Adding battle and bosses

[Immortal Damyn]

So I'm having fun with modding my game its fun times. I got a load of editors and such thanks to the generous people of Qhimm forums . And I've so far only done minor things to my game, such as edit/remove spells, and make new materia. I also made flashback cloud a badass because Zack wasn't a pushover in Crisis Core when I reached Nibelhiem. Anyway, I have just been wondering as of recent how exactly one goes about adding battles and boss triggers. Such as our friendly Hardcore mod's Omega. I've been wanting to add some tough, sub-par emerald weapon like bosses to the materia caves, but I have no idea how I would go about it. So if anyone could enlighten me as to what I would need to look into to learn to add new battle scene's and boss fights into the game that would be pretty sweet .

Side note: I've noticed through titeguy's shop editor that there are several shops that seem to be unused. I was wondering if anyone might possibly know how I may make a secret shop somewhere in like the materia caves, or even something like your return trip to Midgar to save it from the evils of Hojo and such.

[Bosola]

You will need to use Meteor for all those things. I'd say more, but

a) I don't know much else, and

b) there are plenty of resources for you to use. Make your first point of call the Meteor thread.

[Kudistos Megistos]

This opcode list might come in handy.

It has certainly been useful for me in my few and mostly unsuccessful attempts at field editing.

Beware that meteor seems to be a little buggy and crashes when loading certain scenes (it doesn't crash randomly; there are a set of scenes, which don't seem to have anything in common, that always make it crash).

[Immortal Damyn]

This opcode list might come in handy.

It has certainly been useful for me in my few and mostly unsuccessful attempts at field editing.

Beware that meteor seems to be a little buggy and crashes when loading certain scenes (it doesn't crash randomly; there are a set of scenes, which don't seem to have anything in common, that always make it crash).

Oh dear... this is going to be a lot harder than I hoped. But I thought as much...

[titeguy3]

So I'm having fun with modding my game its fun times. I got a load of editors and such thanks to the generous people of Qhimm forums . And I've so far only done minor things to my game, such as edit/remove spells, and make new materia. I also made flashback cloud a badass because Zack wasn't a pushover in Crisis Core when I reached Nibelhiem. Anyway, I have just been wondering as of recent how exactly one goes about adding battles and boss triggers. Such as our friendly Hardcore mod's Omega. I've been wanting to add some tough, sub-par emerald weapon like bosses to the materia caves, but I have no idea how I would go about it. So if anyone could enlighten me as to what I would need to look into to learn to add new battle scene's and boss fights into the game that would be pretty sweet .

Side note: I've noticed through titeguy's shop editor that there are several shops that seem to be unused. I was wondering if anyone might possibly know how I may make a secret shop somewhere in like the materia caves, or even something like your return trip to Midgar to save it from the evils of Hojo and such.

Okay, I'm not 100% sure about this and it'd be much more difficult to add a shop but to add a boss to one of the materia caves, try this:
1. Back up your flevel.lgp
2. get Meteor, Proud Clod, lzs.exe (or some other program that can recompress field files) and ficedula's lgptools
3. extract zz8 (KotR cave) and decompress it
4. open up zz8 with Meteor
5. Goto the "Encounters" tab
6. Open up Proud Clod and load scene.bin
(I'm going to assume that you've already made a boss in proud clod and whatnot, though you might wanna just use a dummy battle for testing purposes initially)
7. Find the boss/enemies that you want to add, and click on "Animations/Formations"
8. Goto the formations tab
9. You'll see a few Battle ID's here preceded with the word "Form" written in hex here, choose the one you want
10. Now we need to convert it from hex to decimal, you can use windows calculator in programming mode to do that for you. Just type it in in hex then switch to decimal. (I think you also have to add 2 to get it right. Don't ask me why.)
11. Back to meteor in the encounters tab, raise the encounter probability percentage above zero, then type your battle ID in under "Normal Probability Encounter" Type 1
12. You can probably Move the slider back down to zero and the battle ID will remain saved, we just needed to type it in
13. Go to the "Entities and Script" tab, and expand l1, then click on script 2
14. (not entirely sure about the parameters here) right before where it says "BITON (10,31,03)" type "BATTLE(0,29,1)"
15. File...save
16. Recompress zz8 using lzs.exe
17. Close meteor and use the "replace" option in Ficedula's LGP Tools to put zz8 back in the archive
18. Done.

If this works, you should get an encounter right before receiving the knights of round materia, if not, then either it won't happen, or the game will crash, haha. Mind you I've never successfully used Meteor for anything, this is all just experimentation for me.

EDITED as per Kuroda's advice

[Kudistos Megistos]

Oh dear... this is going to be a lot harder than I hoped. But I thought as much...

Yeah, field editing is not straightforward, and meteor is somewhat lacking in user-friendliness.

Maybe you could PM gjoerulv, since he has made some new battles. If you're specific about what you want to do and he's in a good mood (and he usually is), then you might be able to get some help.

[Immortal Damyn]

Thanks for the help guys, I might just have to pester gjoerulv about it. But I think I might attempt what titeguy pointed out first..... maybe.

[Kuroda Masahiro]

Actually, I can think of a better way to add one in.

Similar to the Materia Keeper, you can add in a field model of a monster, (even if its the dragon from the play and you added in a 'real' dragon) and when you talk to it, (and win) it can either turn into the physical Materia, or you can have it go straight to the 'obtain materia' message box after the battle.

In fact, you can probably just borrow a lot of the code from Materia Keeper as well, and it looks better than just a boss coming completely out of nowhere.

(in my opinion anyway. )

but, if you try what titeguy3 said...

the game will crash because to be able to edit it in meteor, you have to decompress the files, and then use a tool called 'lzs.exe' (which can be downloaded from Ficedula's webpage) before you can put it back into the flevel.

I think the rest of it is right though.

[titeguy3]

Actually, I can think of a better way to add one in.

Similar to the Materia Keeper, you can add in a field model of a monster, (even if its the dragon from the play and you added in a 'real' dragon) and when you talk to it, (and win) it can either turn into the physical Materia, or you can have it go straight to the 'obtain materia' message box after the battle.

In fact, you can probably just borrow a lot of the code from Materia Keeper as well, and it looks better than just a boss coming completely out of nowhere.

(in my opinion anyway. )

but, if you try what titeguy3 said...

the game will crash because to be able to edit it in meteor, you have to decompress the files, and then use a tool called 'lzs.exe' (which can be downloaded from Ficedula's webpage) before you can put it back into the flevel.

I think the rest of it is right though.

So THATS why my game crashes every time I try to use meteor...

[Immortal Damyn]

Actually, I can think of a better way to add one in.

Similar to the Materia Keeper, you can add in a field model of a monster, (even if its the dragon from the play and you added in a 'real' dragon) and when you talk to it, (and win) it can either turn into the physical Materia, or you can have it go straight to the 'obtain materia' message box after the battle.

In fact, you can probably just borrow a lot of the code from Materia Keeper as well, and it looks better than just a boss coming completely out of nowhere.

(in my opinion anyway. )

but, if you try what titeguy3 said...

the game will crash because to be able to edit it in meteor, you have to decompress the files, and then use a tool called 'lzs.exe' (which can be downloaded from Ficedula's webpage) before you can put it back into the flevel.

I think the rest of it is right though.

The only problem with that is that I have no idea what code I'm supposed to run through and steal. Computer languages are rather foreign thing to me. I know some things about computers, but code is not one of my area's.

[Kuroda Masahiro]

Offhand, i can't check what codes you need, but Materia Keeper itself literally is just 'talk to it and fight' before it changes model to the support materia model.

I suggest going into the flevel file that has the materia keeper (use Loveless to find which map file you need from the preview image) and go through all the code in a C-style script editor to see what the code actually 'does'.

then, copy all of it to a notepad.

then, attempt to make it 'fit' in one of the materia caves and use (to begin with) the SAME codes to ensure it works the way the real Materia Keeper works.

However, after a few attempts, try to find out why it works and make your own as you slowly start to script your own scenes in that regard.

Hope this helped.

edit: i juuust saw your point about adding 'secret' shops, and this is pretty easy to do.

if there's a man for instance, (as in, someone random;y walking around a room) you can give him a code that opens a shop menu.

However, the shop menu that's opened is determined by the code you use to open it in Meteor, so i suggest going to the different flevel fields that have shops, and going into the entities and script for the shop keeper and seeing which code opens which shop.

once you find out which code opens a unused shop, you can edit that shop's prices and stock to fit what you need.