Aridia update and a new fan game (sort of)

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Aridia update and a new fan game (sort of)

Postby hugues » Thu Jan 24, '08, 2:32 am

There's a new version of Aridia out now at: http://huguesjohnson.com/aridia/. This release features tile editing (title logo, fonts, borders).

Barring any glaring bugs (which I'm always prone to make), this will be the last major release. Everything that I know how to edit is now editable so until something new is discovered this is it.

I also added a patch for a new PSIII hack.. OK, it's the same old PSIII that you know and love but with an entirely new font set. It's how I tested the new font editing feature. So if you really love the font from some other game it's now possible to copy it to PSIII.

As usual, feedback and bug reports are more than welcome :)
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Postby Celeith » Thu Jan 24, '08, 2:53 am

hmm, it looks decent enough.. but i can't get the editor to run i get a error when i click the program.

Edit: Nvm i figured it out

Edit #2: >_< Curious, do you know if theres anyway to modify the characters in the party, u know such as having a party of adan gwyn lyle thea sari or something like that.. or anyway by hex editing?
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Postby hugues » Fri Jan 25, '08, 12:28 am

Kaloes wrote: Edit #2: >_< Curious, do you know if theres anyway to modify the characters in the party, u know such as having a party of adan gwyn lyle thea sari or something like that.. or anyway by hex editing?

Yes and no.. you could modify the character names and statistics to get a party *like* that, but I haven't figured out how to swap the sprites. So one character would look like Wren, another like Mieu, and the last like whoever the fifth character in that generation is. It's probably doable, I just haven't cracked it yet.
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Postby Celeith » Fri Jan 25, '08, 1:16 am

guess i'll have to mess with my hex editor and start changing around alot of stuff.. hey do u know any good script editors? i'm thinking of editing my PSIV rom and making the story like my fanfic..
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Postby Tsunami » Fri Jan 25, '08, 10:12 am

Wow, this is SO cool! :mrgreen:

I am curious though. Are the buckles editable at all? (besides the renaming, anyways) When I looked through the equipment and items, I didn't see them located anywhere. :?
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Postby Celeith » Fri Jan 25, '08, 5:36 pm

i wanted to change some of the script around but whenever I change like even just 1 letter i get a error saying about space limit.. Like say I changed Adan's name to something else.. then i wanted to event to say that name, i'd use the same amount of letters but the thing would still say something like 63 word limit.. evil!!!
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Postby hugues » Fri Jan 25, '08, 10:15 pm

Tsunami wrote:Wow, this is SO cool! :mrgreen:

Thanks!

Tsunami wrote:I am curious though. Are the buckles editable at all? (besides the renaming, anyways) When I looked through the equipment and items, I didn't see them located anywhere. :?

I debated adding them to the weapons & armor page since in theory you could assign stat modifiers to them. The thing I spent a lot of (wasted) time on was figuring out how to change the events tied to the buckle items. For example, when you get the sapphire it opens the Landen-Aquatica passage. However, just having the sapphire doesn't do anything, it actually opens when you open the chest containing the sapphire. When/if I crack that I was thinking of a separate "gem" page.

Maybe whenever I come up with a new feature I'll just add these to the weapons & armor page where they belong.

Kaloes wrote:i wanted to change some of the script around but whenever I change like even just 1 letter i get a error saying about space limit.. Like say I changed Adan's name to something else.. then i wanted to event to say that name, i'd use the same amount of letters but the thing would still say something like 63 word limit.. evil!!!

Yeah, strings have a fixed length so you can't expand them. How to put this... when you hit the "talk" command in the game an instruction fires that says "get me the string at address [X]", it then reads until it hits a string terminator (0xFC). If a string gets expanded it would bump down all the strings below it causing some weird text. There's a bug in PSII (http://www.efkm.com/dezoris/pse_ps2.html) that's an example of what happens when text pointers get screwed up.

To make matters more complicated, Mega Drive images are a fixed size which is OK because the PSIII image has plenty of empty space. However, expanding a string would mean needing to move things around into this free space. It's this kind of challenge that kills things like "retranslation" projects because fitting the full original dialog into the space available is extremely difficult.
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Postby Celeith » Fri Jan 25, '08, 11:50 pm

i like messing with this program.. how did you make it? and is there one for PSIV and where / how can i obtain it ^_^
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Postby Tsunami » Sat Jan 26, '08, 1:51 am

Last night I tinkered with editing the font -- it turned out great and was easy to do. :) I checked out the project roadmap, and, if it's possible, I think portrait editing would also be very nice (I would have a blast with that). :yes:

hugues wrote:I debated adding them to the weapons & armor page since in theory you could assign stat modifiers to them. The thing I spent a lot of (wasted) time on was figuring out how to change the events tied to the buckle items. For example, when you get the sapphire it opens the Landen-Aquatica passage. However, just having the sapphire doesn't do anything, it actually opens when you open the chest containing the sapphire. When/if I crack that I was thinking of a separate "gem" page.

Maybe whenever I come up with a new feature I'll just add these to the weapons & armor page where they belong.
I think that event editing sounds interesting, but I can only imagine how hard it would be to figure it out. Still, simply being able to modify the stats would give somewhat worthless items more importance when it comes to who's holding what.

hugues wrote:To make matters more complicated, Mega Drive images are a fixed size which is OK because the PSIII image has plenty of empty space. However, expanding a string would mean needing to move things around into this free space. It's this kind of challenge that kills things like "retranslation" projects because fitting the full original dialog into the space available is extremely difficult.
I wonder if, rather than moving things around, the space itself can be filled? :? I don't know much about this, though.

Kaloes wrote:i like messing with this program.. how did you make it? and is there one for PSIV and where / how can i obtain it ^_^
I knew of someone who wanted to make a PSIV editor, but apparently it didn't happen. :(
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Postby hugues » Sat Jan 26, '08, 1:55 am

Kaloes wrote:i like messing with this program.. how did you make it?

A couple folks started posting their PSIII ROM hacking research over on the GameFAQs PSIII message board (I believe one of them posts here under a different name). They contacted me to see if I knew anything about PSIII ROM hacking since I wrote a guide to PSIII save state hacking. I took their research, along with some of my own, and used it to determine what could go into a ROM editor (see the "Source Docs" on the Aridia homepage).

The program itself was developed in C# using Visual Studio .NET 2003. I went with that version because:
a) It's the newest version I own a personal copy of (anything newer I only have at the office).
b) It compiles code to run against the .NET 1.1 Framework which is on 90% of 2000/XP machines and 100% of Vista.
c) I really wanted to do it in Visual Basic 6 but some of it's functions don't work on Vista.
d) It was 100x faster than writing it in Java which I've used for save state editors. 1000x faster than if I used C++.

Although I haven't personally tried, you should be able to edit & build the source with the free version of C# Express 2008

Kaloes wrote:and is there one for PSIV and where / how can i obtain it ^_^

I do not know of one. Aridia is open source and probably contains 50% of what you need to edit PSIV assuming they're not vastly different. I've written save state editors for all the classic Phantasy Games and those differences aren't huge. I am thinking about creating another Genesis ROM editor.. but not for PSIV. At some point I'll run a debugger against PSIII to see what else I can add to Aridia.
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