Author Topic: Oh yea I'm new  (Read 552 times)

Shee

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Oh yea I'm new
« on: December 13, 2008, 09:40:04 pm »
Hey all. new to the Compendium here...can be found at GameFAQS, also as Shee.  This game rocks my balls off the walls and I've just begun dabbling in hacking it.  progress made thus far?  Minimal if any.  But I'm here and happy to be.

PEACE

Romana

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Re: Oh yea I'm new
« Reply #1 on: December 13, 2008, 09:41:39 pm »
Welcome to the forums!

teaflower

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Re: Oh yea I'm new
« Reply #2 on: December 13, 2008, 10:06:30 pm »
Indeed, welcome. I think I've seen you around before...

FaustWolf

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Re: Oh yea I'm new
« Reply #3 on: December 13, 2008, 10:29:15 pm »
Welcome tot he party! Don't get discouraged if at first you don't succeed. Be willing to ask for help. If you have a basic understanding of hexadecimal notation, anything is possible...though if you have coding knowledge, more than anything is possible.


Shee

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Re: Oh yea I'm new
« Reply #4 on: December 13, 2008, 10:35:10 pm »
Indeed!  Great to be here you all are great!

Now how much is possible if I know nothing?  I stated elsewhere the only CLOSE to this I've messed with was the Construction Set for Oblivion.  Here for CT all I've done was place Dalton in Lucca's Workshop and start a battle with Magus's music playing once Dalton got activated.  What I really want to know mostly right now is changing people's names, music stop/starting (think Dalton changing the music once he upgrades the Epoch), things like that.  But really, don't worry about spelling it all out for me right now...the questions will come for sure!

FaustWolf

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Re: Oh yea I'm new
« Reply #5 on: December 13, 2008, 10:59:18 pm »
Sounds like you've had a good start actually. In addition to downloading Temporal Flux, you may want to invest in a hex editor. Cygnus Hex Editor has a free edition and comes highly recommended. If you want to be able to copy and paste hex in Cygnus you need to give those folks $20, but the free functionality is more than enough for a hacking padawan.

Shee

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Re: Oh yea I'm new
« Reply #6 on: December 13, 2008, 11:43:53 pm »
Cool man thanks for the info..thing is...I have no idea what HEX editing entails or what I would use it for.

FaustWolf

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Re: Oh yea I'm new
« Reply #7 on: December 14, 2008, 02:04:41 am »
Basically, hex editing is editing the hexadecimal value of a given property in the ROM. For example, you can change names of spells and other things by changing hexadecimal values stored at specific positions in the ROM. Allow me to demonstrate.

I'm brushing up on my tech editing knowledge with jsondag's tech editor, but his tech editor currently doesn't change spell names (or at least the version I was using before the Obama Campaign didn't have this feature yet). So, I've got these really sweet looking spells for Magus now, and I want the names to be changed thus:

*Lightning2 > Thor Hammer
*Ice2 > Maelstrom
*Fire2 > Doom Blaze
*Magic Wall > Curse

First thing to do is look up where the heck the spell names are stored in an unheadered ROM. That info has handily been recorded in the Compendium Encyclopedia, under Modification.

Look at "offsets pertinent to techs" specifically. An "offset" is just a fancy name for a certain position in the ROM. Tech names start at offset 0x0C15CF, which is simply hexidecimal notation for saying that tech names begin with the 792,015th byte in an unheadered CT ROM. Tech names are 11 bytes each, and as is often the case in videogames, a "relative alphabet" is used. That means each byte is interpreted by the game engine as a specific letter, number or special character. The relative alphabet used for CT techs is here. Think of the relative alphabet as a Rosetta Stone that helps us translate hexadecimal into English.

Now, let's say I'm impatient and don't want to go through the trouble of finding out the pointer to a specific tech name (pointers, by the way, are hexadecimal values that tell the game engine where other data are stored). I can just use the relative alphabet to search for the names already in the ROM!

*Lightning2, according to the relative alphabet, is 2F AB C2 C0 C1 CD C7 C2 C7 C0 D6. We find that in two places, the second at 0x0C17DF being Magus' *Lightning2. Tech names in CT are a constant length of 11 characters in the ROM, with the hex value 0xFF representing blank space.

I go ahead and overwrite the spell names for *Lightning2, *Ice2, *Fire2, and *Magic Wall with the desired values in the Relative Alphabet. I'll upload a video of Magus owning Dalton with his spiffy new techs in Prophet's Guile later. 8)

Oh yeah, and you really don't have to go through all that -- Geiger has made it so you can just edit tech names in Temporal Flux.  :mrgreen: But it's a good exercise in hex editing.
« Last Edit: December 14, 2008, 02:18:04 am by FaustWolf »

Shee

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Re: Oh yea I'm new
« Reply #8 on: December 15, 2008, 04:42:36 am »
 :picardno

Strugglin' here...I'm basically using Dalton in Lucca's Workshop as a testing ground for scenes...I'm getting the hang of animations and sounds lining up with them...dialogue is beyond me right now...he keeps saying the same thing over and over now matter how many times I change the 3 textboxes...I have animations and sounds between the textboxes...I dunno if that matters.

In addition, I'm trying to recreate the fireball throwing he did at thelast village..I actually copied all of one of the fireballs stuff for startup, activate, touch, and arbitrary0, but it dosen't show up.  I changed the cooridnates to teh workshop, and took out teh PC arbitraty commands because they don't have nay in the workshop (the only people I'm with are Marle and Crono...this is right at the beginning of the game *side note: didn't know that Iron Orb can't kill you...moving on)



NEW NEWS as of 2:28 am in the morning pacific time.  I'm starting to understand stringing dialogue, and I got two YES two fireballs at spearate times to show up and disappear accordingly. 

So I don't know if this should get moved...this is turning into my "Help Shee not feel like an idiot" thread.

Thanks again for all the help, y'all are great!
« Last Edit: December 15, 2008, 06:30:39 am by Shee »