Topics

151

Completely Unrelated / The $132 million man...

« on: 2009-06-11 15:47:35 »

Real Madrid have bought Christiano Ronaldo from Manchester United for £80 million

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/m/man_utd/8094720.stm

Recession? What recession?

152

Archive / Working out the unknown scene.bin data

« on: 2009-03-24 18:21:41 »

A few discoveries that I have made:

0x0C of formation data determines whether an enemy can be targeted in battle, as well as a few other things. When this is set to E7, the enemy is untargetable but visible, and does not have to be killed for the battle to end (example: the helicopter in the Rufus battle). When it is E6 the enemy is again untargetable and still doesn't have to be killed for the battle to end, and it is also invisible (example: the lorry in the Palmer battle). I've tried this with MPs and Guard Hounds and got the results I expected.

0x04 (possibly 0x04-05) of battle setup 1 has something to do with how long it takes to escape from battles; the higher the number the better. It might be the amount of turns the player has to spend trying to escape, but I haven't confirmed anything.

0x010 (possibly 0x010-0x011) determine whether the battle is escapable. Formations with FD at this offset can be escaped, whereas formations with other values here (F9 and E9 seem to be the most common) are unescapable.

I actually found the last two a while ago, but I don't think I advertised them very well. My apologies if any of this is old news. 

153

Archive / Making allies into enemies

« on: 2009-03-03 14:23:00 »

M'kay, ff7rules and I have been discussing this. One can make allies appear as enemies in battle by using their battle ID as the enemy ID, but there are a lot of problems with animations and because (of course) they don't have weapons (I remember Barret turning up with no weapon, and Cloud having a sword dangling in front of him). When they do anything the game gets stuck with everyone doing their "standing" animation because it can't do the attack animation.

Does anyone know of any way to have allies as enemies other than making new battle models with their parts and giving them weapons as part of the main model?

154

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Problems swapping Hojo's sample monsters + possible scene.bin discovery

« on: 2009-02-04 23:18:49 »

I've been trying to change the enemies that fight with Hojo in the first battle on the Sister Ray in Midgar from the Poodler and Bad Rap Samples into an Unknown 2 and Unknown 3. The enemy IDs, data from 0x0350-0x04bf, all attack related data have been swapped and the AI has been fixed, including pointers and Hojo's AI telling him to "kill" his monsters during the battle set-up. But they still won't appear; they are targetable, invisible, do not act and die after being the target of any attack (including things like "sense").

I suspect this may be something to do with their formation; when I change their formation to put them in the position in which they appear in the Gelnika, they appear in battle at the start but disappear when Hojo uses capsule on them (exactly the opposite of what one expects). When their position is the same as that of the Poodler and Bad Rap samples, the battle starts as usual with them invisible and untargetable, but they revert to the state mentioned above when capsule is used. I've remembered to put their IDs in the formation data every time

So after all that, what I'd like to know is what is known about formation data in the scene.bin (assuming this is the problem); there isn't any data on the wiki and a forum search reveals little of use. Or might the problem be something else entirely that may or may not require a facepalm for my ignorance?

Now for the (possible) discovery. I've noticed that the wiki says that the function of all the bytes from 0x00a to 0x0019 are unknown. They aren't. The first two bytes of this "unknown" data do something similar to this field opcode. By changing 0x00a-0x00b from 5c03 to ffff I changed what happens when the player wins; now, when Hojo's first form is killed, there is a normal victory scene with Exp gained before the player is taken back to the cannon as if all the forms had been beaten. My apologies if this is old news, but if it's not, the function of those two bytes has now been discovered.

155

Completely Unrelated / Anticipation

« on: 2009-01-10 00:15:41 »

Whilst browsing a certain board on a certain website, I came across this and thought I'd leave it here:

You've finally recieved your banging new copy of the Final Fantasy Remake.

Once again, you will be able to play the game of your childhood joys, not only reliving the great moments but staring in awe at the beautiful graphics.

You pop that bad boy into your PS3 and watch as the game starts up and the PS3 logo flashes on its screen.

The starting screen comes up and you eagerly hit new game. You observe the lifestream until the game closes in on Aerith's face. She backs away from the alley wall and heads out into the streets.
The game zooms out to show all of Midgar and the Final Fantasy over 9000 logo flashes across the screen. The nostalgia brings a tear to your eye when suddenly everything goes black. Suddenly, Rick Astley appears on your screen singing "Never gonna give you up"!

156

Archive / Battle Square Mechanics

« on: 2008-12-10 21:14:51 »

This question was asked by someone else a while ago, but wasn't answered, so I'm asking it again in case anything new has been discovered.

What is known about the battle square mechanics? How, for example, could the handicaps be disabled? Is there any way to have three people in the battles instead of one? Or get Exp. and AP from fights?

157

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Changing the music file set for field files

« on: 2008-10-31 16:49:43 »

I was wondering how to change the music played in the field and battle scenes using meteor, and came across this and this after searching for information this and about the music opcodes.

They say that music is "defined" or "set" for a field file: I'd like to know how to set extra tracks for field files to change the music played in battle; for example, how to set the normal boss music for the fight with the Turks in the Winding Tunnel without changing the music in other battles (which would happen if one changed it with ff7music). Meteor doesn't seem to have an option for this; either that, or I am missing something that is right in front of my face.

EDIT: I think I've found where this data is stored. Now, if I can just figure out how to repack flevel.lgp I'll be able to do some tests.

EDIT2: Managed to change the music in the Wall Market to "Cosmo Canyon" without anything crashing...

158

Archive / Changing the prices of things in shops

« on: 2008-10-11 17:03:10 »

After searching for information on how to change the prices of shops (and finding nothing) I decided to search ff7.exe with a hex editor. Progress has been slow, but I think that I have stumbled across some data for prices in shops. At 0x523B8C in my patched ff7.exe (official patch and chocobo patch) there are some hex bytes with seem to correspond to the prices of Cid's weapons (and the data starting at 0x5219C8 is dialogue from shops - what, I wonder, are the spaced-out bytes from 0x521E18 to 0x52381D?). There are lots of other bytes in that part of the file that look like prices as well. I'll do some more searching tonight; who knows what will be found? Maybe nothing, maybe something; maybe someone else might have something to add...

My apologies if all of this has already been discovered and I am reinventing the wheel.

EDIT: They ARE prices: I changed the prices for potions and Phoenix downs

EDIT2: RESULT! EUREKA!

I was looking for the prices at which master materia could be sold, but couldn't find anything of which I could be sure. Then, an idea came to me: why not mash the numbers on my keyboard like a hyperactive five-year-old and see what happens? I did, and when I loaded the game, the prices for master materia were FUBAR (the R standing for recognition - I made a backup, of course).

It turns out that the prices from master materia are from 0x523E58 to 0x523FC3 - the price is the decimal conversion of the hex bytes x 70, so "All" materia (at 0x523EB4) is 1 400 000/70, or 4E20 (shown as 204E in a hex editor). I changed it to 7D0, and now mastered "All" materia sells for 140 000 gil.

EDIT3:

Those "spaced-out bytes from 0x521E18 to 0x52381D" are, as I should have known, the items and materia that the shops sell, and also determine the text at the top of the screen in some way. By changing 0x521EE0 from 31 to 50 I managed to get the materia seller in the Sector 7 slums to sell "Leviathan" materia instead of "Fire".

I'm waiting nervously for someone to reply "we found this already!"