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| User | Post |
| DF Ash Posts: 25/29 |
And so the thread won't just be me begging for help on this starting position thing, here's a quick rundown of what's new in the hack:
- Completely new storyline - An overhauled world with new towns, dungeons and quests - 3 new character classes (6 new classes, counting class change) - 2 new weapon types - A new magic system, and two new skill categories - A revised shop system - New sub-bosses What's remained are the general map tiles and many of the sprites (it's still the Final Fantasy 1's world, although specific locations can look very different now) and the random monsters (although the domains have been redone). The music is likely to remain untouched, as I have no delusions of being a better composer than Uematsu, and importing later FF tracks seems to be too much work for too little creative payoff (besides, as much as I love the later soundtracks, especially Final Fantasy 4, I want this hack to evoke FF1's world and atmosphere). The story revolves around Chaos and the Fiends of Elements, and so they've remained as the game's bosses, but the context and reasons for those battles are often very different than they were in the original Final Fantasy. Screenshots may be coming soon: as said, about 3 playable hours of the game are done, and I've stopped only to make sure all the new game mechanics are ironed out before returning to mapping and level design. There are definitely new images ready to be captured, but I want to be sure nothing changes before posting them. Besides, I also don't want to spoil any of the story or secrets.  |
| DF Ash Posts: 24/29 |
Thanks, that problem's fixed now! I'm not sure where the KAB went (no wierd alternating tile effects, just some additional forests and mountains), but as you said, creating a few horizontal rows of ocean freed up a ton of KAB, enough to hopefully rest through the rest of the overworld modding.
Has anyone had anymore luck with Rockman's hack, or knowledge of the starting position code? I've been exploring it, and it seems that it glitches the first time you start a new game, and then apparently glitches when you soft reset and do it again. But then you can just take a step and the screen adjusts to show Coneria 2F. However, you start off in "inside-room" status, so the sprites are invisible and you can see in other rooms (if you walk into a room and then back out, everything's fine). Then if you soft-reset the game again and restart, everything's completely normal. It does seem to scramble the "continue" data, but that might just be because my continue data's prehack: I haven't saved a game afterwards to see what happens, so that might not really be a problem. I've built up the hack (3 playable hours now, with new classes, magic, weapons and shop system set up) around the idea of beginning on a submap and eventually exiting into the outside world: does anyone know what might cause that kind of behavior with it, and how it could be fixed to start the new game in a submap rather than overworld? Any submap is fine, since the maps can be swapped between them... they just have to start off in an area that won't show up on the overworld map. |
| Disch Posts: 163/202 |
Originally posted by DF Ash Well it's not messing up anything in the ROM -- what's happening is the map can't be compressed to a size small enough to fit back in the ROM. You must have ran out of 'KAB' (Known Available Bytes). Keep an eye on the KAB as you're editing (to refresh it, press the Find KAB button).. it must always stay above 0 -- when you're near zero, you're running out of space. Maps need horizontal runs to compress. If you're creating graphical effects by alternating every other tile or something like that, you'll destroy any attempt to compress the map. Also -- full rows of any tile (typically ocean water) compress to literally nothing. The first full row of water will use 3 bytes total -- after that, Hackster will recycle that row for any other row which contains nothing but water (so if you have, say, 25 rows of nothing but ocean water -- all 25 rows will compress down to 3 bytes total). So by changing a row that has nothing but water in it, you'll be taking away a significant amount of KAB. (Hackster will actually recycle any rows that are 100% identical, no matter how complex the rows are -- however it's just most likely that the only identical rows will be nothing but ocean water) Also one final note: Tile 7F (the last tile -- lower-right-most tile) cannot compress at all... so if you make a run of that tile it won't compress, it'll just eat up all your KAB. |
| DF Ash Posts: 23/29 |
Does it work for you? If so, please tell me how you did it!
From what little I understand, the memory address in the rom never changes, so if the starting coordinante points at submap #11 (just making up a number), then it'll always point at that particular submap. But you can use Hackster to swap maps, dungeon types and change the exit codes and locations, so that for all practical purposes, the party starts off in whichever map you want, all without changing the submap number or the address being referred to. In my case, I do want them to start in Coneria, but as far as I can tell, you could change "Coneria" into a copy of any other place, change the other place to Coneria, rework the exit coordinates, and that'll solve it. To answer your question from another thread, I had the same idea about one party member who meets others, but FF1's engine doesn't allow it. Too many things depend on four characters being in the party, such as the shops and menu screen, and there's no existing in-game way to introduce new characters. The closest might be starting them all off dead, but they'd show up on the intro screen, and show up dead on the menu screen and the player could just visit a clinic to bring them all to life. It could probably be done by directly programming it yourself... Now, one other question on Hackster: I got a strange error message last night saying that the "map is too complex, did not save to rom." I wasn't doing anything especially complicated with it, just making a forest around a mountain and stream. It's been fixed now, but I don't want want to make the same mistake twice. Does erasing too many of the compressed ocean tiles mess things up on the rom? |
| srothroc Posts: 3/56 |
Originally posted by Rockman I'm curious - how did you find that out? I'm trying to figure out this exact same problem for a hack I want to work on, but I'd (presumably) have to specify completely different values if I was remaking the maps, right? How would I find out the values for the tile I wanted to start at after I'd remade the maps? |
| DF Ash Posts: 22/29 |
Hm, I think I see. A warp tile doesn't have or need any specific coordinates set to it; it always just sends the player back to the last map they were on. I've set the towns and other single-map exits back to warp tiles and they work perfectly now. Thanks! |
| Disch Posts: 130/202 |
I probably could have named those better -- "teleport" came to mind right away and that's what I was calling all of them... but then the special "warp" teleports I named after the spell WARP, since they act exactly the same (taking you back to the floor you were previously on).
Exit teleports only need to be used when an area has multiple entry points (Titan's Tunnel) or multiple exit points (Titan's Tunnel, Ice Cave -- Earth Cave, Volcano, Sea Shrine, Sky Castle all have the secondary exit behind the altar, too). You also need to be weary of plot events that teleport your character, as those will screw with the warp stack: You'll notice that in the original game, Coneria Castle does not use ANY warp teleports, even though it's just a simple 2-floor castle. You could put in warps and play it and it would play fine until you rescue the princess. Consider the following: - You enter ToF (warping would now take you just outside of the ToF) - You rescue the princess, she teleports you to Coneria 2F (warping would take you to the last map you were on -- so warping would take you to the ToF!) - If you want to go downstairs to Coneria 1F, you need a normal teleport tile, since a warp tile wouldn't put you there |
| DF Ash Posts: 21/29 |
Ah, okay, I'll do that! But I guess my question is this: if I'm editing Melmond, and I set the warp tile to get out of Melmond, there's no "exit: Melmond" in the list of available warps, and not enough unused exits to accomodate all the towns. There has to be something I'm missing about leaving towns, especially since the game puts you on top of whichever town icon you last stepped on, without regard to an exit coordinate. So far I'm treating them like leaving dungeons, which puts the player on one specific overworld coordinate, but that can't be right, and I'm quickly running out of spare exits.
(Edit: Okay, I've solved it now, but I'll leave the message up in case anyone else new to it reads this thread. Inside the town, you set the warp to 'enter town' and it seems to just send you back to the coordinates you entered from. No need for seperate 'exit' coordinates except for dungeons with multiple levels. At least... I think that's it.) And thanks again: I was wondering what the difference between warp and teleport is. |
| Dragonsbrethren Posts: 278/442 |
Use the normal warp title, you only need a teleport tile to exit when you can go to a non-overworld map from the map you're on. |
| DF Ash Posts: 20/29 |
I do have one strange issue, though. When I try to modify maps like the Dwarf Cave or Elfheim, the warp tiles leading out of the area just say "Cardia" (the first Cardia Islands), and there are no warps corresponding to getting out of those towns. So far I've been using the unused Exits to get the player out of them, but I'm down to the last two exits, and the game's not even 1/8th the way through. How does the game normally get the player out of a town when they leave? |
| DF Ash Posts: 18/29 |
The typo gremlins made me do it...  |
| Dragonsbrethren Posts: 275/442 |
Originally posted by DF Ash The irony is you spelled grammar wrong  |
| DF Ash Posts: 17/29 |
I thought it might be. Still, the magic system's being revamped so much that, even using FFHackster to change and rename all the spells, it won't be much more work than I'd planned on. Thanks for your help... and thank you for making FFHackster in the first place. There's no way I could've ever done any of this without it (and, even if I somehow had, the time frame for this hack without its help would be years)!
(Edited twice because I'm a stickler for grammer...) |
| Disch Posts: 111/202 |
Originally posted by DF Ash Bullseye. The spell level is the Spell ID number / 8. If you want to shuffle the spells around, you'll have to re-arrange them so that the spells you want to be level 1 are the first 8 on the list, and so on. Hackster doesn't really have an easy way to automate this, however if you go in with a hex editor it should be pretty quick to copy/paste the spells stats over. That should take care of everything but the spell names, which you could use Hackster to edit afterwards. But I'm afraid there's no easy way around the 8-spells-per-level limitation. At least not without some moderate asm rewriting. |
| DF Ash Posts: 16/29 |
Work on the hack continues, several towns and sidequests established, and the hack's deep enough now to start factoring in character changes... which leads to a hopefully easy question. Does FFHackster or another utility allow the levels of a magic spell to be changed, so that CURE is level 3 or EXIT is level 1 (examples given are not part of my actual plan!). FFBytes doesn't say which bit controls the spell's level, and it may be that there's no way to change it, that the code just reads them in blocks of 8. But if there's a way to shuffle the spell levels around, I'd appreciate the help! |
| DF Ash Posts: 15/29 |
Well, if I remove all the warp tiles, the castle does act like a normal castle, and it could be remapped to put the heroes in the right spot. But there's a menu screen glitch that appears in the top right corner... :/ |
| Rockman Posts: 34/91 |
I turned on the game, and when I started, yes it did take me to a different castle, and things were glitchy. I experienced this while attempting to do the ASM hack. However, I reset and started a new game several times, and it took me where it should take me, to the Coneria Castle 2F. I don't know what is causing it to take you somewhere else. It shouldn't be doing that. But, if you guys have entered the bytes I posted, try starting a new game a few times. For the most part, it should work. I don't know if it's because I have a different ROM version or not. |
| DF Ash Posts: 14/29 |
It must just be a location-bit typo, since he did successfully change the starting position to a submap. My thanks in advance to Rockman for figuring this out, and to Disch for the warp/teleport information.
(Edited because a typo made that last sentence look like gibberish  ) |
| Dragonsbrethren Posts: 245/442 |
^ See my edit. |
| DF Ash Posts: 13/29 |
I'm not sure either (I turned the option off and it appeared to overwrite them, but the "invalid file type" thing came back), but GF overwrites bytes by default, and it comes up with the glitched Castle of Ordeals. I'll keep trying... |
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