Topic: Apropos of nothing (except of course FFIV)

[Grimoire LD]

I've made a mess of things and can't salvage this. I'm going to have to start back with 0.04, a shame, but I'll just have to be more careful for now on.


  Alright now, looks like things are back to normal. I just copied the default map from 0.04 and things are looking Perfect again, I wasn't set back at all (except for today's work in freeing up space...)

[chillyfeez]

I'm curious - what was going on with your maps, and was it clearing up space in FF4kster that broke them?

[Grimoire LD]

Oh, no no. FF4kster is completely innocent to what happened. When I was trying to do was set a base patch that you eventually made for me anyhow, I ended up unknowingly downloading an FFII 1.0 ROM. What eventually happened is that I used this as the "unmodified file" eventually when it came to creating 0.05. I thought somehow it "depatched" 1.0 because I noticed no problems at all until I went through several of my recent backups and saw it was there. Somehow patching those two together screwed up several maps in bizarre fashions.

So I went back to 0.04 patched that to a clean rom, copied my maps from there into Combat Boost. Unfortunately that means I had to do the space-saving and room salvaging again, but it really wasn't that bad the second time around.

[chillyfeez]

Ah, ok. You mentioned something about a waterfall map that kept recurring and I thought maybe FF4kster was doing that thing it had been doing with dialogue bank 2 (before pinkpuff fixed it), where it recopied everything from the end of the bank over and over again every time the data ewas shortened.

[Grimoire LD]

Oh it turned out to be several maps that were mixed up, and some were just essentially destroyed. I  am 99% certain it was the 1.0 to 1.1 conversion which caused the problems as now everything looks perfectly fine.

[Grimoire LD]

Haha! Well this became a little unexpected for me, probably inspired because of the time of the year...

So the optional dungeon that replaces the hidden Troian Island Chocobo Forest is now "Everwhite Woods" (except green in battle and the world map.) and I wanted a boss, so I started combing the internet for obscure meanings of "frost" when I found "Black Frost" which was originally going to be the name of the boss then I saw that Black Frost was related to an old Russian god name Korochun, and a little more research showed that a figure named Ded Moroz (Literally translated to Grandfather Frost and hey! Eight letters!)) was the spirit of winter in Russia. He was an old sorcerer who would kidnap children and freeze them to death with a magical staff unless their parents paid a ransom of a gift. In modern times this character is shown as being reformed and now basically acts like Russian Santa Claus...

So... the boss of this optional dungeon is, for all intents and purposes, Santa Claus. Now I just need to find a suitable enemy sprite... when I had him as Black Frost I just used a Zemus Shade as his sprite, but that no longer seems appropriate... this would probably be the best time for a palette swapped Ramuh, if I could get that to work.

Hmm, maybe I can use palette swaps of some characters... maybe use a palette swap of Tellah or FuSoYa to get the desired effect?

[chillyfeez]

Hey, that sounds like a cool sidequest. While I never would have thought of a forest dungeon, you're right - it is sort of a Final Fantasy standard that FFIV lacks, so good thinking!
Are you looking specifically to use already-in-game sprites for the boss? I'm not sure you'll be able to palette swap Tellah or FuSoYa. I think Character enemies have fixed palettes (that of their ally component).
you could copy Indra's sprites into one of those empty banks near the summon images, leaving spaces in the right places so that you can call a regular rectangular size (thereby not wasting a Special Size). I can help with that if you want to take that route.

So just for fun today, I played around with eliminating unseen portions of maps to see how much space I could free up. I also turned the Forest Clearing After Mist into all grass. Altogether, these are the changes I made:

Remove edge of Kaipo Oasis

Remove top two rows of Mysidia

Remove bottowm two rows of Damcyan sub basement

Extend east wing of Fabul 1F

Clear out post-mist forest clearing (make all grass)

blank out top row of mt hobbs west

blank out top row of mt hobbs east

blank out 5x10 rectangle in northeast AND bottom four rows of mt hobbs save point room

blank out top three rows of mt. ordeals entrance

blank out bottom row, top row of mt. ordeals third station

blank out bottom row, southwest 4x11 rectangle, last four spaces of next to last row and last three spaces

   of third to last row of mt. ordeals summit

remove bottom row of tower of zot 6f

remove bottom row of tower of bab-il entrance

eliminate the top 13 rows, the 9 westmost columns and the 8 eastmost columns of the bab-il crystal room

blank out southwest 6x13 rectangle in Giant of Bab-il stomach

remove bottom row of Giant Lung

blank out top three and bottom 13 rows of Two Connected Airships

By doing this, I was able to free up 977 bytes! and with the exception of the Forest Clearing and part of the East wing of the Fabul lobby, all of these changes would be entirely undetectable in normal gameplay.
Maximizing the space saved can be a little tricky sometimes. Because of how maps are written, you save the most space by overwriting the unseen spaces with repeats of whichever tile comes immediately before or immediately after (as opposed to just overwriting it with the "blank space" for that tileset).
Anyway, that amount of space is larger than the amount needed for the Dwarf castle (I think the largest map, datawise) by over 100 bytes. And I only worked with Overworld maps, so the same could theoretically be done for The Underworld/Moon, too.
So idf you're looking for more space for maps... there's some options for you. :)

[Grimoire LD]

I had the same fear originally Chillyfeez, then I noticed that enemy PC's had their palette set to their matching Ally ID, I changed that and saw that it did change as expected but yeah... your idea for a normal enemy Ramuh is Much more preferred! If you could assist me with that, it would be very appreciated.

Yes, much of what you suggested I tried as well, I also took the extra step by removing what I felt were unneccessary adornment (Three Stacks of firewood in a place without a fireplace is rather silly) Not sure what you mean extending the East Wing of Fabul 1F though.

I didn't want to really touch the dungeons though since a later goal of Combat Boost, when fully done with the gameplay portion will be to modify normal dungeon maps and make them into different arrangements.

That said, I have no idea how to tell how much space I saved, heh.

[chillyfeez]

It's very difficult to see how much space is saved, but after a lot of searching, I figured it out...
First of all, I noticed that whatever I did in the over world maps, the pointers for the underworld/moon maps never changed. So the game does read which world you're in before loading map data. Underworld/moon maps always start at C712E.
Having noticed that, I then looked at the last map with its own map index in the Overworld (Phoenix's FFTools was key for this process), which is the small dock (used for underground airship docks), map DF.
So then, I counted through the pointers to find the one for DF - not hard, every two lines represents 0x10 maps.
Assuming no changes are made to the Small Dock map (thereby making it longer or shorter), the difference in pointer value before and after this process represents how much space was saved. In my case, 0x3D1 bytes, or 977.
It looks like what  FF4kster does with the extra space is... Absolutely nothing, so all data after the small dock is left exactly as is, which is why you can't just look to see how much space is saved. But the space between the end of the small dock and C712E will always be unused.


Sure, I'll be glad to help you copy Indra's sprites to make him usable. I just finished with a couple of days off and am going into the second busiest weekend of the work year, so it may take a couple of days, but if you PM me a patch with your current work in progress, I'll work on it when I get the opportunity.

[Grimoire LD]

Ah, that is interesting to know, unfortunately FF4Tools no longer work for me since Phoenix's site has gone offline and I could never get the actual tool to work independent of that.

Sure, I'll send you the newest WIP patch in PM then.

[chillyfeez]

Ah, that is interesting to know, unfortunately FF4Tools no longer work for me since Phoenix's site has gone offline and I could never get the actual tool to work independent of that.

Really? It's just an HTML file (and a bunch of images). I've run it successfully on a bunch of different devices...

[Grimoire LD]

Ah? I could never figure out how to load my ROM into it though. Is there something so plain I'm missing here? Also the PM has been sent (on romhacking.net).

[chillyfeez]

Oh, no, it's not designed to load a ROM into it. It simply has an output of hex that you could, theoretically, copy and paste into your ROM using a hex editor... Except no hex editor I've ever used allows you to paste "text" into the hex field. So while I use it regularly as a reference, it rarely ever had for me the practical purpose that I think Phoenix intended.
And now everything it does is available to do with FF4kster, so now I use it exclusively as a reference tool.

[Grimoire LD]

Oh, no, it's not designed to load a ROM into it. It simply has an output of hex that you could, theoretically, copy and paste into your ROM using a hex editor... Except no hex editor I've ever used allows you to paste "text" into the hex field. So while I use it regularly as a reference, it rarely ever had for me the practical purpose that I think Phoenix intended.
And now everything it does is available to do with FF4kster, so now I use it exclusively as a reference tool.

I thought that was the case, but whenever I open it there's nothing.  Map Loading has no maps, events have no events, etc. Is there something crucial I'm missing there?

[Grimoire LD]

As a big fan of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (having read the books and seen all the movies) I've thrown together something for fun that I somewhat doubt I'll ever really try to tackle (mainly because of lack of appropriate sprites) of making a mod of FFIV into the basic plot of the Hobbit movies. 13 Characters lets me use the vast majority of the Dwarves and Gandalf as well as throw in movie-verse Legolas and Tauriel. Fixed levels aren't so bad when you consider that from a logical standpoint the party would be encountering Legolas and Tauriel later in the game and Gandalf should be absurdly powerful because he's Gandalf so the vast majority of the Dwarves start at Level 10, Bilbo and Ori at Level 1 and Kili at Level 5 as being the second-youngest of (movie-verse) group of Dwarves.

Here would be the stat plan, classes, and general overview of role for the characters (stats on a scale of 0-5)

(Level 10) Thorin - MtnKing (Str. 4, Agi. 4, Sta. 5,  Wis. 2, Will 0) several fighting related skills, good MP, most HP)

(Level 20) Balin - Advisor (Str.3, Agi. 2, Sta. 3,  Wis. 4, Will 5) not-good MP, few fighting skills, several minor magics.)

(Level 10) Dwalin - Warrior (Str. 5, Agi. 3, Sta. 4, Wis. 0, Will 3) Great HP, Great MP, most fighting related skills)

(Level 1) Bilbo - Burglar (Str.2, Agi. 5, Sta. 2, Wis. 3, Will 3) Low HP, Medium MP, Several talk skills, Steal, terrible starting stats.

(Level 10) Fili - Heir (Str. 3, Agi. 3, Sta. 4,  Wis. 3,  Will 2) - Can equip all weaponry (except legendary equipment.) his skills are similar to Thorin's, he will have Throw (or some variation thereof).

(Level 5) Kili - Archer (Str. 2, Agi. 4, Sta. 2,  Wis. 2,  Will 4) - Good HP, Low MP, Several long-range skills.

(Level 10)Bofur - Miner (Str. 3, Agi. 3, Sta. 3,  Wis. 1,  Will 2) - Good HP, Low MP, several bard-like skills.

(Level 10) Oin - Shaman (Str. 2, Agi. 4, Sta. 2, Wis. 3, Will 4) - Low HP, High MP, Healer

(Level 10)Gloin - Banker (Str. 3, Agi. 1, Sta. 4, Wis. 3., Will 3) - High HP, Low MP, Some skills...? Gold Toss

(Level 1) Ori - Scholar (Str. 2, Agi. 4, Sta. 1, Wis. 3, Will 4) - Low HP, Decent MP, minor-magics. Uses a Slingshot/ammo combination that cause status ailments.

(Level 50) Gandalf - Wizard (Str. 4, Agi. 3, Sta. 3, Wis. 5, Will 5) Decent HP, Highest MP, all magic, does not increase in stats.

(Level 25) Legolas - Prince (Str. 2, Agi. 5, Sta. 3, Wis. 2, Will 4) Low HP, Low MP, Powerful skills.

(Level 20) Tauriel - Captain (Str. 3, Agi. 4, Sta. 2, Wis. 3, Will 5)  Medium HP, Medium MP, Healing Magic/Attack Skills.

Just an idea I've been throwing around I'll post on more ideas if it comes to me.