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31
Chrono Cross Modification / Re: Tutorial for itoikenza: how to delete music from battle
« on: November 15, 2017, 08:25:57 pm »
The Purple Cat Tools table files aren't complicated. The tables for version 0.3 are just lists of [filename],[location in ISO]. For instance, let's look at the entry for file 0001:
0001.boot.cfg,0x000A7000
That tells us that the file is named "0001.boot.cfg", and it starts at byte 0x000A7000 in an ISO image of the game disc. The passage prizvel quotes above explains how to derive the 0x000A7000 from the disc's TOC, and where to find the TOC in a disc image. Creating a new disc table just requires a hex editor to view the TOC, a calculator that understands hex, and a lot of patience. (I seem to remember that utunnels once managed to dump a disc for an entirely different Squaresoft PSX game using Purple Cat Tools and a custom table, a very long time ago.)
Version 0.4 of Purple Cat Tools doesn't even require the addresses, just a list of filenames, but I never really finished it, so some of the scripts are buggy.
0001.boot.cfg,0x000A7000
That tells us that the file is named "0001.boot.cfg", and it starts at byte 0x000A7000 in an ISO image of the game disc. The passage prizvel quotes above explains how to derive the 0x000A7000 from the disc's TOC, and where to find the TOC in a disc image. Creating a new disc table just requires a hex editor to view the TOC, a calculator that understands hex, and a lot of patience. (I seem to remember that utunnels once managed to dump a disc for an entirely different Squaresoft PSX game using Purple Cat Tools and a custom table, a very long time ago.)
Version 0.4 of Purple Cat Tools doesn't even require the addresses, just a list of filenames, but I never really finished it, so some of the scripts are buggy.
32
Kajar Laboratories / Re: Chrono Cross.... for the SNES!!?
« on: September 05, 2017, 07:45:38 am »
Razzly can be written out as an NPC. (So can Viper, even if you include the rest of the Dragoons.) Swap the elemental orientation of a necessary character rather than add someone in just for the sake of having another red element user.
33
History, Locations, and Artifacts / Re: Let's talk about food....
« on: July 23, 2017, 03:20:13 pm »
Do we know for sure that they're refrigerators and not iceboxes? The latter are much lower-tech. (And I'd bet that the earliest working refrigeration systems in the real world were created based on empirical observation, without any understanding of thermodynamics. Humans have this habit of figuring out what and only then trying to figure out why. 
)
As for Chrono cuisine, don't forget Skelly's favourite squid gut pasta. The "squid guts" part is more plausible than the "pasta" part, when you think about it--the ocean in El Nido should have plenty of squid, but pasta needs grain, and I don't remember us seeing any large cultivated areas.
)As for Chrono cuisine, don't forget Skelly's favourite squid gut pasta. The "squid guts" part is more plausible than the "pasta" part, when you think about it--the ocean in El Nido should have plenty of squid, but pasta needs grain, and I don't remember us seeing any large cultivated areas.
34
Chrono / Gameplay Casual Discussion / Re: Favorite Part
« on: July 19, 2017, 07:44:36 am »
Some people have speculated that an Ayla sidequest was planned at one time, and then cut for space or pacing reasons, leaving only the unused Singing Mountain track in the soundtrack as evidence.
As for my favourite part, well, I'm a Magus fan, so I kind of have to bring up the ending known as "What the Prophet Seeks".
As for my favourite part, well, I'm a Magus fan, so I kind of have to bring up the ending known as "What the Prophet Seeks".
35
Kajar Laboratories / Re: Chrono Cross.... for the SNES!!?
« on: July 09, 2017, 01:42:07 pm »
I'm going to divide this into sections, because there's a lot to cover.
1. Visual Aspect
I would probably start by sketching out the first few areas of the game using a perspective closer to the 3/4 top angle used by most SNES-era RPGs (Fort Dragonia dreamscape, Arni, Lizard Rock, and Opassa should be enough to start with). A lot of the locations in Cross were drawn at a flatter angle that would be difficult to work with as tilemaps with constant-sized sprites (the upper area of Termina outside Zappa's shop is one of the worst, but there are others).
For the tiles themselves, you may be able to steal a few from Trigger--the Forest Maze from Prehistory has appropriate sandy soil and palm-like trees--but a lot more are going to have to be drawn from scratch. And then they need to be fitted together into maps.
Then you need some sprites. If you cheat and hard-code Radius as the third character in the dream sequence, you can get away with three full PC spritesheets (Serge, Kid, Radius) plus some Arni villagers (walking animations at most, set must include Leena) and a half-dozen monsters for the first stage of the game (up to Arni (Another)). The PC spritesheets need the usual basic animations (walk, run, attack, defend, cast, die, possibly climb and idle).
2. Audio Aspect
All the music would have to be downgraded to fit the SNES's limited four-instrument system. Not sure how many channels there are in the original, but there's going to be something somewhere that doesn't fit, and the instruments themselves are going to sound more synthesized.
Also, you're going to lose the vocal from the ending theme no matter what you do. The SNES was never known for being good at reproducing intelligible speech.
3. Programming Aspect
Where do I even begin? Cross's combat system doesn't entirely match up with any other JRPG ever, as far as I know. Even if you started with a Trigger ROM as a base (probably not a good idea), you'd have to reprogram the combat and Elements systems largely from scratch. In SNES assembler. That's likely going to be a major time sink.
The menu, with its quirky rotating pointer, is another thing peculiar to Cross. I think there was someone who produced a working version of that, some years back, so if you're serious about this, you might consider searching the boards on romhacking.net and see if you could find them. The Element grid support is going to need to be written almost from scratch (you might be able to reuse some stuff from the equipment system).
And you're going to run into various size and complexity limitations imposed by the SNES hardware. Mauron's already mentioned one. Plus, even with the video cutscenes reduced to sprite animations and a lot of the Element and enemy special attack animations simplified, I suspect you may also run up against the "how much can you fit in a cartridge" limitation. You may have to pare away everything that doesn't figure into the main plot, and then judiciously cram as many of the cut bits back in as you can find room for.
Alternatively, you could move to another engine and just mimic the SNES graphic style, although I'm not sure what the point would be, then.
In short, it's a really big project, and I can only wish you luck. If you want to know what you, personally, should try to learn to have the best chance of pulling this off, I'd look into the programming side.
1. Visual Aspect
I would probably start by sketching out the first few areas of the game using a perspective closer to the 3/4 top angle used by most SNES-era RPGs (Fort Dragonia dreamscape, Arni, Lizard Rock, and Opassa should be enough to start with). A lot of the locations in Cross were drawn at a flatter angle that would be difficult to work with as tilemaps with constant-sized sprites (the upper area of Termina outside Zappa's shop is one of the worst, but there are others).
For the tiles themselves, you may be able to steal a few from Trigger--the Forest Maze from Prehistory has appropriate sandy soil and palm-like trees--but a lot more are going to have to be drawn from scratch. And then they need to be fitted together into maps.
Then you need some sprites. If you cheat and hard-code Radius as the third character in the dream sequence, you can get away with three full PC spritesheets (Serge, Kid, Radius) plus some Arni villagers (walking animations at most, set must include Leena) and a half-dozen monsters for the first stage of the game (up to Arni (Another)). The PC spritesheets need the usual basic animations (walk, run, attack, defend, cast, die, possibly climb and idle).
2. Audio Aspect
All the music would have to be downgraded to fit the SNES's limited four-instrument system. Not sure how many channels there are in the original, but there's going to be something somewhere that doesn't fit, and the instruments themselves are going to sound more synthesized.
Also, you're going to lose the vocal from the ending theme no matter what you do. The SNES was never known for being good at reproducing intelligible speech.
3. Programming Aspect
Where do I even begin? Cross's combat system doesn't entirely match up with any other JRPG ever, as far as I know. Even if you started with a Trigger ROM as a base (probably not a good idea), you'd have to reprogram the combat and Elements systems largely from scratch. In SNES assembler. That's likely going to be a major time sink.
The menu, with its quirky rotating pointer, is another thing peculiar to Cross. I think there was someone who produced a working version of that, some years back, so if you're serious about this, you might consider searching the boards on romhacking.net and see if you could find them. The Element grid support is going to need to be written almost from scratch (you might be able to reuse some stuff from the equipment system).
And you're going to run into various size and complexity limitations imposed by the SNES hardware. Mauron's already mentioned one. Plus, even with the video cutscenes reduced to sprite animations and a lot of the Element and enemy special attack animations simplified, I suspect you may also run up against the "how much can you fit in a cartridge" limitation. You may have to pare away everything that doesn't figure into the main plot, and then judiciously cram as many of the cut bits back in as you can find room for.
Alternatively, you could move to another engine and just mimic the SNES graphic style, although I'm not sure what the point would be, then.
In short, it's a really big project, and I can only wish you luck. If you want to know what you, personally, should try to learn to have the best chance of pulling this off, I'd look into the programming side.
36
Chrono / Gameplay Casual Discussion / Re: How do you think they coded the automatic accent generator in Chrono Cross?
« on: July 03, 2017, 07:53:26 am »
There are 26 strings in the auto-accent database. Most of them are suffixes or short-but-common words ("the", "you", etc.) See https://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Chrono_Cross_File_0000.html .
You have to remember that not all character-specific text is produced by running generic text through the auto-accenter. There are a few cases where actual variant lines for different characters are stored in the script (the ghost ship chapter has several, frex), and a lot more cases where an event can only occur if a specific character is present, so the stored lines can be written for them directly.
You have to remember that not all character-specific text is produced by running generic text through the auto-accenter. There are a few cases where actual variant lines for different characters are stored in the script (the ghost ship chapter has several, frex), and a lot more cases where an event can only occur if a specific character is present, so the stored lines can be written for them directly.
37
Chrono / Gameplay Casual Discussion / Re: How do you think they coded the automatic accent generator in Chrono Cross?
« on: June 24, 2017, 09:12:54 pm »
The executable contains lists of the short strings used to create the accents. For example, one list contains all the variations on "can't you" used by the various characters. There are a bunch of unknown bytes packed around the lists that presumably map each variation to the characters who use it. From there, all you need is a simple substitution function, with special characters for the text you want to change:
Hey, {can't you} see it?
(Select character Korcha and substitute in) -> Hey, can'tCHA see it?
(Select Norris instead) -> Hey, can't you see it?
Hey, {can't you} see it?
(Select character Korcha and substitute in) -> Hey, can'tCHA see it?
(Select Norris instead) -> Hey, can't you see it?
38
Chrono Cross Modification / Re: Chrono Cross Hard Hack
« on: March 11, 2017, 09:59:51 am »
We assigned (actually, that may even be "I assigned", but it was a long time ago and I don't remember) the .mdl extension because it was an obvious abbreviation of "model", not because of any connection to anyone else's format. Unless Quake uses arbitrarily mixed triangles and quads, and stores the skeletal rig as a series of joints rather than bones, they're unlikely to be a match.
I can't remember the exact texture size CC uses (it's fixed, may be different for overworld vs. combat models, PCs always have one texture only, some NPCs have more), and have no idea whether the size was mandated by the hardware or arbitrarily selected by Square. Someone at romhacking.net might be able to point you in the direction of better hardware information for the PSX, though.
As for increasing the size of the party...yeah, you're in uncharted territory there. Little work has been done on the program executables--we know that they're the files at the beginning of the disc, and a couple of the routines have been tentatively identified, plus some people have found pointer forests or other embedded bits and pieces, but that's it. Successful modification would probably require a knowledge of PSX assembler and/or a debugging emulator, which is out of my scope at this time.
I can't remember the exact texture size CC uses (it's fixed, may be different for overworld vs. combat models, PCs always have one texture only, some NPCs have more), and have no idea whether the size was mandated by the hardware or arbitrarily selected by Square. Someone at romhacking.net might be able to point you in the direction of better hardware information for the PSX, though.
As for increasing the size of the party...yeah, you're in uncharted territory there. Little work has been done on the program executables--we know that they're the files at the beginning of the disc, and a couple of the routines have been tentatively identified, plus some people have found pointer forests or other embedded bits and pieces, but that's it. Successful modification would probably require a knowledge of PSX assembler and/or a debugging emulator, which is out of my scope at this time.
39
Chrono Cross Modification / Re: Chrono Cross Hard Hack
« on: March 08, 2017, 06:02:45 pm »
Yes, Square used a custom format. Much of it has been deciphered, but there are some quirks that make it difficult to convert to anything else (the rigging for animations is...weird). utunnels wrote custom code to load the models into Blender, and no one's tackled the matching export code yet.
So if you want to insert new models into the game, your first step is probably to learn Python so you can write an export plugin for Blender.
So if you want to insert new models into the game, your first step is probably to learn Python so you can write an export plugin for Blender.
40
Chrono Cross Modification / Re: Chrono Cross Hard Hack
« on: March 06, 2017, 09:56:44 pm »
99% of the files on the discs have been identified, at least in general terms, and the findings are in the Encyclopedia. There are some unpacking tools of various levels of ability that can extract the files from disc images--see the "Chrono Cross Toolsets" thread about halfway down this forum.
The high-poly models used in the FMV sequences are not on the discs. The models that have been extracted are the battle and overworld models, including texture and animation data. Inserting modified models should theoretically be possible, but no one's done it yet as far as I know. The Blender plugin for Cross is load-only--we can't export models back to the CC format yet--so modifying a model in a sensical way would be difficult.
Does that help?
The high-poly models used in the FMV sequences are not on the discs. The models that have been extracted are the battle and overworld models, including texture and animation data. Inserting modified models should theoretically be possible, but no one's done it yet as far as I know. The Blender plugin for Cross is load-only--we can't export models back to the CC format yet--so modifying a model in a sensical way would be difficult.
Does that help?
41
Other Topics and the Prerelease / Re: Cross Texture Analysis
« on: February 28, 2017, 01:49:06 pm »
My guess would be that "evhal" is supposed to be "evil". "eval", which is shorthand for "evaluate" or "evaluation", is a slightly closer match phonetically but makes no sense in context. Anyway, it could be a typo or a genuine misunderstanding of how the English word is pronounced.
42
Chrono Trigger Modification / Re: Kronos Trigger - monumental translation fuck-up hack
« on: January 28, 2017, 09:29:12 am »Anyone have an idea on how to go about doing this with other games? Say, Chrono Cross?
The Terminus toolset that Ramsus and yazoo modified was intended for making additional translations, so it should be usable for this, too. (And there my advice ends, because I've never tried to use the thing.)
43
Chrono Trigger Modification / Re: ChronoTrigger+WorldRevolution
« on: January 24, 2017, 08:12:14 am »Quote
When Dalton brings Schala back, Queen Zeal says, "Glad of you to join us." It should be "So glad of you to join us."
I think you mean either "So nice of you to join us" or "Glad you could join us". Given the speaker, I would advise using the former. </20_CLAWED_GRAMMARIAN>
44
Chrono Cross Modification / Re: help me speed up regular battle loading.
« on: December 24, 2016, 04:45:04 pm »
The fieldscripts are stored compressed, so for practical purposes, no.
45
Chrono Cross Modification / Re: help me speed up regular battle loading.
« on: December 22, 2016, 10:22:40 pm »Quote
make every single "Gale" track playin' battle have the same track as it's room instead
You want to look at fieldscript opcodes A3 and C9, which are the ones that trigger battles. One of the parameters there is a set of bitflags that controls whether Gale, Brink of Death, or the room music plays.