Topic: Developing FF4kster: a comprehensive editor for FF4

[LordGarmonde]

Oh wow I actually love that game, haha! You're IN MY MIND!!

Well obviously - I mean come on, given the choices of 'in your mind' and 'under that dam' I have no choice but to go with A - lol 

Perhaps not an editor issue, but anyone know what enables Status messages in battle?  I tried a few of the 'dummied' ones (HP Leak, Hiding, & Critical) - no good, still blank next to the name. I changed the names for Wall and KO - the changes carried through perfectly, so there's something in between getting in the way. Any ideas?

[JCE3000GT]

Ah, yeah those are all reasonable thoughts. Ah well, looking forward to the release anyhow!

PM me your email address so I can send you a beta of it so you can test it out if you have time?

[Pinkpuff]

The good news:

The most rudimentary level of map editing has been implemented. You can now tab between the tileset and the map itself and hit enter to assign tiles. You can also "save" your changes...

The bad news:

Something is messed up with the saving. Specifically, I'm having trouble figuring out a way for the program to detect which maps need to write data and which ones don't. For example, maps that refer to other map indexes don't need to write map data or pointers. However, what's happening now is that, for example, the first glitch world (the one immediately after the Troia dancers' stage) is writing data and a pointer, when it shouldn't be. The rule I had been using was if the "map index" property for a given map was different from its actual map index, then don't write anything. However, that doesn't seem to do it. That glitch world apparently has its own map index and thus FF4kster thinks it needs to write something there when it actually needs to write nothing.

With things like this I normally don't care that much if the underlying representation isn't identical to the original, as long as the output/functionality is the same. However, when I ran it in an emulator, it was a complete disaster. Loading up a fresh rom in FF4kster, changing nothing, and then saving, resulted in DK Cecil's battle graphic being messed up (???) and stepping into Baron Town caused you to appear in the top left hand corner instead of the correct entrance.

I uploaded the current version, but since it will horribly mess up your rom, I simply added it to the zip under a different name, "bugged.exe", but the previous version is still there as "ff4kster.exe". That way you can still use the previous more stable version, but if you want to help me debug you can also look into the output of the bugged one.

  Never mind, I'm a genius; I figured out the solution. I just made it so that when it's reading the maps to begin with, it checks whether the next map has the same pointer as the current one and if so, flags it as having "no data". If a map is flagged as having no data, it will only display in the map editor if it has a map index different from its own, and will not be written to the rom when it is saved.

[LordGarmonde]

Nice job Pinkpuff! 

That was quick too - I swear it seemed like yesterday that you surged with conviction and released the first half of the map editor. But here you are now, blazing away. 

I'm excited to try your map editor out - I remember a while back someone "requesting" mouse support...

  - If I want to do that I use FF4Tools - in Safari, if I try it in Chrome it's like it's not even there and Firefox seems to have some mood swings about it.

But never give up the quest! Keyboard forever! 

[Grimoire LD]

Looks like everything is working perfectly! Added a few new tiles to Baron Town and noticed no peculiarities through doing so. It seems you implemented this quite quickly! And I tested that item locations and triggers could be changed as long as the other data in doing so is changed and it worked! Its like having the other half of a puzzle, I wouldn't have to go into FF4tools to make those fit any longer!

[LordGarmonde]

Agreed - so far so good: Nice work Pinkpuff

I changed a few things in Baron, on the Lunar Whale, and in the Subterrane - no problems   

Also, I love using it - very natural:  --> you 

[Pinkpuff]

Yay!  *Eated da cookie*

Next I'll see what I can do in terms of getting some of those more convenient keys working. Oh also, I don't think I documented it earlier but in the version you guys have you can also do these:

HOME: Scroll to top left corner
END: Scroll to bottom left corner
PAGE UP: Scroll to top right corner
PAGE DOWN: Scroll to bottom right corner

Try using it with the numpad, it's awesome (you'll have to turn off numlock though). On that note I'm thinking I might assign some of those other functions (flood fill, etc) to numpad keys as well (in addition to their regular keys) and then it'll be super numpaderific.

Soon no one will miss the mouse 

  Everything implemented now except for copy/paste, and the current version has been uploaded. Enjoy!

[Grimoire LD]

Wow! You implemented these really quickly! I do have a bug report though... when you go to fill in a space of tiles that is currently filled in with Enter, the program crashes (I guess because there's no exception made for it?)

And soon with visual confirmation of NPCs and the like true event editing can take place without the need of constant memorization.

[Pinkpuff]

Wow! You implemented these really quickly! I do have a bug report though... when you go to fill in a space of tiles that is currently filled in with Enter, the program crashes (I guess because there's no exception made for it?)

Fixed. 

And soon with visual confirmation of NPCs and the like true event editing can take place without the need of constant memorization.

Er... yes... well... for that I will have to dig back into the graphics. Hopefully the NPC graphics are not as much of a pain in the butt as the map tiles.

But in any case, yes that is something I would like the editor to be able to do for sure. I was thinking of maybe having a toggle switch, like maybe the "/" key, to turn on/off NPC placements.

[Grimoire LD]

The more you can use the numpad buttons the better I say, it creates a compressed and solid dynamic.

[Pinkpuff]

Well, school starts again for me tomorrow. Once again this means work on FF4kster will likely be slow and updates will happen at highly irregular intervals, depending on how much homework I have, etc.

The map editor has all its basic functionality; I'll probably leave the copy/paste thing for the time being and come back to it later. However, what I would like to come back to next is the tile editor. I would really like to be able to read the graphic tiles directly from the rom. In addition to the already mentioned advantages, it will greatly shrink the filesize of the program due to no longer having to package all those bmp files with it, and also I can have it dynamically add those box and arrow symbols to the tiles that have those features (warp, treasure, etc) and have them change as you change those features on different tiles. I almost had the graphics being read correctly, but if I recall correctly there were a couple of major roadblocks:

1. I couldn't get the palettes correct for some reason. The castle tileset seemed to display fine but the magnetic/sealed cave tileset had the correct graphics with the wrong colors. I even tried cycling through all the palettes and none of them looked correct. Either I'm reading the palettes wrong or from the wrong location or something is otherwise messed up.

2. I don't know where all the tileset graphics begin and end. If there are any kind-hearted souls who don't mind finding this information for me I would be most appreciative and it will certainly speed things along. Don't get me wrong, I am certainly quite able and willing to dig around for this myself in Tile Layer or something, but it will take time; time that I would much rather spend coding and implementing things in the editor.

I also have an ever-growing to-do list that I can implement odds and ends from as the mood strikes me.

In any case, in the absence of any game-wrecking or program-crashing behaviour, I think today I'm going to finish updating the readme and upload the current version to RHDN.

[Grimoire LD]

That time is creeping up on me as well and I have a pretty heavy schedule this time around so my activity might *actually* decrease, instead of me doing the equivalent of deciphering all commands and spells this time around. But I suppose by job is just about over until... oh boy, next October?

[Grimoire LD]

So as a bit of experimentation I decided to copy the first town of FFIII into FFIV as a test of the tools, it went smoothly (except for my artistic failure to even copy). Here are a couple of pictures.

[Grimoire LD]

One thing I Must address is that the Message Editor for large bits of text is now unusable, basically. There is a bright pink glaring at you the entire time when you go to click on a message to edit and the cursor which showed you where you were in the message is Completely gone and despite not even touching it (but merely viewing it) I can no longer save because of a Bank2 Overflow. This is rather harrowing and should be fixed as soon as possible.

[Pinkpuff]

I can't duplicate this. Anyone else?