Chrono Compendium
Bend of Time - Inactive Projects => Darkness Beyond Time - Dead Project Discussion => Chrono Trigger Ultimate Edition => Topic started by: FaustWolf on December 10, 2008, 12:58:30 am
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I'm gonna store the Dream Devourer's working GFX packs and palette shifts here for safekeeping. I still have to put Schala together yet, but once that's done I'll toss her in too. I can't find an easy way to transfer background tile assembly from one ROM to another other than IPS patching. Therefore I'm going to wait until the other features are done, and then add the palette and GFX packs into the near-finished ROM, and do the tile assembly from scratch in that ROM. I'm doing this to provide justin with maximum freedom as to where he can place the other events in the expanded ROM.
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I'm trying to see if I can bump the dialogue to empty space for the new areas, but I'm having issues with changing the pointers in general. They just revert no matter what. I think we'll have to edit the dialogue pointers and the dialogue pointer itself in hex, so this'll take quite a bit longer then wholeheartedly expected.
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I can make spreadsheets of all the offsets for the dialogue packets if that helps. We need one for the enemy AI too, right?
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No. The enemy AI one was released like a year ago somewhere on here. I saved it on my hard drive. Actually, tonight, I'll upload every single thing that I've safe-kept from the Compendium. I still have to update the "How to..." part of it. But I think you'll find everything you need probably in the folders I have.
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The graphics packs and palettes for the DD are in the first post here, but do you need an estimate on how much space tile assembly would consume as well? I figured I'd just nab your mostly complete ROM and take care of the Dream Devourer for ya. But if you need the tile assembly data on the spot I could probably carve it out of the ROM.
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There's plenty of room after x430DAC
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Okay, I'll whip up a Dream Devourer location. Unfortunately I don't know a thing about coding events yet, but I can get the graphic insertion and tile assembly finished without a problem I think.
I should get to it in a few days.
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(http://i39.tinypic.com/2lurxqf.png) - Trying to redesign the DD a little bit to fit into the Chrono Cross scheme a bit more X_X
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Oh, I see, you replaced some big feet with some little feet. Just be sure to keep it symmetrical and insertion will be fine.
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Yea, I was trying to make it look more like the Time Devourer a bit and that's a slight bit. I was trying to add the other legs that extend below the creatures face, but it looked like tentacle porn with that X_X
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(http://i43.tinypic.com/2db19oy.gif) - Updated. ~___~;;
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Wow, that does look nice. I wouldn't mind using that in AE:HU too.
Let me know when the design is finalized and I'll start the process of importing it.
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You can import it with the old one if you'd like. It's just a matter of graphic replacement for updating it.
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(http://i41.tinypic.com/hrcunb.gif) - This is probably the final version as I can't think of anything else to do with it.
(http://i44.tinypic.com/ibc75i.png)
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I'll insert the final version. It's great how it shrunk a bit with each rendition -- like you can tell how long Schala's been in there by the size of the Devourer.
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I think I can get this done tomorrow. justin, is the patch attached to reply #5 okay to work with or have there been structural changes to the ROM since then?
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Use this one, I'm not really working on advancing on the script or maps or anything atm. I'm trying to figure out how to get the VWF to work in battle.
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Well, as you can tell, I haven't made an ounce of progress on this yet. Hoping to get the graphics packs done tonight, then the assembly later on in the week.
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'tis fine. Take your time. I've got plenty of other things to work on while I wait.
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Okay, graphics packs are ready for insertion. It looks like there's plenty of unused pointers for new graphics packs (well, 5 look open and we need 3) so that I can insert the Dream Devourer without having to overwrite Lavos.
What I'm wondering about at this point is the palette situation. No, wait a minute, on second thought everything looks good. What I'll do is actually use the same tileset and palette set used for the final Lavos battle, but only the Dream Devourer battle will have the Dream Devourer data mapped and activated. There's few enough palette shifts involved that both the Dream Devorer palettes and the background palettes will fit together comfortably.
Just to make this work as smoothly as possible, any recent updates to the ROM you'd like to reflect in a new patch before I do this tomorrow? I'll definitely have enough time to tackle it this time around.
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Nope, no new patches or anything. It's been on halt for this =p
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Hmmm, slight problem -- possibly. The pointers for graphics packs are in the format (address) + C00000. There's a maximum of 3 bytes per GFX pack pointer, so the address for graphics packs can go up to 0x3FFFFF (for a pointer of 0xFFFFFF). Unfortunately, I was planning to use free space beginning at 0x42D559 before this issue dawned on me.
I imagine there's some way around this, since expanded ROMs are used all the time and lots of pointers are stored in this format. Do you know if this is the case?
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Huh? If it can go up to 3FFFFF it should be able to go above that. If you want 42D559 to be a pointer, make it 59D542
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From my understanding though, to make the game engine read address 0x42D559, the pointer would have to equal 0x102D559, or 59 D5 02 01, one byte too big for the game engine to handle.
For example, the first graphics pack has a pointer at address 0x362220 with a pointer value of 0xE52000, which points to address 0x252000. The reason why the upper bound is 0x3FFFFF is because 0xC00000 has to be added to it.
I worry that there's no way to express 0x42D559 using three bytes, because 0xC00000 would have to be added to it according to my understanding of how the game engine reads pointers to the graphics packs.
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Is that really how that works? That's really weird.
Edit: No, that converts numbers 0-3 to A B C D E F, Anything above that stays the same. So it should be fine to load it anywhere.
Edit: The next one is 62 23 E5, reverse that and change the number and it's 25 23 62 (252362). Anything ABOVE 3FFFFF for example, 410000 would just be 000041. It doesn't have to be changed into a letter.
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Okay, I'll try it without the +C00000 addition and report in with my findings.
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Er, typoed
0 = C, 1 = D, 2 = E, 3 = F
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It worked! Someday you'll have to explain the pointer scheme to me, but don't worry about it for now. The point is, I am empowered. The New Dream Devourer insertion continues.
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I'll just explain it to you while you're working. It's actually really simple. From what I've seen of Chrono Trigger there's 2 types of pointers, but there's probably more.
The first type is your basic 3 byte pointer, example 362220 = 2022F6. C = 0 D = 1 E = 2 F = 3. For any chunk of data that you know is being pointered to, you can do this. The most obvious ones would be the Character Graphics and whatnot. You take the address it's at, reverse it, and if the first number was 0-3, change it corresponding to the letters I listed above.
The second type is a 2 byte pointer. May seem odd but it isn't. There's a specific byte that tells what "bank" it's in. Meaning that the main area that everything is in is labeled by 1 byte for the area, then the other 2 point to the exact location.
Example: 3FC457 (D7 C4) - Character Stats On Left: The bytes are are D7 C4, reverse that and plop on the other and you get 3F C4 D7 for the exact location. There's a specific byte that's labeled "FF" that labels everything in that area in bank 3F. It's kind of complicated but once you start futzing around with everything, it's 2nd nature.
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Dream Devourer assembly should be finished late tonight. I'll upload a patch based on the full modified ROM, and if you apply that patch to your latest full patch everything should mesh together okay.
There will probably be issues with Layer 3 spell effects messing with the appearance of the Dream Devourer's shell -- I never did figure that out yet. Like, when Lavos casts "Chaos," the shell turns weird colors while the Layer 3 spell effect is being played. We'll have to figure that one out.
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Alright, that's fine. You're my god of Tiles D:
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One modified Dream Devourer, hot off the presses!
Apply this patch to the latest version of your already-patched ROM and see how it works. Location 0x1F8 (the first "empty location") should now contain the Dream Devourer. There's a teeny tiny problem in that the modified DD is one pixel "short" laterally, but hopefully that's not too noticeable...
I'll take a look at the layer properties sometime to see if I can figure out what's needed to keep the coloring consistent during Layer 3 spell effects.
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Woo! -glomps- This is incredibly exciting.
Edit: What tileset does the DD use? I've gone through 0 to 35 and I haven't seen heads or tails of the DD
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Should be tileset 35. If you go to location 1F8 it should be all set up...I hope. If not, give me a patch of your latest version and I'll patch the resulting ROM and toss the resulting patch in here.
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When I patched my rom with the DD patch, it over-wrote the entire Ocean Palace Time Freeze Event. That's not a big deal to move, so maybe I should try moving that real quick and see what happens?
Edit: It doesn't help it one bit. Nothing changes on the map O_o...This is odd. I don't even see the DD graphic anywhere in the rom when I check in Tile Molester. It's like the patch didn't even work
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Not sure what was up with the last effort. Try this out on a freshly-unheadered unmodified CT ROM.
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THERE'S THE DD! I just have to move the Ocean Palace Time Freeze location and it works perfectly ^_^
Edit: Yep, it's working now! I'll scan through the rom to see if it overwrote anything.
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Ouch, well, at least it worked out okay in the end. Now you can start coding the Dream Devourer events finally. I'll eventually get around to some tests to determine why the DD's shell gets funky when Layer 3 spell effects are applied.
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Do you know what area the DD graphics are located at? I'll do some minor tweaking on the edges to make it look okay.
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The DD graphics packs should start at the following addresses:
0x42D559
0x42E2B8
0x42ED8D
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Fixed the graphics themselves, but now the location doesn't want to work. How typical X_X
Edit; Working :D (http://i44.tinypic.com/o09b7k.png) - Now if the damn thing would STOP changing the pointer for the events.
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(http://i40.tinypic.com/160en8p.png) - Schala on the DD. It's really buggy atm because I'm basing it off of Lavos's Sprite Assembly and what not. Hopefully by 10:00 I'll be done.
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Triple Post: (http://i42.tinypic.com/2nqttme.gif) - First frame down and perfectly down
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Awesome -- and your version looks better to boot. If you really, really want, we could look into getting the background color to match up with the Tesseract background in the DS version, but without changing the background of the final Lavos battle, that will require making a completely separate tileset. Hopefully it's an extremely minor issue players won't nitpick about.
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I was thinking of coloring it to something else, but naw. Waste of space. But that's how the DS colors the Tesseract in general. The DS colors are darker on everything, so it's not that big of a deal