Author Topic: [FFVII] Cheats/mods for a Cloud-Sephiroth-Vincent party  (Read 5165 times)

Lymmea

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I am super new to the FFVII modding scene; I've never played it on a PC before and I intend to make my first foray into it soon. I've always played it on consoles, completely vanilla, and now I want to experiment with modding/cheats in ways I couldn't before.

One of the things I'd really like to do is play with Sephiroth as a party member. However, Vincent is one of my favorite characters, and most of the cheats I've read about dictate that you can't have both without breaking one of them because they share a slot. So I was looking into mods here, thinking a mod might get around the issues that cheat codes run into, but a lot of the Sephiroth mods here seem to make Sephiroth the main character, replacing Cloud. While I don't necessarily mind that, that would be a separate thing I'd want to do, maybe with the Sephiroth Story mod I've seen in my search of this forum. But I still want an option to play with both Sephiroth and Vincent as party members in an otherwise vanilla game, with Cloud as the main character. (Note: if this is only possible with character overrides, I'm okay with Cait Sith or Yuffie being replaced. I thought Yuffie would be relatively easy to replace since she's optional like Vincent is, but I didn't see any mods like that so I'm thinking I was totally mistaken.)

Is what I want to do possible? I did search the forums, and also did a general Google search, but if there was anything out there that could fit the bill then I must've missed it. Are the only options to replace either Vincent or Cloud?

Also, as a quick aside - what's the best version of FFVII in regards to my ability to use cheats, or the selection of mods I'll have access to? Emulating the original game? (I own the discs, for the record, nothing illegal going on here.) The PC version? The Steam version? I haven't yet looked into/decided what version I'm going to play, so if any of them are a notably superior experience I'd like to know.

Sega Chief

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Re: [FFVII] Cheats/mods for a Cloud-Sephiroth-Vincent party
« Reply #1 on: 2019-01-23 16:15:42 »
Doing this purely for battles is relatively straightforward.

What you want to do is, get yourself Luksy's ULGP tool; it's for unpacking model archives to be edited and then repacking them.
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=12831.0

Go to the FF7/DATA/BATTLE folder and grab the battle.lgp archive from it. Unpack it using ULGP and it should give you a folder with all the loose model files inside. The model files/parts are identified by the first two letters in the file name, so everything starting with 'RT' for instance belongs to Cloud's model.

RTAA: Cloud
RUAA: Tifa
RVAA: Aeris
RWAA: Red XIII
RXAA: Yuffie
RYAA: Cait Sith
RZAA: Cid
SAAA: Sephiroth
SBAA: Barret A
SCAA: Barret B
SDAA: Barret C
SEAA: Barret D
SFAA: Vincent A
SGAA: Vincent B
SHAA: Vincent C
SIAA: Hi-poly Cloud

As a sidenote, there are multiple copies of Barret and Vincent to handle different weapon animations in case you're wondering.

So what you can do here is, you can make a copy of Sephiroth's 'SA' files and then rename them to match a different character's files. When the game loads that character, it'll have Sephiroth's battle model instead.

If we delete all of, for example, Yuffie's files (any file starting with RX) and then rename our copied Seph files to use RX instead of SA, then whenever Yuffie is in a battle it'll load Sephiroth's battle model.

For the weapons, we can get away with just replacing the first weapon with Sephiroth's only weapon but for more variety you could grab Cloud's weapon files and use those to replace the remaining weapons; weapon files typically always have a 'c' as their 3rd character; so all 'RTC' files are all Cloud's weapons, 'RXC' are all Yuffie's weapons, etc.

When finished, repack the archive and put it back into the ff7/data/battle folder.

For the menu portraits, you want to head into FF7/DATA/MENU and extract the menu_us.lgp. In here you'll find a bunch of .TEX files that handle character portraits in menus + smaller versions for PHS/shop menus. Same deal here; get rid of the target character's files and replace them with a renamed copy of Sephiroth's files.

For the weapons + stats, you'll want to use the kernel editor 'Wall Market' (install Visual Basic Power Pack 3 to get this tool working on newer machines).

If you pop open the kernel.bin (located in ff7/data/kernel for old FF7 PC, and in ff7/data/lang-en/kernel for steam version) you'll be able to modify your target replacement character's starting weapons, stats, etc. for something closer to what you'd expect Sephiroth to have. You can rename the weapons too if you want.

As for field screens, that's a bit more involved as there are a lot of screens, animations, etc. to change (and dialogue, assuming). You might be best leaving this as-is unless you want to undertake your own project to changing it all.

Lymmea

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Re: [FFVII] Cheats/mods for a Cloud-Sephiroth-Vincent party
« Reply #2 on: 2019-05-16 10:11:43 »
Sorry for the incredibly late reply, life ate me.

That said, I wish I knew enough about modding to make my own project, but I definitely don't. I'm surprisingly good at using trial and error to tweak with things I barely understand until I get them working the way I want, but I'm awful at actually coming to understand how things work.

I think I could definitely get the in-battle models working the way I want with this advice, but I'd want the field models changed too and it sounds like that's going to be way above my competence level. I may need to accept that what I want to do can't be done - at least not by someone at my meager skill level - and either accept not modding the characters at all, or going with one of the pre-made mods even if they're not quite what I'm looking for.

If I could create a project of my own - if I had the time, energy, and game-hacking knowledge necessary - I think my ideal mod would be one that replaces Cait Sith with Sephiroth, complete with altered story and dialogue in a sort of alternate universe interpretation of the main game. It would involve the Sephiroth that accompanies you being a fragment of the real Sephiroth that formed from the Lifestream(similar to the remnants from Advent Children) - Sephiroth's remaining humanity and compassion, rebelling against the insanity and hatred that took over the rest of him. Rather than sending Cait Sith with you, Reeve sends this splinter of Sephiroth with the party - who has probably come into contact (if not conflict) with Shinra since his both literal and figurative reformation, and may well have encountered and possibly started working with Reeve as they'd both be conscientious objectors to Shinra at this point. Obviously there'd be no point in sending a battle robot with the party as assistance/a point of contact when splinter-Sephiroth could serve the purpose far better. I think it'd be a really cool idea and I'm only regretful that my own lack of technical know-how means that there's no way on god's green earth I could ever make it.

(If anyone with actual skill likes the idea, though, and wants to make it a reality, I'm putting it out there as a concept for a reason. Hell, I'd offer to help write the dialogue.)
« Last Edit: 2019-05-16 21:37:48 by Lymmea »

jenniangl

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Re: [FFVII] Cheats/mods for a Cloud-Sephiroth-Vincent party
« Reply #3 on: 2021-06-20 22:45:51 »
My way of thinking is that you don't have to answer them with the same currency when people are toxic on the internet everyone has a big mouth. You have to be more innovative sometimes when you play with hacks, it can be a benefit that you help others to rise in rank. The game Call Of Duty: Warzone I played for about 7 months and did not find any hackers, but I would like to try warzone cheat: https://lavicheats.com/call-of-duty-warzone-hacks-cheats-esp-2021/ I don't know if it will help me and I'm not sure if I won't take my ban.
« Last Edit: 2021-06-24 22:08:07 by jenniangl »