Those of you with a keen eye should've noticed the increase in interest and knowledge Caesar and I have had in FFV lately. There's a reason for that.

Roughly a month ago, I felt I needed a break from Endless Saga to gather up my thoughts. I grabbed ahold of FFV, dumped the code, and got cracking. No more than two days later, I had decoded really important bits and pieces, including the event scripts. So I figured I'd give Caesar a call.

Shortly after, we started work on this project. e figured we could do some really awesome things with the ROM, and that we'd make one hell of a hack. But first we'd try to crack the entire ROM, start to finish.

This was a month ago. We're missing very few things. We have enemy AI, maps, music (that's right...), events, NPC data (Rune's been busy last night, Caesar!), spell/item/enemy/job data, various level up tables, location tables, palettes, graphics, all of the text in the game, hell the only thing we don't have are spell animations - and by the process of elimination it won't be long.

This was a month ago. Last night, we started official work on this.

Most, if not all, total conversion mods fail. They fail for 2 reasons:

1- A lack of experience.I get emails and PMs all the time with people saying "zomg i gotz teh MASSIEV hack idea for FF6! ...but i wuldnt know were 2 start plz help?"

2- Seeing too big. We've all been there. I myself had a few such projects and most certainly know what's reasonable andwhat's not by now. Caesar too. And this hack isn't some 500+ hour monstrousity.

I expect Caesar will be quite happy to expose the details. I'm at work and don't have time to post more. Expect screenshots and demos within a few weeks.

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Color me interested. Caesar, get on here!

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Before I expose too much, I just wanted to check with RuneLancer to see what I am allowed to say.

I'll edit this post shortly.

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I've been wanting to do a hack of FFV for a while.

Currently I'm still doing character analysis (i.e. the thread about Faris)
my goal is too simply add on character development, and a few surprise extras to the original FFV.

I had a feeling you two were moving this way as well. And I'm glad, I still know next to zilch about hex editing. And with the both of you starting on FFV before me, that's completely my benefit.

CoN's Dynamic Duo, at it again.

I'm really looking forward to this.

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Eh... I must be a little more than slow. What is you guys are doing?

We're basically remaking the game. That's essentially what a hack is. The term has been slightly diluted, though, since most people consider a hack to mean using a game specific editor to change some sprites around and maybe change some text. RL and I decoded almost everything there is to know about FFV in just a few weeks, and that's with him not having interest for more than half the time (evenings and weekends).

We just started making official changes yesterday. Expect new jobs, items, enemies, maps, music, game engine, equipment, magic spells, and some diabolical surprises that we won't reveal ever.



This post has been edited by Caesar on 24th January 2007 15:50

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I'll just add a little something.

Caesar, from what I've learned working with him, has absolutely radical ideas. Myself, I'm the type who won't be interested if there isn't a challenge (read: a complex assembly hack to deface the usual system or mechanics we're used to) in whatever it is I'm working on. I'll let you guys do the math.

The threads on changes in the game were directly related to this hack. While we're starting to center on a general concept and have begun working on the hack, ideas could end up being used in one way or another. The sooner the better - adding extra things after we've finished planning things out entirely on paper and written enough code/hex to have something playable up and running, well, it'll be too late to start making changes.

Currently Caesar and I are starting to discuss jobs. Neither of us has taken any decision on ether we'll be making demo releases or wait until the whole thing is done before posting it (frankly we've never gotten around to discussing that - kinda early to start thinking of it) but I suppose completed classes will be a good milestone for a demo release.

The actual formation of these dungeons is still not 100% clear. It could be anything from randomly-generated maps to fiendishly-designed carefully-crafted dungeons. We're talking about something out of the ordinary, either way, and not some run of the mill dungeon with "zomg a puny enemy... mash a a a a a a... lolz i won" encounters.

Expect to see a piece of ROM hacking history being written.

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Sounds really cool. Can't wait to try the demo out. I've been very busy replaying the original SNES version more than the GBA one.

Keep it up, Caesar and Silverlance.

Wow great stuff! I'm going to refrain from playing though until this is available. Do it justice . Hope it doesn't swamp you too much.

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I had a week off last week, pretty much the only week I'm getting for a holiday this year. I took the oppurtunity to read books and re-start work in assembly. I've really improved again up to the point where I've discovered some things in the C2 bank not previously known (as far as I'm aware of).

Anyway, a good coincidence to see you're taking an interest again. Though I don't see patch-making beyond bugfixes as something I'd do personally, I'd be interested to follow progress; though the joy of all this is discoveries you make yourself, new information leads to new possibilities.


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This sounds very cool. I enjoyed i90east's hacks, and it would be cool to see more made by dedicated dump hackers (If THAT isn't an awkward title, I don't know what one is).

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I think i90east made FFVI hacks. The expert version ones, right? AFAIK, there have been no hacks for FFV, aside from maybe graphical hacks or something. RL and I are pioneers with this project, especially with all the amazing things he found. I just found the easy stuff, he found the maps and music and events and NPC data.

We might release the notes afterwards, but that's way too far off to think about right now. We're just going to focus on getting some serious work done while we both have time and see what comes of it.

Dji, that's cool that you picked up ASM again. I'm still not into it, and probably won't take the time to learn it, though. You may have found something that we don't know about, but RL seems to have almost all of the ROM decoded right now except for animations, and I wouldn't doubt it if those were done by tomorrow, too.

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The difference here is that we're not just doing some simply little text-and-item/enemy hack. Some of the changes Caesar and I have been discussing are completely hair-raising. Random dungeons, skill trees, dynamic enemy AI, the works. How much of it we'll decide to use is unknown at the moment (the hack itself started only recently) but you can bet the game engine won't be the same, much less the maps, jobs, enemies, music, items, spells, animations, and so forth.

I intend to release my notes after the hack is complete and I've organized my notes properly. I'm not sure if I'll throw in a complete assembly dump with these notes (I have banks C0-C4 covered, along with some of the stuff in E0/E1, but my notes are badly organized)

I'm missing very few stuff to have a complete dump. Mostly palettes, graphicplacement data, and bits of stray 65816 stuffed here and there. Seriously, I see stupid stuff like a JSR followed immediately (in the subroutine) by a JSL/RTS. I understand they save a byte each time they call it, but usually these are called only once. D'oh? That doesn't make up for the 4 bytes from the JSL and the byte from the extra RTS. :x

Anyways. Caesar, we have to decide on the job system soon. I'm itching to write some code. Hammering in some complex commands and such for the new jobs will rock.

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Not that you should... but from the sounds of it, I'd probably actually buy this game. I never realized that when making silly little "what would you change" suggestions in other threads, that it would actually be taken into consideration for redesign development. Big Kudos.

Although I do have some questions about the less-intese sections of it.

Textually: Did/Are/Can you make(ing) Items/Weapons that have better names? (I added Can b/c that would probably also depend on if you could alter it to hold longer names).

Graphically/Playability: Is this going to be so intense that you need 4 characters? If so, extra sweet, if not necessarily for the more advanced person: can you code in the ability to do a single character game?



Storywise: I think my brain is on too-inside-the-box mode today. So is this game going to have any of the old storyline to it? Or is this going to be strictly, "You know the characters, you know what they can do, now go and do it." sort of thing?

Keep us abreast, Very Happy Fun Time Land Abound awaits us.



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We will probably keep some of the more traditional weapon names (Ragnarok, Excalibur, Masamune, etc.), but we will have lots of original weapons, so we may find the need to make up some of our names for them.

Yes, this game will need all 4 characters. We probably could program something in for SSCC's, but believe me, you do not want that. It won't be possible to beat the game, I assure you. With some of the things we have planned, you will be lucky to make it through using all 4 characters.

I'm pretty sure this won't have the old storyline to it at all. The main idea behind our new concept is that it can be done with very impressive results and reasonable replay value in a shorter amount of time than a full-blown hack. Whereas everything within our hack can and likely will be 100% original, if we did that for a remake of FFV, it would take years to do and we'd run out of space to make new spells and items and such. It's probably not going to have the same feel as the original FFV, but that's what makes it a hack. I have a feeling there will be enough new stuff in here that you will not even be worried about the storyline. You're going to be more worried about what just happened to your characters.

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Considering what I know about Rune's programming abilities, and what sort of craziness I've seen Caesar pull in FFV SCC's and SSCC's (not that Caesar lacks programming skills, or Rune lacks craziness - far from it... you two are both skilled and quite, quite insane) this is going to be a frightening project to behold. I can't wait.

I'm curious about what sort of proprietary stuff you folks will be adding. Dungeon design is an enormously interesting concept, and something that Final Fantasy simply lacks creativity in.

I have my own ideas to add, but at this point, I might as well keep them to myself. If my life ever settles down soon to the point where I can really start, I'd like to get back to work on my own game.

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By all means, do NOT refrain from posting ideas. Like I said, NOW is the time to post things. Later it will be too late because we'll already have things planned out. If anything, we hope to hear your ideas in this thread. Caesar and I both read them and take them into consideration, so this is more than just a matter of getting ideas off of your chest for the sake of conversation.

Like Caesar said, this is a complete remake. But it has little, if anything, to do with FFV (that's what a total conversion is about, after all.) It might as well be 4 unknown characters and the game would probably be the same. The focus is mainly new mechanics and content than, say, focusing on any character or the events of FFV. We're just using the FFV engine as a springboard for a project, essentially.

Anything that's map, music, item, enemy, character, job, skill, whatever is likely to get changed.But we're limiting ourselves instead of making a full-blown hack. Like Caesar said, a project like that is unreasonable (get that through your heads, neophte hackers That's experience talking here.) We DO expect to finish this project, hence we've been designing it to be short-ish, hard, and intense. Kinda like a few hours of really hard and unique battles and dungeons as opposed to a slower pace, bits of storyline, lenghty side-quests, and so forth. Don't worry - it will be good despite this.

Again, dump your ideas in here if you have any. We will take them into consideration if they interest us or gain enough popularity. No idea nor comment is wasted.

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I'd like to see the jobs get reworked a bit - earn them in different ways. Just getting the crystal shards was a little boring in the original. You could do it quasi magi-tek and give the player an item from each defeated boss where they can then take it back to some magic facility and learn a job from it.

Dungeon-wise, I'd love to see something with a little more breadth. All the original dungeons were very linear (they were fond of towers, it seems). That's something that could sure use a change.

That's all for now I suppose.

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I won't say exactly what we're doing until RL actually implements it (we don't know if it's entirely possible ATM), but I can tell you that the job system is definitely getting reworked. It might be getting reworked a little too much, actually. We have some really outrageous ideas that use jobs in pretty unorthodox ways, but I think everybody will enjoy it.

As for dungeons, we are going to get pretty creative. It's not going to be a bunch of square, empty rooms with monsters inside. They will be legit dungeons. Considering who is on the job here, I wouldn't worry too much about the dungeons being non-linear. I would worry more about the dungeons being impossible to get out of. We do plan to use randomly-generated maps, a la some of the dungeons in the FF remakes (I think DoS did this, but idr).

I guess that answers your questions/suggestions. If you have any else that you want to see or are concerned about, please let us know.

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Indeed, the jobs are going to be heavily reworked. We've cycled through a bunch of potential systems and ideas, tossed out some good but potentially complex ideas that would probably cause balancing issues, come up with stuff we ended up scrapping entirely, other things we bounced around for a while... In the end, it should be a very enjoyable system with a few surprises.

Maps, we've loosely discussed. We're going somewhere with the idea, like Caesar said, though nothing official has been agreed on yet (other than the job system, we're largely just tossing ideas around right now.) Random dungeons are very probable (seriously, I'm totally into this - the challenge alone makes me feel fuzzy inside) though exactly how we make it work is a detail as of yet undetermined.

As a rule of thumb, we're trying to make things as different as possible without breaking the game, unbalancing it, or totally alienating veterans. Kidding. We're going to alienate veterans all we want, damn it.

I suspect that by monday we'll have the start of something set up. We've settled on some foundation for jobs, or rather for the job system, and I plan on trying to code it tonight. By monday, I suspect we'll have a few things up and running. I really look forward to that - ideas are neat, but results are even cooler.

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Wow! What you guys are doing sounds outrageously cool! Of course, I have little to no idea how hacking and such works, so it sounds quite amazing that something like this is possible. I doubt I could come up with any ideas for you because you've pretty much covered everything. Keep up the good work!

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I'm sorry if this was pointed out or it's obvious or I'm otherwise just blind, but you guys are using the SNES version, right?

At any rate, this is all very exciting. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with.

Personally, I'd just like to see a real superboss who doesn't mess around. Randomly generated dungeons are also tasty.

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King Eddy: I hope our final product meets your expectations.

Zeromus_X: We are indeed using the SNES version. We don't want to use their dungeons and super bosses and new classes and layouts when we can just as easily make our own. Plus, we alerady had some stuff from this version figured out before FFVA was released.

And yea, our superbosses don't fool around. Well, that's a lie actually. They fool around with you. And then they end you. If you thought Omega and Shinryuu were hard, then...well...I can't even really compare these to anything, so I'll just let you see for yourself later.

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Just to let everyone else who might not be familiar know, Caesar isn't fooling around with his superbosses. These two managed to turn FFVI into a DIFFICULT game with some of their hacks. Im a little frightened about what they've got in store for FFV.

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I think I should probably move this to Your Creations. There's limited chat about canonical FFV here.

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My only request is that Gilgy remains a re-occurring boss, the game won't be the same without him.(so many times)

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Caesar and I have been heavily discussing classes (I think we've written emails a good dozen pages long back and forth all day...) Various tests with what can be done using the job system have been made last night and it's already been changed. I'll let Caesar explain what we're doing with it if he wants, and if not, you'll all just have to wait and see.

The amount of planning this requires and the actual changes are very massive. Even at a small scale this is a huge and very involving project. But seeing as we both have the experience to go through with our ideas, I think it'll be worth the blood sweat and tears.

Mmm... ROM blood...

As usual, suggestions and ideas are welcomed. Particularly changes to the game engine. New ways to make shops work, new ways to make the battles flow, anything really. Caesar and I may be experienced ROM hackers but that doesn't make anyone's ideas any less good than ours. Except maybe some of the more close-minded FF7 fanboys who'd want Sephiroth to be playable or something like that (thanks, you can head back to the loony bin now )

This weekend, I'll be finishing up some changes to the job system (I was swimming through a good page and a half of 65816 code written specifically for this - 3 am creeps up on you real quick when that happens...) and intend to try some stuff with the map engine (map generation, mainly.) Wether we post about the results or not monday will depend on how evil Caesar and I fel. Wouldn't want to give away the best bits right away after all.

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There was an aspect of four i liked that wasnt in this game (well sorta.) there was a whole list of summon monsters, and thats great, they were all great, but i'd like to see the return of the regular summon monsters, like imp, and bomb, and cocktric and all that .May be do one of those dragons that are desigsed as frogs, or maybe even have gogo be a summon. Just a few no-summonable boss monsters to summon would be cool and few regular enemies. I'd also be cool to have more than two different kinds of Chocobo's in the game, maybe even get one to fight on your team along with a moogle. That or figure out maybe some way to make them a job class. Anyways those are just my two cents.

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I suppose there's no harm in releasing the general job outline, since RL successfully implemented it last night.

Our job system will not be the same as the old system that FFV used to use. You don't find jobs as you go through the storyline, and then instantly have access to them just like that. Rather, you start off as one of like 4 or so jobs, and then as you gain levels, more jobs become available to you. It is similar to the FFT prerequisite idea. You can unlock every job in the first dungeon if you really want to, but we implanted a level cap so that powerlevelling only does so much, though. Anyways, some of the higher-level jobs may have a few unique prerequisites, so you might stumble upon a new job without even realizing it. It's best to think of it that way, I guess. Just play along and then if you happen to unlock another job, that's cool.

As of right now, we can 18 unique jobs made, plus the Bare class. That leaves us 3 slots I think for hidden/acquirable jobs and for a new unprecedented idea we had. I don't want to ruin the surprise, so I won't say any more. We will have used all 23 (I think it's 23) available job slots by the time we are finished, so there will be PLENTY to keep the players occupied with.

In doing that, some of the magic lists have been broken apart into separate commands. For this reason, it may not be possible, Lockes AlterEgo, to put too many simple enemy summons into the hack. There aren't as many slots for summons anymore. However, since we are not using the traditional FF summons, AFAIK, we will probably be searching for ideas so it isn't unlikely that we could have an enemy drop a summon as a rare drop. Maybe it can be a rare steal from a boss. Idk. We may find a place for it.

That's all for now, and probably for this weekend since I cannot contact RL until Monday. If you have anymore suggestions, please leave them here though. We will still read them and get back to you whenever we have a definite (or somewhat useful) answer.

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The one thing I have mentioned in one of the other "what would you change" forums is the ability to finish white magic after that last monster is beaten. I'm not sure what coding something like that would be like, but if you could, it'd be sweet.

And in the spirit of the above idea, you should totally make an item (headgear most likely) that locks magic cost at 1MP. You could give it some terrible side-effect, like doom, or a major cut in defense, or... better yet... extreme weakness to all magic! It takes practically nothing to cast, and practically nothing to kill you. That would be schweet.

This post has been edited by leilong on 27th January 2007 01:50

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