Author Topic: An update to the HOJO utility ?  (Read 5048 times)

Armorvil

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An update to the HOJO utility ?
« on: 2008-11-27 17:28:35 »
In case Squall reads this, I have an idea that would ease the work of all wannabe modders (myself included :D) :
Below "misc", in an enemy's tab, you can see an enemy's abilities and even rename them. This is great, but what would be even better, I think, would be the possibility to double-click on them or something in order to modify these abilities.
You don't even need to make it look good : I can imagine a new window with the attack data's 28 bytes listed, in hex (kudos to Akari and NFITC1 for the new info, by the way :) ) so one wouldn't need to unpack the archive, use a hex editor, and repack the file just to change a value.

Just tossing an idea, there :)

Kudistos Megistos

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Re: An update to the HOJO utility ?
« Reply #1 on: 2008-11-27 17:54:56 »
That would be nice, but...

as far as I know (and I hope that I'm wrong about this), one would only be able to change the attacks that are only used by enemies, such as "supernova"; attacks that are used by the player as well (such as "fire" and "shadow flare") have their properties decided by the kernel, so changing them in the scene.bin file would have no effect.

Armorvil

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Re: An update to the HOJO utility ?
« Reply #2 on: 2008-11-27 17:58:57 »
Yeah, I know. I don't think this is a problem, though.

Kudistos Megistos

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Re: An update to the HOJO utility ?
« Reply #3 on: 2008-11-27 18:11:26 »
I wonder whether it would be possible to have Hojo do what Scene Edit does, namely allow the user to see AI data, but also allow the user to edit it, and to edit attack IDs. Hopefully that would mean the user could edit any attack the enemies use by letting the player swap shared attack IDs with enemy only ones. It might be more complicated than that; whenever I've tried to do this by hex-editing I've made a mess out of it, but if it could be done it would certainly be very helpful (of course, Hojo is already very helpful ;-) ).

nfitc1

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Re: An update to the HOJO utility ?
« Reply #4 on: 2008-11-28 17:12:38 »
I did look through all the enemies' data and they are all stored just like in the KERNEL.BIN section 2. Several of them are for animation purposes only, however. There are at most 32 per scene block (I don't think any block uses all 32 attacks) and there are 256 scene blocks. If a monster is within a scene block, it could perform any of those 32 attacks. Several of them are blank so there's room to give some monsters additional attacks. You'd just have to change the monster's AI to perform that attack at a certain time.

Akari

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Re: An update to the HOJO utility ?
« Reply #5 on: 2008-11-28 18:08:27 »
I did look through all the enemies' data and they are all stored just like in the KERNEL.BIN section 2. Several of them are for animation purposes only, however. There are at most 32 per scene block (I don't think any block uses all 32 attacks) and there are 256 scene blocks. If a monster is within a scene block, it could perform any of those 32 attacks. Several of them are blank so there's room to give some monsters additional attacks. You'd just have to change the monster's AI to perform that attack at a certain time.

You will need to assign animation script to see anything visible. Assosiation written in enemy data.