Author Topic: Making modding less painful (FFVII)  (Read 2707 times)

Bosola

  • Fire hazard!
  • *
  • Posts: 1752
    • View Profile
    • My YouTube Channel
Making modding less painful (FFVII)
« on: 2014-01-26 18:03:22 »
As someone who's been spending an inordinate amount of time over the last couple of years modding Final Fantasy VII, I thought I'd share some tips on testing and playing changes and making the debug process a whole lot less painful.

Testing battle changes (enemy stats, AI, formations, attacks)

If you haven't touched the battle scene lookup table in the KERNEL.BIN, you shouldn't need to reset your emulator to test these changes. You can just go ahead and instigate a fight on the world map. If you want to test a particular scenario, I would use the gameshark 'force enemy encounter' code (80116274 xxxx for NTSC), filling in the encounter ID you can get from looking at the formation data in Proud Clod.

Testing kernel changes (character stats, spells, etc.)

KERNEL changes require a reload of the game. For this reason, it's easiest to work with if you have a 'save anywhere' cheat enabled, particularly if you're tweaking things at the initial part of the game and you don't want to go through the intro video a thousand times. I have found the code 8009D2A6 0000 fairly reliable at giving me this.

Tweaking enemy damage

Use a damage calculator to tweak attack power rather than using trial-and-error with real battles. The relationship between power and final damage will not scale in the way you expect it to. I have one here: http://www.breck-mckye.com/final-fantasy-7-damage-calculator/calc.html

Testing new attacks

Don't use save states to try and get different outcomes for randomized attacks - obviously, loading a state will load all the pseudo-random number generator states.

I would also shove some Master Materia in your save with Black Choco etc., so you can activate attacks without any fussing around.

Skipping things

You can achieve some limited sequence breaking with a 'walk though walls' code (D00A99A4 A979; 800A99AC 0013; D00A99A4 A979; 800A99AE 1000). You should also see if your emulator has a skip frames / fast forward feature. On ePSXe, you can activate this with F4. On the PSX emulator, hit backspace.

Testing with arbitrary characters

The USO code can help you with this - it's a bit like a universal PHS. I believe the NTSC code is D0062D78 0022; 30049450 000B; D0062D78 0020; 30049450 0001.

Testing field changes

I believe fields are loaded on the fly, so simply entering an area should be enough to force a reload from disk. If you want to test things without getting bothered by enemy encounters, use a no-encounter code (8007173C 0000).

General tips
  • Keep a folder you can easily reach on your desktop with shortcuts to all your tools
  • Use this folder to quickly reach your mod source folders when doing imports with CDMage
  • Keep revisions of your old files
  • Use something like Wiki on a Stick to keep track of changes, reported bugs, documentation etc.

Hope that helps - and please, if you've any tips of your own, do contribute.