for the wide tiles. So I think you may not have seen the last of me just yet.

[Bahamut ZERO]

It's just the Timecave one that's been available for a while.

Also, I know I said I was going to move on to other things, but... I feel really bad leaving FF4kster without at least finishing overworld editing. Especially since that's been all thoroughly researched and should be fairly straightforward to add, it's just a matter of the interface for the wide tiles. So I think you may not have seen the last of me just yet.

Reading that just made a good day even better!

[Grimoire LD]

That was one of the last big pieces missing (that and Lunar Boss AI, hehe). I am really glad to hear that you're still working on the program to at least finish that section up. I tried to add some of my own improvements to FF4kster, but none of them seemed to stick or even appear. Programming sure is daunting...

[chillyfeez]

Granted that I have zero clue as to what goes into actually programming a particular feature into FF4kster, but I don't think dealing with those 4-by tiles really has to have any special process in the user interface. The four tiles that make up each of those conglomerate mountain tiles do also exist as individual tiles, right? So just as - in the location map editor - the program sees five of tile 1B and knows to represent that as 9B 04 in the actual data, when it sees tiles  78 79 7A and 7B all in a row, it can choose to represent them as just tile 30 in the data.
I mean, I assume that should be possible...

[Pinkpuff]

I get what you mean, and if it's indeed that simple, then I have nothing to worry about. But what I'm concerned with is, I mean, the tile palette will still have a "tile 30" in it, right? How would that be displayed in the editor? What happens when you highlight it in the tile palette? What happens when you drop one on to the map? Would tile 30 just be another reference to 78 for those purposes? Or maybe just a big old X where tile 30 should be?

[chillyfeez]

Hmm... Good questions. Having looked a small amount into how the game translates ROM map data into RAM map data, I would guess that tiles 00, 10, 20 and 30 have dummy palette assignments, and the use of one of those in ROM simply calls the appropriate 1x1 tiles when the map is being drawn into RAM. That's how it works for the "multi" tiles - "98 04" in ROM ends up getting written into RAM as "18 18 18 18 18."
If I can determine that I'm right about that, then the solution would simply be to make the 4x1 tiles inaccessible to the user in the editor (a big old X, or whatever), and have their implementation entirely behind the scenes.
I'll look into that. In a couple of days, though, I've got kind of a busy weekend ahead.

[Pinkpuff]

And now... for my next trick... overworld triggers are now editable!! Timecave version updated.

It currently doesn't let you add or delete them, but you can certainly edit them. If anyone figures out where the pointers to the start/end of the overworld/undergound/moon lists are and how they're handled, then I might be able to add that functionality. But until then, those lists will remain fixed size.

[chillyfeez]

It's the six bytes immediately before the trigger start. The first two (00 00) point to the start of Overworld triggers. The next two for Underworld, and the last two for the moon.