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Update.

Last night, I found some interesting job-related stuff I had missed (and I thought I had everything useful in that bank!!) I haven't heard from Caesar yet (just sent off an email a few minutes ago) so I won't post about what we could be doing with this new info, but let's just say it's surprising how little Square exploited the FFV game engine. I mean, wow, seriously. We're looking at a total goldmine here of potential job modifications.

Anyway, that aside, we're looking into producing screenshots soon - this project has gone on for a while but we don't have much to show for it yet (that we'd release now, at least.) Caesar may have some animations, and I may have some new jobs. Essentially I'm hoping to have a sprite or two in there, but I don't know where the palettes are (embarassement ensues.)

Will there be screenshots tomorrow? Maaaaybe. Seriously, there could be - personally, I'm aiming for that. Monday, that's a definit. If only some altered maps to show we have that kind of power (and soon, the world shall be ours! Wait, we already have the world map data... ok, well, anyways... :x Boy, that sure killed my buzz.)

The biggest thing holding us back was data - we were missing some important chunks. We're very close to having the entire ROM decoded (but despite that, I still don't know HOW TILES ARE LOADED AND ASSEMBLED! :x Grr...) and we're progressing pretty fast now though.

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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."

Ahhh that was such a good find, RL! We can do so much more with jobs now. I suppose we could just keep this to ourselves and keep SOME element of surprise to the game, since we've disclosed a lot so far.

I have a very brief concert to play tonight, but I plan to, within the next few days, have a few animations made up so you can see what I have in mind for this. Not sure what exactly I will be reanimating (pun), so it might be a command or a casting animation, or blue magic, or something. I really don't know. I just have a few ideas for cool-looking stuff and we'll see what happens from there.

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Is PJ

Yeah, screenshots. Here we go. I got started working on some of the new classes' sprites. This one isn't too impressive but hell, it's a start. Up until last night I didn't even know where the palettes were stored.

Note that only Butz is completed. Lenne's sprite is just palette-swapped.

I'll be holding back on commands and the likes because of a discovery Caesar and I made a few nights ago. So graphics for now.





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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."

Anyway, nice job guys.
The shots are pretty nice, although is the job Butz and lenna are one of those wickidy whack whack(never have said that before) new jobs you guys are talking about.

My big question comes from the one major change i noticed to what I'm used to: lowercase a's.

So is this a copy of the Japanese rom with english text? Because there's an obvious difference in the font.

Nextly: Butz is crazy awesome in that pic with the 3000 hp, but may I ask, what level is he?

Also the sword he's swinging looks different, I'm at work, so all my referencability is nill, but was that a change you made?

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

This is the same version of the ROM I have always used so I have nothing to compare the font to. It looks just like what I'm used to.

As for the other questions, telling you what level Butz is will mean hardly anything to you, I'm afraid. I believe that's RL's file on our so-far hack. This means the HP/MP/exp tables have been altered. The Butz you see there could very well be level 15 or something low like that. And the weapon, unless RL has been doing some work on that without telling me, looks just like a basic dagger/knife-class weapon. All weapons look different when you see a screenshot of them, so that might be what you're experiencing. or maybe RL is just pulling our leg.

@yomama, that class is just the basic Knight class. RL is just changing the sprites to suit our tastes. I hated the blue/red Knight outfits because it never made sense to me, and apparently RL feels the same way, hence the new grey and gold Knight outfit.

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Is PJ

Quote (Silverlance @ 2nd March 2007 10:22)

Lenne's sprite is just palette-swapped.

Quote

that class is just the basic Knight class. RL is just changing the sprites to suit our tastes.

Now it makes sense.

Quote

The Butz you see there could very well be level 15 or something low like that.

I understood that part, that's kinda why I asked. Since there's no damage values, or commands, or levels visually noted, the only reference on any aspect of the character is the HP. So identifying the level would give us a basis of comparison on how far deviated the new is from the old. I look forward to it all, but I gots to be comparitive.

All in all, it looks like it's gonna be crazy sweet!

And props for knights that have metal colored armor!

This post has been edited by leilong on 3rd March 2007 23:58

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

Well thanks for clearing that up for me, although i kinda liked the blue. Made me feel that they were like for peace or something of that sort. Of course, i dont really care about things like this. After all i did name bartz/butz QXWZKL.

And for what level he is, it does make a difference.

I have even more screenshots, though I'm having problems posting them at the moment (work PC) As it stands, I have 8 or 9 completed and inserted spritesets, though I haven't had the chance to share them with Caesar yet so they're subect to change.

The game used to test is a random save file I had after messing around with the new level calculations. There is no guarantee the stats are correct anymore. But the Butz in that screenshot's probably around level 15-20 or something...

That's not a new weapon. It's just a regular normal in-game weapon. Glad to see it's drawing so much attention though - if the original stuff can impress, imagine just what our changes will turn out like. >:)

If I can get my screenshots posted, expect a new job.

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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."

I'll post the screenshots on behalf of RL, since I think he may be having some trouble with the PC at work still. No problem:


A party of a nomads.


Monk Butz, Nomad Faris, Galuf (not an original sprite), and Knight Lenna.

I have not, unfortunately, made any animations yet, but I have drawn up what I expect Bolt, Ice, and Fire to look like and I should have at elast of these finished by the end of the night. It is possible that I will have others as well, but I'm not going to say for sure. The former I know will be done shortly.

Which reminds me. Does anybody know how I can somehow post a short animation online? Say, if it were to record something as a movie file using ZSNES (I forgot the extension, maybe .zmt, .zm1, .zm2, etc), could I somehow convert it to a usable file type instead of .zmt or whatever and upload it somewhere online so you could see it? It might make posting animations a little more effective, but it would also take away some of the surprise, I suppose. Oh well. Let me know anyways, so I can at least share with RL.

This post has been edited by Caesar on 5th March 2007 20:38

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Is PJ

ok now is nomad a new job
cuase i just got to know.

Yes, Nomad is a new job.

I made a few animations tonight, but I was really only pleased with basic Fire 1 after I took another look at them. It took a lot longer than expected because I ran into a few problems while trying to multitarget some skils. Good news: I figured out how not to run into this problem. More good news: there are a lot of single-target spells, so I won't have to worry about that problem.

I would post a screenshot of the spell, but it really doesn't showcase it at all. I really need to learn how to post some videos online for everybody to see, because animations are kinda tough to depict with just a screenshot.

I also found a few familiar sprites in the ROM, so if I feel like I might want to, I could even make some original sprites to compliment the original animations. Who knows.

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Is PJ

This is probably the cheapest thing ever to ask, but would it be possible to get the info you have on what you've deciphered so far with the file? I don't want your game, just the data on what all the hex means, I'm curious to how much trouble I can get myself in with it. (Translation: Can I freeload all your hard work?)

Also, nomad looks sweet! but with a secondary like !White, does that mean that it's the new bare class?

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

The new classes aren't implanted yet - just their sprites (well, in part.) Fully implanting the sprites will take some time. Fuly implanting the commands and spells will take a long time. Very long.

I'm neither fond of freeloaders nor giving away information on a silver platter. Heck, it took us only a few days at most to find the majority of the info we needed (this whole project started when, after 2 days of work, I had already cracked most of the basic structures AND the event scripts - I just had to tell Caesar. Then all sorts of hell broke loose.) I do plan on releasing my information after the hack is completed, but not before. But frankly, if this information'd be of any real use to you, then you shouldn't have too much trouble finding it yourself.

While I won't reveal the new classes, I can tell you this much: there are just about as many classes as the original version, and they're all new (some have similare names, but different abilities and stats - Knight and Monk for instance.) Only 4 have kept their original names, the rest are new (excluding Bare.) Nomad is one of the new classes - try to guess the others.

The original thief class has been split into 2: Thief and Nomad. I won't talk about either of them, but nomads are kind of a cross between Thief and Ninja. Only they're cool. Way cool. Not that Ninja and Thief aren't cool classes but comparing them to Nomads is like comparing... I dunno, chicken broth to gummy bears. Broth is good for old people. Gummy bears rock. You figure out which is which.

Yeah. That's about all from me, for now. Expect new screenshots as Caesar and I come up with new stuff.

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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 (Silverlance @ 6th March 2007 10:06)

I'm neither fond of freeloaders nor giving away information on a silver platter.

I can tell, getting those map dumps is like pulling teeth. ( )

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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?

lol

Patience, patience. I still don't have them myself - frankly, building tilesets is the one thing I'm still totally clueless about in the ROM. So far I have what I believe to be the right offset for the data, but I don't know how it works yet. Rest assured, I'm going to end up posting a few paragraphs of excited nonsense once I figure out how that part works.

After that, the dumping will commence, along with the editing.

Edit: Well, one class fully implanted, nineteen or so to go. Soon I'll be able to post actual screenshots of new commands and classes. Caesar has a few interesting things he wants to share with CoN, as well. Expect pictures (the purdy kind) tomorrow.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 7th March 2007 15:02

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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."

Nobody saw that edit. I suppose I have news. Not really anything special. I only have two animations done. I can work at a pace of about 2 animations per evening while balancing schoolwork, now that I've ironed out the kinks I've been running into (I can usually get the animation I'm looking for in one or two attempts as opposed to the 20 or so it took the first time I tried). But anyways, I sent the animations of Fire and Bolt to RL for approval and so he can take screenshots since I couldn't bring myself to capture the entire animation in one glimpse. Those should be up by tomorrow. I have the concepts for 5-6 more spells, so assuming this is a slow weekend, I could have maybe 9 spells completely animated. I suppose I coudl even change the stats since it's an easy enough change.

If RL keeps up his rate of a heck of a lot of sprite sets per evening, then we could potentially have a LOT to show off very soon. But whenever we say that it never happens. So edit: we won't have any tangible results for months. Now if we do, it's s good thing and not a setback. Optimism FTW!

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Is PJ

Hehe... having MP3 player problems (my only means of transferring info around the place - for now at least.) But despite that I don't have too much to show off at the moment. I'm afraid it'll have to wait until tomorrow :x

I do have map-related news, though. I was pissed off at not having had any results in so long, but now I'm getting somewhere.

FFV loads 4 tilesets per map. These are packed into some crazy format over 3 bytes, some weird interlaced crap. It took me a lot of tracing to make sense of it. The upshot of all this tracing is that now, I know where the data comes from. So I have half of the info I need: I have the image data, but not the tile assembly data.

Also, byte 8 in the header controls what appears to be tile properties. They're compressed like maps (no biggie for me - I have teh toolz zomg) and seem to contain a series of 2 byte values. The compression algorithm FFV uses inscribes the amount of data to unpack as 2 bytes at the start of every object, so you can tell how much data is there just by looking. Most are 512 bytes (256 x 2 - makes sense... tiles are stored as 1 byte) but some aren't, and that's kind of confusing to me. I'll look a little more into that - it's the only lead I have for the tile assembly structures. Other than that, I suppose I can try to do some more tracing and figure out where the game winds up after having loaded the tile graphics.

It's going to be a long night.

Aside from that, I've been busy getting jobs in there. I have the basic sprite for most jobs (maybe 2/3rd) and I've inserted the entire JP listings and the job prerequisit tree. It's just a matter of inserting sprites and coding up the new commands now.

With Caesar's animations, the jobs I'm inserting, and soon the maps, playable stuff may start coming in sooner than expected. My predictions were summer 2007 (early summer) for a demo and something around fall 2007 for the finished product, but I think it'll be a bit sooner than that.

For the sake of optimism and all that, ahem, we will not complete this project any time soon and I won't figure out the map data once and for all tonight. This isn't going great - we aren't progressing faster than I expected we would.

Edit: Bloody hell, suddently the pieces fall into place. No wonder I'm not finding any place tile formats would be loaded from - why should the structure be kept in memory until it's needed - ie, at map design time. By the time the header is loaded, we still don't have any maps rendered. So there'd be no reason to fill up WRAM with tile assembly data (which sounds like it would be a bit voluminous - it takes 4 tiles to make a 16x16 tile, and I think most tilesets have more than 256 of those. So it'd take, what, 8 bytes per tile (2 per 8x8 tile) for 256 tiles - 2k of data. There's no way this is staying in 7E, so it has to be in WRAM bank 7F - that's where enough free space would exist to comfortably hold the structure.

And bank 7F is frequently flushed. It's some kind of scratchpad RAM where data rarely remains permanently - usually used to decompress large chunks of data. It'd only make sense that something would write to 7F AFTER the tiles are loaded, the map decompressed, and the data ready to be rendered.

And I remember seeing some hard-coded writes to early 7F regions somewhere in the map code. Some tiles (0x02 and 0x12) are always a specific tile (in this case, the closed and open chest sprites - they're actually map tiles, not sprites) so it'd only make sense the game would force these values into wherever tile assembly data is loaded.

Hrm. I'm rather eager to get home now. I think I know how to do this. With a little luck, Caesar and I will have a lot of fun toys to play with this weekend. And many, many upcoming screenshots. >=)

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 8th March 2007 17:44

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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."

I hate double-posting, but edits don't bump the thread and I'm sure this will interest a few people.

I found it - tile assembly data. Turns out my hunch was right. It's stored as a series of rather large compressed structures (FFV uses the same compression throughout the ROM so no biggie there - my earliest map extractor ended up becomming a decompressor I can feed this stuff into.)

I don't have anything yet. I cleaned up my appartment last night (took a hell of a while, I can tell you that...) and was exhausted when I finished, so I started poking through this thing kinda late. I had to - I wanted to have a look at something Caesar sent me, and I just had to verify my idea. By the time I tracked it down, it was 2 am. But I did get around to locating the Tule tileset and messing with it a little bit - it really is the long sougth-after tile assembly data.

I suspect I'll have something monday. Maybe not map dumps just yet, but at least assembled tilesets. Give it a day or two after that and I'll be able to provide everyone who wanted map dumps with, well, map dumps. Not quite sure how I'll distribute them though, a small FTP account to upload them to would be welcomed because emailling 300-some images could take a while.

See? I didn't forget you guys - granted, it did take a month.

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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."

RuneLancer was nice enough to take screenies of my animations and send them back to me, so I'll be nice enough to post them here for all to see.


This is the basic Bolt spell. What you see is really just the graphics involved in the animation, but it should give you a sense of what will happen. Just look at the angle of the sprite, position relative to the enemy, and the name of the spell and it should make sense.


RL did something cool to this screenshot so you can see the trails of the animation. It moves so fast that if you just capture one frame of the animation (as a screenshot does), it will just be a single sprite on the enemy. It looks like multiple flames, as this picture illustrates in a manner far better than I could do with a picture.

So those are the two I did so far. Seems like a relatively easy weekend for me, so you can expect some good news from us on Monday. Likely a map editor/viewer and some more animations. This is exciting!

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Is PJ

This isn't a two-bit operation here. Give me a bit of advance notice and Climhazzard will open up FTP to you.

This post has been edited by Rangers51 on 9th March 2007 20:52

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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 love the new animations, they look so much more realistic than fire spriting out of the ground, or a skinny bolt of lightning coming from the sky.

I wonder what ice will look like.

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Kel'Thuzad: She is persistent. Reminds me of you, death knight.

Arthas:Shut up you damned ghost.

-Warcraft III Kel'thuzad comparing Arthas and Sylvanas Windrunner.

Very appreciated, R51. I'll get in touch with you sometime next week, once I have the maps dumped, to get them over to you and all that.

Well, shift's over. Time to go write that dumper.

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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 only two words can describe the animations. Boo Yah!
And same with faris's costume in the bolt one

Ok, I had a bit less time than expected this weekend, but I've got really good news.

I've cracked the tile formation data. It took a bit of effort but I figured it out. Tomorrow, or in a worse-case scenario the day after, I'll have a working map dumper. I just need to get a few problems fixed and figure out some palette-related problem, and it'll be done.

The structure is compressed using the same compression maps use (this is common in FFV's larger structures...) A structure unpacks to about 2k of data. Each corner (upper left, right, lower left,right) is 512 bytes apart (fun thing to figure out...) and 2 bytes in length.

The first byte indicates which tile to use (8x8) for that corner. The number is the tile ID, based on its tileset (for instance, 8 would be the 8th tile in the set.) The tileset is specified in the map header as 4 seperate sets (we'll get to how the game switches between them soon.)

The second byte is a series of flags. The first bit (starting from bit 7; last bit actually) indicates wether to flip it along the Y axis. The second bit, the X axis. The third bit, this one controls wether this 8x8 chunk should be above the player or not. Then there are 3 bits representing the palette ID (really, which 16-color slot to use out of the 8 slots a map palette contains) Then the last 2 bits (bits 1 and 0) represent the tilset to use (the 4 sets I mentionned earlier.)

Currently, I don't have the right palette (I'm not sure how it works - it rarely comes out right...), some graphics come out wrong in the map display and sometimes in the tileset display, and it's uber-slow (it woke me up this morning whispering "Optimize me... oppptimiiiize meeee...!" in my ear) But then again I only started to make serious progress around 1 am, and by the time I had something working up and running it was :30 am, so... I ran out of time.

No new screenshots yet but I did find some cool, tiny chunk of data controlling how the world map looks when in mode 7. Ever played Terranigma? If so, you should know what I'm talking about. Yes, the effect is identical. Wether we put that to use or not, I don't know. Maybe we could have some underground area you ride around in a minecart or something like that somewhere. I dunno. Manipulating the data could create waves, too, if it were just water.

Surf minigame!!!!!!

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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 everybody, I really feel bad for not having presented you anything new in a few days, so I made a quick consolation animation. It actually turned out fairly well and I'm satisfied with it. I am quite sure RL and I haven't released any of our spells for you besides Fire and Bolt (and Ice, as you can assume) thus far, so I will just leave you with this as a teaser. It is an upper-level bolt-elemental spell. Not telling who learns it if anybody can even learn it at all. Just an animation.



There. Oh, and since that animation is randomly generated each time you use it, you will never see the same one twice. Assuming I know my commands correctly. And with random movement commands, you are bound to get some graphics overlapping the status bar at the bottom there. Oh well. It only goes to further emphasize the unbridled nature of this attack.

I have a brilliant idea for a generic upper-level fire animation, but I can't disclose it just yet. It'd take the shock out of presenting the screenies. I can't make it yet, though, because it uses custom graphics and they are too big to actually use at the moment. Sadly. But that is in the making. It is simple to make once I get the graphics imported.

I made an animation for Cure but it is nothing special. Best saved for later, but don't get your hopes up because it really is simple.

I may step outside of the basic spells I have been working on for the purpose of making some more interesting spells. Fire and Bolt are great, but compared to some of the other spells, they are boring. Screenies to follow if I'm allowed to post them and if I make them soon.

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Is PJ

Hehe, that's the first time I see this one - really nice. After having seen the fire/bolt spells in action, I'm really looking forward to this one.

A friend of mine dropped by yesterday so I ended up getting less work done than expected. I figured out two things though.

1- I feel SO STUPID for this. I saw a bit in the code that looped the graphic offsets to another bank when over a certain value. That explains some scrambled graphics... Can't believe I forgot those.

- Sometimes the order of the tiles seems to change. Instead of being stored UR, UL, LR, LL corners, in that order, they're sometimes stored in, say... UL, LL, UR, LR, or some such. I'm not sure what causes this yet, though.

I managed to dump one map completely fine. Indoor maps seem to work better than most. The rest come out weird, probably for the above reasons... At least now I know why. Nothing seems to explain the palette yet though.

Aside from that... I found a few minor things in the ROM, bumping our % decoded to about 83-84%. I think this may be the first time in ROM hacking history a ROM has been decoded 100%. Which is rather exciting. We'll be releasing not only one of (if not the) most ambitious hacks, but also the first complete mapping of a ROM. Now THAT rocks.

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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."

This is just a measly question, but could you maybe make it be able to trigger animations off for any if not all spells. Cause i remember fighting odin and it took 20 seconds for flare.

This topic is dead! omg can't believe it, what about the hack? :/

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All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Broccoli to die.

I beleive you will find your answer here
The topic is only seemingly dead too.