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Many thanks, yomama. Indeed, we're just keeping things quiet but the hack is being worked on daily (well, near-daily) behind the scenes. Our biggest hurdle at the moment involves overcoming some of the game engine's limitations; material as such as being added on a regular basis.

Caesar suggested I should post this sometime. While waiting for a demo, here's a slightly outdated little something to keep everyone guessing just what jobs it'll feature.



Edit: Sized it up to 2x, since it was hard to make things out.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 22nd April 2007 20:55

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

All well and good but I still have yet to see my maps.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

I've run into a bit of a problem with maps - despite having what I'm 100% sure is the right format for tilesets, they still come out wrong. There's a possibility that the demo will not feature new maps just yet.

However I've decided that if I can't get the tilesets working, I'll build them by hand. It's less flexible (tilesets actually come from multile sub-tilesets and have a lot of parameters messing around with sprites and palettes) but it will work both for dumping purposes and for editing purposes.

It was pushed back down on the priority list after I spent a few days going nowhere with it, but apart from a few small assembly hacks for animations and job commands, it's rising back to the top again. So... I hate to give you a generic means-nothing response, but they'll be worked on and ready to be extracted soon. No worries - I haven't forgotten.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

OH EM GEEZ I THINK IM SO EXCITED FOR THIS I ALMOST PEED MA PANTS. LOL!
ok seriously, those sprites are looking awesome. I think i can almost guess all of them to.
Well anyway, i better get to cleaning this mess up.

I'm quite sure you can't guess half of them correctly. I agree, though. RL did an incredible job on these sprites. They look even better when you know what classes they are, too.

Idk if RL wanted to keep this under wraps or not, but I'm feeling generous so I'll tell you anyways. There are a few classes that will be included in the game, but are not included in that chart. So let that add to the mystery and such.

As RL said before, there may or may not be a demo. And I have all of the animations (except for one usable spell and a few enemy spells) made and in working order. I will not post any animations online for a few reasons: 1) I don't know how to make animated GIFs or movie files; 2) screenshots don't do animations justice, so I need to host movies to showcase them; 3) you have to play the game to see the animations.

With RL having access to the internet at home now and me having heaps of ideas for animations and a firm grasp of how to make the things I'm thinking about, progress is actually very good. We just didn't want to post a million times with posts like "um so we didn't get anything done yesterday but we figured out what this one byte does!"

That's all I've got to contribute for now.

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Is PJ

Alright, this is not an update for the hack specifically, and is mainly intended for Josh, but I figure it may interest a few people anyhow.

At long last, I've figured out how to get maps to dump. It took a bit of cheating on my part but it works like a charm. Problem is, it involves ripping tilesets by hand, which is pretty hard. Each tile must map to the appropriate ID - it's not just a matter of plucking tiles out of a screenshot and sticking them in a bitmap. That's right - it's technically cheating, but heck it works and I'm pretty fed up with going in circles.

I'm not 100% sure how long it'll take to get everything dumped. Potentially a week - there are a lot of tilesets and it's a slow, painful procedure. But hell, it works, that's absolutely all I care about. I'll be sure to post an update when I have available maps from the original game for download.

(Note - each map is 64x64 and made up from 16x16 tiles, so that's 1024x1024. This is somewhat big - 3 megs per map as uncompressed bitmaps for something like 300+ maps. I'll almost certainly be providing them as gifs seeing as they won't exceed 256 colors; that's quite a bit smaller and between 100-200 kb each... but that's a lot of maps regardless. Expect a 50 meg zip/rar (your choice) once I finish up with the tilesets and the dumping.)

Edit: And here's proof - an incomplete map (I only have about a third of the tileset done.) Enjoy!



This post has been edited by Silverlance on 25th April 2007 23:40

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Nice work, there. You can feel free to rar the bitmaps, they'll compress well and we can do the conversion any time. Climhazzard has oodles of space and bandwidth, transferring to the malevolent soul shouldn't trouble you much.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

i really need to learn how to hack...

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Aujourdhui a commence avec toi.

Quote (Silverlance @ 22nd April 2007 15:53)

Many thanks, yomama. Indeed, we're just keeping things quiet but the hack is being worked on daily (well, near-daily) behind the scenes. Our biggest hurdle at the moment involves overcoming some of the game engine's limitations; material as such as being added on a regular basis.

Caesar suggested I should post this sometime. While waiting for a demo, here's a slightly outdated little something to keep everyone guessing just what jobs it'll feature.



Edit: Sized it up to 2x, since it was hard to make things out.

You know, I really like the ZZtop beards. I'm curious as to what class that is, but man, will I have to have two people assigned to that class at a time. Just for kicks.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

Any updates you could toss our way? I'll take whatever crumbs I can get!

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Oh sure, I don't have to get kicked in the junk to activate it, but I like it anyway. -- Thief commenting on the difference between Throw and Blue Magic.

The project is still alive and well, but there have been a few things hindering progress. First of all, having just begun college, finding time to work on this (especially time alone without annoying dorm mates looking over my shoulder asking me what I'm doing and telling me to explain it before taking offense at not understanding) has proven itself to be a difficult task. I have had some success on my end while here, but far less than when I am home or alone.

Secondly, as some of you may have noticed, RuneLancer hasn't been as active on the forums recently. Since he is an internet junkie, it can be assumed that if he has a computer he will be on the internet surfing around or posting here. You all can probably put the puzzle pieces together, but in short, he has run into some complications with his computer. Some rather complicated complications. Hopefully he will have it back up and running after the holiday, but as of right now it's out of commission. I am on holiday break until the end of January (like 6 weeks of vacation!) so that is a good chunk of time during which to accomplish a lot of stuff on the project.

So anyways, there aren't many updates that I'm willing to share at the moment, but I assure all of you that we are not letting this die. We are two persistent little hax0rz. With patience, good things will come.

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Is PJ

Quote (Caesar @ 13th December 2007 14:09)

The project is still alive and well, but there have been a few things hindering progress. First of all, having just begun college, finding time to work on this (especially time alone without annoying dorm mates looking over my shoulder asking me what I'm doing and telling me to explain it before taking offense at not understanding) has proven itself to be a difficult task. I have had some success on my end while here, but far less than when I am home or alone.

Secondly, as some of you may have noticed, RuneLancer hasn't been as active on the forums recently. Since he is an internet junkie, it can be assumed that if he has a computer he will be on the internet surfing around or posting here. You all can probably put the puzzle pieces together, but in short, he has run into some complications with his computer. Some rather complicated complications. Hopefully he will have it back up and running after the holiday, but as of right now it's out of commission. I am on holiday break until the end of January (like 6 weeks of vacation!) so that is a good chunk of time during which to accomplish a lot of stuff on the project.

So anyways, there aren't many updates that I'm willing to share at the moment, but I assure all of you that we are not letting this die. We are two persistent little hax0rz. With patience, good things will come.

We find your answer suitable, and are relieved that there has been much progress.

Anyhow, since I don't want this to just be an empty reply, let me add an idea to the mix. It might be too late to include it, and it might not be suitable, but since you're all open to ideas, here goes:

Add additional characters that could optionally replace the other characters. They're brought in as guest characters with the same level as the character they replace, but act as a unique job. Each of the main 4 characters has a different guest character that can replace them, acting as an additional class.

Some options:
Butz - Gilgamesh or Dorgann
Lenna - Cid, Mid, or Melusine
Faris - Ghido, Xezat, or a pirate
Galuf - Kelgar or Krile

The difference between the guest characters and other classes though is that guest characters cannot change jobs, earn AP, or use other skills that the character has learned. Obviously, there are some coding difficulties with that... :-(

Anyhow, you guys do great work, I'm excited to see this project come together.

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Oh sure, I don't have to get kicked in the junk to activate it, but I like it anyway. -- Thief commenting on the difference between Throw and Blue Magic.

I appreciate the ideas, but RL and I already have more ideas for the remaining job slots than the game will allow for. Also, as mentioned in my previous post, RL will be out of contact for another week or two. Once he returns, we can consider this more, but right now we have a few other priorities to take care of.

Anyways, thanks again for being patient, everybody. More updates to come in a few weeks.

This post has been edited by Caesar on 14th December 2007 19:50

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Is PJ

*Phoenix Down*

Any progress on this hack? I was hoping maybe you could share your info if the project has died.

I haven't heard from RL in like 3 months. I still plan to finish this once I know what's up, but I honestly don't know when that will be. Hopefully soon because I really do want to get some more work on this done, but that is just wishful thinking.

When he does get internet connection back (I'm assuming that's the problem), there will likely be a few posts here from him explaining where we are. If I hear anything else, I will let everybody know here. If neither of us have posted in this thread, then it is safe to say that he hasn't gotten back to me yet.

Sorry.

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Is PJ

Oh, ok. The reason I asked is because I'm working on a hack myself:
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,5598.0.html

There won't be any serious changes like the ones you were planning, but I need what I can get. Feel free to use what I have gathered, if can be of any use (not sure about FM's stuff though):
http://jorgur.zymichost.com/ff5/http://jorgur.zymichost.com/ff5/-technical/

This post has been edited by Jorgur on 17th August 2008 12:20

We have nearly everything in the ROM figured out, with the exception of a few really complicated sprite loading procedures and, last I remember, some minor map stuff. Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm pretty sure there is nobody out there who has decoded something in the ROM that we haven't. I appreciate the offer to your notes, but we already figured that out.

As for sharing info, RL and I agreed awhile back that we would not release any of our notes or info until our hack was finished and released. Even though I haven't heard from him in awhile, I still keep my word. Sorry.

Good luck on your hack.

This post has been edited by Caesar on 6th March 2008 06:01

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Is PJ

I guess I was expecting that. Thanks anyway.
Everyone else is free to browse though. Its regularly updated.

This post has been edited by Jorgur on 6th March 2008 06:44