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Quote (Caesar @ 2nd July 2005 23:53)

Thanks a ton, RuneLancer. If this works, I'm building a shrine in your honor.

You know, when I get around to adding the required code, Endless Saga could use some animation scripts for its spells and effects... I might consider the expertise of some people if there's any interest.

Here's a quick lil' update. My code is absolute crap. There's a nasty as hell bug somewhere in the code. The good news is, I know exactly what it is. The bad news is, I'm not sure how I'll manage to come up with the spare space in C1 to do it. But the good news is, I might be able to do some optimisations here and there to save space for some other animation commands, move some pointers about, and end up having more free space. The bad news is, the code will be a lil' more messy. The good news is, Square's programmers write enough spaghetti code as it is, it won't matter if it gets a tiny bit more convoluted.

So! Should be ready soon enough. Gimme a few hours (gonna take a break and maybe go for a midnight walk 'round town; 1:30 am's the best time to get some fresh air ) and after a few more tests it's yours.

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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."

Quote

But the good news is, I might be able to do some optimisations here and there to save space for some other animation commands, move some pointers about, and end up having more free space.

Did I hear this correctly? More animation commands. No seriously, tell me you're joking. I think I might die if I get another new toy to play with.

Wanna hear something really fascinating? Though I never remember doing it, it seems that I have expanded my ROM. Yea. So your long jump command no longer gives me access to 10,000 free bytes. It gives me access to at least 1,050,000 free bytes. I estimated to make the subtraction easier. Yea, when I found all that unused space, I almost soiled myself. 1 million bytes. A MILLION! No more need to worry about overwriting animations. Forget about it.

And I would be happy to do some animations for ES. However, I can't garuntee anything; I am the master of animation only regarding FFVI. This self-proclaimed animation guru may not be any better with the animations you seek than anybody else, but I would be more than happy to help you out.

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Is PJ

Well, there's no way to add extra commands. AS SUCH. Basically the code staples itself shut at 0x80 commands. BUT... take a look at command 0x80. Yeah, that's the one... see where I'm going with this? You do? Good boy.

Freeing up space is a real pain. You have no idea how paranoid I am of forgetting to convert a jump or two. The worse are relative jumps; the SNES chipset's jump command takes a parameter (2 bytes): the... this is why this hurts so much... the relative OFFSET to which to jump to (and not ADDRESS.) This means that if I replace a common set of instructions by a JSR to a function that bundles 'em up all neat and space-friendly, I have to make sure that EVERY jump into that code gets fixed or else I'm screwed. Moving code around hurts.

Care to share with us your plans for this extra megabyte of free animation space? Also, mind if I steal some of that free space? Now that I know you have an expanded ROM, I can definitely save myself a LOT of work by making use of that huge chunk of free space instead of struggling with the meager handfull of free bytes C1 gives me.

Edit: God, it's 4 am and the internet's so damned silent... Well, gonna go grab cheese and coffee, and see if I can come up with some more interesting stuff...

Edit 2: Eh... pretty bad news man... I don't think I'll be able to pull this off. See, the problem's with how the SNES addresses places in memory. In short, and very basically, you can do one of two things: give it an exact address ($C145F3), or an indexed address ($C10000,X) In the last case, if X varies, so does the address being read at. So if we had a loop that went from 0x0000 to 0x0200, it would read from C1:0000, C1:0001, ... C1:0200. Notice, however, that X is 2 bytes long.

One of the modes that does the above uses something called the Direct Page, or Zero Page, to set a "base" bank to read from. I figured I'd just push the DP, set it to the new bank, load script data, then pull the DP and make a clean getaway. Not so. After doing that, I was getting ugly crashes that took a hell of a lot of effort to debug. It turns out there are many, many places that require reading from, and keeping the DP set to the right address at all times AND covering all cases would require rewriting the entire animation parser (perhaps nothing so drastic as that, but going through the entire thing line by line would be more likely. )

The good news, however, is that all hope may not yet be lost. I'm hunting around for a way to do this without fiddling around with the code so much and may have a backup plan. I'll edit this post again once I get an idea how to do this other than via animation commands.

If you're hurting for space though, there might be stuff to move in D0 that could free up space. That's the most likely possibility, and I might have ways of putting things in that spare space your extended ROM has. This still limits you to D0, but animation scripts range from 7BE5 to around 9AA0, so 0x1000 bytes would be enormous. What else is in D0... let's see... a couple of pointers (easily relocatable) and a battle dialogue bank (likewise)... Hrm... I think I may've found some free space for you after all.

Edit 3: Fully possible.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 3rd July 2005 08:55

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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."

Well, if you want to use the free MB, it starts at like $302700 and ends at $4001FF. Use at will.

I was thinking about relocating some stuff in the D0 bank, but I wanted to make sure this isn't possible before I did such. Is edit 3 saying that the jump is still possible, or that the relocation is possible?

Edit

Actually, out of that space, I have my attack scripts. So from $380200 to like...$390000 we'll say, just to be safe, should be avoided. You know, just in case I want to make a 3000-byte attack script for some enemy.

This post has been edited by Caesar on 3rd July 2005 15:48

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Is PJ

How about this: Make the spell completely non-learnable... then have the Penguin Spear randomly cast it? Would that work?

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Uwao. aooh! I'm Gau!
I'm your friend!
Let's travel together!

Actually, believe it or don't, that was my first idea for the spell. I thought it would be neat. However, I forgot that the relic, PenguinPower, grants the wearer X-Fight, which means that it would never cast the spell as long as you had the relic equipped.

I don't know the exact chances of casting a spell randomly, but if it is high enough, I might get rid of the X-FIght ability so that it would work. That would be the ideal situation. Only problem with that is, there would always be a blank spot in your magic list where the spell was. I'm sure the players wouldn't appreciate that very much. Oh well. I guess I could make Ragnarok (the esper who doesn't exist anymore...either choose Umaro or the sword ) a different esper who teaches that spell only and make him very difficult to acquire. I don't know, honestly. Again, not a main priority, but I guess we could see what develops.

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Is PJ

Hmm, the actual long jump command is, of course, not impossible. But to do so would imply a very, very in-depth rewriting of many parts of the animation script parser (basically, changes everytime it reads from ROM to make it grab a 3-byte address, and not 2 like it currently does.) Every read would imply setting and restoring the Direct Page, making sure it never loses the right value at all times. Making sure no read instruction anywhere is left unchecked would mean closely following the entire animation script parser code line by line; this would rock and be one heck of a learning experience, but not something that lies within my timeframe.

Relocating stuff in D0 is very possible and possibly the best solution to freeing up space. If you want me to see what I can get you out of it, I'll give that a shot. Real easy: just copy-paste some stuff into another bank and hunt around in the code for any references to that address. Change as desired.

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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."

Alright. Yea, that sounds like it'd take an eternity to manage. I don't blame you for not wanting to do it. You can give the relocation a shot if you want. I don't know if you have an expanded ROM or not, so I could send mine over for you. Plus, that'll give you an oppurtunity to try some of the things I made, and possibly help you understand why I need more space.

I'll drop you an email with my ROM attached...maybe a savestate, too, just in case you wanted to fight me. Note that there's still one change I am going to make to my AI, but you can give it a shot anyways.

Edit

cang ive = baaaad. Typos fixed.

This post has been edited by Caesar on 3rd July 2005 18:23

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Is PJ

Ker-bump.
Also, an interesting thought for the name of the new, ragnarok-replacing, PenguAssualt teachin esper...
I call it...
Arktos! (Like Arctic! Geddit?)

Moderator Edit

Yes, because a thread that had been idle for seven hours needed the bump. -R51

This post has been edited by Rangers51 on 5th July 2005 02:24

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Uwao. aooh! I'm Gau!
I'm your friend!
Let's travel together!

I don't think the thread was in too much danger of dying, but thanks for the thought, I guess.

I had an idea just before going to the fireworks tonight. I remembered that I was going to make a spell called "Penguin" for the rarest snow area attack for Golbez. I never got around to doing that, though. Maybe, just maybe, I could manage to make "PenguAssault" (you are aware that this was just a temporary name just to make descriibng it easier, right? I will certainly not name the spell that, but eh) the same spell as "Penguin", therefore saving me a whole bunch of time and effort and such...although it won't be saving too much of either. Oh well. I thought it'd be cool for an attack for Golbez to have access to, anyways.

In other news, RuneLancer has just informed me (well...a few hours ago ) that the long jump command is still very possible. This means that I still have access to ~1,000,000 bytes for animations. w00t! Very exciting. If it doesn't work, we have a back-up plan that will still free like 50,000 bytes. We are genii.

I am very, very pleased with the progress going on here. I just thought I'd take the oppurtunity to brag a little about it. I'm not sure if anybody here is aware of the scale of this. If you look at the other hacks out there, they might have ONE new special monster or something, or 2 new characters added in, maybe some dialogue, but nothing to this degree. There have been a few monster patches that have changed the animations of some spells, but this is the only hack in existance that has utilized 100% custom animations. Even if that's just one or two animations, it is still the first (there is a ridiculous amount of changed animations, where I went in and just changed a few bytes that controlled some things I didn't like, but I think I only truly made 3 100% original animations). Again, some more self-promotion: it just struck me that there are maybe 4 people in the world (well...in the ROM hacking community; there might be more who haven't joined us yet and are just biding their time in hiding) who know how to make an animation from scratch. RuneLancer and I are two of those who can make them for sure. The 6th Lime is also very proficient with animations, as well, and I think WindWaker and Imzogelmo might know how to, too, but still, I never thought about that before and it's pretty cool.

/end self-promotion

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Is PJ

<shamelessselfpromotion>I'm the only person with a list of all the animation scripts and the animation parser code (fully commented)/shamelessselfpromotion>

As I was telling Caesar in an email, I stumbled on some new data for animations that led me to realise just how EASY the long jump command would be. Five minutes later, I had coded it and had a working command.

The unfortunate thing is that, the command replaced by the long jump command (which is some kind of VSync command) is used qutie a lot more than the both of us expected. This causes nasty crashes when certain animations are played, and completely unexpected results. There are possible solutions to this, though, and it's just a matter of figuring out which would be easiest/safest to implement. Fastest, too. I've got a project of my own to slave at, and my deadline's too close for me to hunt through the script for possible solutions this week.

By the way... Omnislash really is incredible. Two thumbs up! Caesar's work is wonderful.

Edit: Solved it.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 5th July 2005 03:27

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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."

Thank you, thank you. I do take great pride in my work, and Omnislash is my personal favorite. Just imagine how it's going to look with all that space! I can hardly contain myself.

I still think it'd be easier for you to replace 80 30 or 80 71. Those HAVE to be used less than VSync. Seriously, when are you going to use "restore palette for characters 2-4"? Whatever's easiest for you, though.

Edit

Quote

I'm the only person with a list of all the animation scripts

You have one of those?! :drool:

This post has been edited by Caesar on 5th July 2005 03:39

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Is PJ

How else would I be able to tell you which scripts have that command? Unfortunately it isn't very complete due to the fact I'm still missing a handfull of commands.

The problem is that EVERY command is used at least ONCE. Which is quite a problem: if, at any time, that particular spell/animation is triggered, crash-city would occure. So it's not a matter of simply replacing a lesser-used command, there would still be crashes somewhere down the road...

For the record, 80 71 is used quite a bit. 80 30 is not used very often; in fact, my dump doesn't have any mention of it. But I have seen it while running around through scripts by hand (like I said, the dump still isn't complete and messes up for commands with an unknown number of parameters). 80 30 IS quite rare but it's still used, in an event I believe. If I could pinpoint which one (gonna have to work on my script dumper...) I might be able to just plain drop the command and replace it. It's 0x20 bytes in lenght, which is longer than the VSync one and which would allow me to play around a bit more.

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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."

Go for it. At first glance, I was thinking the meeting between Terra (?????) and Tritoch, when she glows and the lightning and such, but then I realized that it wasn't use then, either. I could give my friend Ctrl + F a visit tonight and see what I can find, as well. Looks like we have ourselves a winner.

Edit

Yea the Ctrl + F scan is a negative. It came up ONCE, but that was after a D2, which has two parameters, so that couldn't have been used as a command. I honestly don't think that this was used anywhere...good call

This post has been edited by Caesar on 5th July 2005 04:35

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Is PJ

Any news, Caesar?

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Uwao. aooh! I'm Gau!
I'm your friend!
Let's travel together!

Caesar's going to have some very, very good news once he checks his emails.



Having access to a full bank to store assembly code in solved soooo many problems I was having with a certain bit of code... Hehehe...

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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."

Okay, well I do believe an update is now at hand. When I was beginning this hack, I expanded my ROM, but I never found a use for it, and I eventually forgot I did that. Luckily, I remembered just when I needed to. With 1 MB of free space, RuneLancer was able to program the custom animation commands he was going to make for me. With that background information given, I'll proceed to update you all:

THE LONG JUMP COMMAND WORKS!, quoth RuneLancer. This means that I will have like 500k free bytes to program animation scripts as I please. Just to give you an idea of how much that is when programming by hand, Omnislash is like 800 bytes right now. I have 500,000 more. That means that Omnislash will soon become similar to a cinema, especially with all the animation commands that I can see RuneLancer sending my way.

I will keep all those commands a secret, unless I get a really really great one that I can't keep to myself, and have to share. But really, giving the self-declared animation guru a few hundred thousand bytes of free space, and giving a software developer with a lot of spare time access to an equal amount of free space should make you all very excited. This means that some of these attacks will have such nasty animations, you might die. Here's just a sample of what RuneLancer and I (but mainly RuneLancer's commands) are capable of:

I was informed that it is possible to make a command that branches when the caster's HP is at a certain level, or if a certain item is in the inventory. This means that I could give EVERY ANIMATION CASTABLE BY THE PARTY a secondary animation if your health is low, or if you have a certain item. I don't know about you, but that makes me excited.

I also believe that it MAY be possible, after all, to make the APOCALYPSE AMMO. Depending on how willing RuneLanceris to make certain commands, I can really have this ammo destroy portions of the map, break the rifle, destroy everything on-screen, and maybe even elimate nearby towns, if you were unfortunate enough to use it by a town (yes, that means you can actually lose the game forever by using this attack).

So yes, prepare for some incredible screenshots in the near future, and/or some more great news regarding these commands .

This post has been edited by Caesar on 12th July 2005 14:45

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Is PJ

If you're willing to be a bit meaner ( which i'm sure you are), you could have the hit rate of spells lower if you have less hp.
APOCALYPSE AMMO!!!! *Stares at the screen waiting for the possibility update/ screenshot*
Bet you're gonna have fun with that!

Hehe, don't get too carried away with the apocalypse ammo just yet, that's a VERY massive command in itself IF it can be pulled off.

Altering the world map means writing to the ROM directly. As this isn't possible, some very heavy assembly hacks will have to be implemented in the map decompression/loading code. I'm talking really heavy stuff here. I'm still not 100% sure how I could pull it off even in theory, though with all that free space I should be able to find a way.

I'd like to take this opportunity to bring up once again a certain mention of custom damage algorithms, in conjunction with the free space I now have access to...

--------------------

"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."

Quote

I'd like to take this opportunity to bring up once again a certain mention of custom damage algorithms, in conjunction with the free space I now have access to... smile.gif

...oh, you meant for ME to talk about it? I scroled down farther looking for more of your post, but there was none.

Okay, so basically, RuneLancer can program his own damage calculations with the free space I gave him. This opens up PLENTY of possibilities, but I'll let you all use your imagination with this one. Not too hard to figure out what can be done here.

Oh, and yes, I'm aware that it's impossible to destroy the world map. I just wanted to throw that in htere to build excitement. It WILL be possible to destroy the rifle, though, and I can make an amazing animation for it.

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Is PJ

Er? Who ever said it was impossible to destroy the world map?

It's possible, but would be extremely troublesome. What I might be able to do, however, is allow it to destroy certain areas via event flags and slight alterations to events. Don't forget, I DO know how to edit town and dungeon maps (slightly!!) and might be able to shove an event that picks between the normal and destroyed map. This is only a thought, I'm not sure just how hard it would be to add maps.

Events can also edit existing maps. Think Tzen (was it Tzen...?) when you get Sabin in the WoR. After the town is destroyed, it remains destroyed. Hum hum...

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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."

Hm. So let's assume that after you use the ammo, it checks to see whether or not you're in a cave, town, or on the world map. If in a town, the town is destroyed, and if a cave, it collapses, in both cases leaving you on the world map next to a crater in the ground which used to be a town or cave entrance. If on the world map, it would simply destroy the tile you were standing on, or a few tiles around that. Would that be possible?

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Is PJ

I don't believe you can edit the world maps with event commands, so this brings me back to the part about altering the decompression/loading code, which would be hellishly difficult (not in the good way, either )

The rest seems feasible. I don't know how the Light of Kefka event is scripted, but stdying it should give some insight on what to do. The downside is that this would have to be done for each location individually, which could be tedious.

A brief mock-up of the command would be as such...

- Check current area.
- Get an index into a table that'll hold the necessary event bit(s) to switch on/off.
- Read the bit and set it.

The problem would be causing the event to trigger. The map would have to have an event to run somewhere that would take over and make stuff happen. But I don't know how the alternate map thing is handled, so I can't say much until it's given a look...

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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."

Ah. I see. Stupid world map. Well...I wouldn't worry about it too much, then. Primary concern = new animation commands for Caesar to play with.

Haha, no but really, after I get the long jump, I should be fine for awhile.

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Is PJ

By the way, have a look at the "echo" commands. You might find them of great use for your omnislash command.

Damn, am I ever eager to get back home to work on this..

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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."

Destroying a town with an attack... wow. Methinks this hack'll make history, that it will.

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Uwao. aooh! I'm Gau!
I'm your friend!
Let's travel together!

Quote

By the way, have a look at the "echo" commands. You might find them of great use for your omnislash command. smile.gif

Give it a look again, RuneLancer, and you'll find that I already made excellent use of the caster echo. How else do you think I got 2 Cecil's to appear at the same time? I just enables the caster trail and then had him move incredibly fast, so it looks like he is in two places at once.

That was the first attack animation that popped into my head when I saw the command.

And yea, I'm eager for you to get home, too. I want my commands! Hahaha...

Edit

RuneLancer gave me 4 new commands to play around with, so expect some amazing results soon. I wish I could post an animated gif or movie up here so everybody could see it when I finish

This post has been edited by Caesar on 13th July 2005 02:33

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Is PJ

I added two more last night, though they're pretty much the same (one's the caster version and the other's the target version.) As to what they do, it's nothing to write home about, but they will definitely breath life into characters during animation sequences if properly used.

Now that the betatest is out and being tested (with good results ), I'm taking a break from Endless Saga and working on this hack's technical aspect full-time until saturday (at which point I turn 21 and head over up north to throw a party with some old friends.) Sorry Caesar, no weekend developement for you. However, the time I've had this week has allowed me to setup a very, very solid subset of commands and to add code to do whatever I want. So long as it fits in the time-scope I've mentionned, whatever Caesar wants, I can implement. And with all that free space and absolutely nothing to hold me back, belive me, there's a lot I can do. A lot. Expect some good results from Caesar once he releases this, as we are making ROM hacking history right here, right now.

I'd like to take this opportunity, and the fact I have spare time after work, to bring up a subject I've been curious about. What else will be edited? I'm having a blast writing all this assembly, and animation commands are pretty easy to implement. I can add new script commands, too, if the hack goes in that direction.

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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."

RL, I have no clue what I will be changing after this. I am focusing mainly on Omnislash right now, and once I finish that I will look for everybody's input on what else should be changed, as per usual.

This may be a good time to mention, I am leaving for the Adirondacks tomorrow evening, and I will be gone until next Thursday, so don't expect any updates or anything until after then. I doubt I will finish Omnislash before I leave, too...unfortunately. I'll just have to brainstorm all week what I want it to do, and then finish it when I get back.

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Is PJ

i read the first 8 or 9 pages, i believe, before i could read no more - i think i know that half of what you're talking about is hexadecimal, but thats as far as my knowledge goes - but your hack sounded very intersting, caesar - did you finish it, or are you still working on it?

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