Messages

101

Completely Unrelated / Re: Ohh yeah!

« on: 2013-10-26 14:51:01 »

The game-play was lacklustre too imho.  Gambits took all the tactics and brainpower away from you; for 90% of the game I survived on 2 gambits as my characters mindlessly slashed away.  Random treasure was a silly idea. The areas were great but filled with nothing as you walked for miles on end, and sidequests and user input was down to a minimum.

It's like Square identified all the worst aspects of MMORPGs - the arbitrary and unfair randomized mechanics, the focus on looting, the fixation on killing numbers of beasts - without figuring out a way to substitute the best parts of those games, namely the feeling of progression, a sense of mastery and the random interactions with your teammates.

In FFX you get complete control of your characters and even Summons, you get little quirks with the limit breaks (like entering a code, or pressing button at correct time, or liming up slots).  There is nothing like this in XII.  It's just one long trudge, and the gamer comes second at all times.  Even the AI was lazy.  FFXII deploys the most lazy battle mechanic  too "Heaps of HP = harder".

The basic way to play XII is to find an auto-grind spot at the earliest opportunity, wait until you're overlevelled, and then plow through the rest of the dungeons as fast as possible. At least that way you can keep track of the (terrible) story - otherwise, with four or five hours between story points (thanks to dungeon length), you forget what's going on.

It's a complete mystery to me how anyone puts this game above X... I've racked my brain over it a lot, but I haven't got an answer!    The only thing it beats X on imho is the graphics (and perhaps voice acting, which doesn't really count as part of a game anyway). Even the music has to go to X.

Graphics? Besides the dodgy HUD design, FFXII is vibrant, sharp, and shows off a consistent art design (I know the Yevon patterns are overused, but they do suggest a coherent Spiran architecture). You can differentiate areas in ways that reflect the game lore and battle animations show great momentum and force. XII's graphics are nothing like that. Muddy, samey dungeons with homogenous architecture; floaty, ineffective battle animations; hackneyed pseudo-Renaissance styling.

Final Fantasy XII is not a good game.

102

Completely Unrelated / Re: PS3 Emulator

« on: 2013-10-15 20:08:51 »

I honestly don't think a PS3 emulator would ever be feasible - it's a moderately popular platform in the sunset of its lifecycle. The work involved would probably never be justifiable.

103

Troubleshooting / Re: Not sure if it's a bug but....

« on: 2013-10-15 20:02:38 »

How would an application with a monolithic single-threaded design exploit a multi-CPU architecture? Don't expect extra cores to 'automagically' kick in.

104

Completely Unrelated / Re: Why does the PSP support PSX games ?

« on: 2013-10-15 19:56:31 »

The CPU isn't emulated - they're both MIPS architectures, with the PSP's processor instruction set being a superset of that supported by the PSX.

I don't know much about the popstation 'emulator', but I would expect a compatibility layer for mid-level graphics and sound calls. This isn't really 'emulation' - it's more a matter of providing an API that fulfils the same contracts as the original hardware. Naturally, undocumented behaviour or quirks might not supported, which may explain why certain games are hard to port.

There wouldn't really be much 'extra' processing required to intercept the hardware calls. Yes, the requests would be deferred through an abstraction layer, or some kind of memory sandbox mapping for low-level operations, but you shouldn't be doing anything _that_ 'intensive'.

And remember, even recompiling assembler can be performant if you cache generated procedures and do smart optimization / branch prediction etc. Just look at the JVM - Java applications are essentially "compiled" to a generic assembler for an 'idealized' processor architecture, then reinterpreted on the fly via the virtual machine. Java 1.0's naive implementation was pretty slow, but since hotspot speed has been mostly a non-issue.

105

Completely Unrelated / Re: So just got pokemon Y

« on: 2013-10-12 22:30:05 »

You people keep buying this shit, Game Freak will keep (re)making it.

106

FF7 Tools / Re: [Release v1.4.5] WallMarket KERNEL.BIN editor

« on: 2013-09-17 20:10:00 »

Some people have mentioned that they can fix the issue, and Gemini hinted it was to do with ISO manipulation tools. But I'm afraid he did not specify exactly why.

107

General Discussion / Re: Final Fantasy VII - The Web Series Shutting Down

« on: 2013-09-14 14:27:10 »

I have no sympathy for these people. This was stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

108

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: (FF7) "Count Up" Timer: Is this unused code?

« on: 2013-09-14 14:25:30 »

I can see an architectural rationale - perhaps the developer felt it would be best to have a single implementation in the kernel separate to any module.

109

Troubleshooting / Re: Magic Defense Equipment Bug PSX

« on: 2013-09-14 11:28:00 »

Search the forums. There's scores of threads on this.

110

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: (FF7) "Count Up" Timer: Is this unused code?

« on: 2013-09-14 00:29:18 »

Well if they called it a "countdown timer" then he would be fairly sure that's what they intended...

Even if a designer or business analyst tells you there's a constraint you can happily incur, you avoid it unless it's a problem. I can't even count the number of projects I've worked on where a 'cast iron guarantee' that this or that won't change has turned out anything but (though that's a grumble for another time...).

As for why it counts down constantly, hard to say. Perhaps it's just sloppy design.

111

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: (FF7) "Count Up" Timer: Is this unused code?

« on: 2013-09-13 16:11:52 »

Why would a developer make their code less flexible without good reason? How would the engineer in question be so sure the counter would always move down?

112

Troubleshooting / Re: Custom Magic and Materia

« on: 2013-09-01 16:33:24 »

I've done that, but it seems a lot of animations do jive well with characters. Mainly I was wondering if there was a more up to date list of which enemy animations are best suited for creating new materia.

Yes - you can see mine right here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avv5n_dvnE2jdFVMUEpqNm5jVFk3SUYwdnI4S1JXTlE#gid=0. I've annotated animations that I used for particular spells (though Rebirth cannibalizes a lot of cut player spells' animations for its water and wind magic).

Hit the 'obtaining' tab to see how to access a particular enemy animation index for a particular magic type.

113

Gameplay / Re: Making playable bosses

« on: 2013-08-20 20:00:03 »

Also, don't make assumptions like that about me, especially considering you're wrong on every single account.

No he's not.

If you had the technical expertise you seem to be claiming, you wouldn't be confusing disassembly for 'hex editing'. You'd be providing us a commit to Q-Gears or a reverse of a module.

You will need help to do this work (if only because this is not a single-person project); you aren't going to get that by acting uppity and defensive.

You might say it's not worth it, but I've seen at least one post on here talking about rewriting the game's script and story all for the sake of playing as a modded character, so I don't feel like my goal is that unrealistic.

Even that project is regarded as extremely ambitious. *I* certainly don't think it'll ever be released (though I have been wrong before).

Stuff like this is definitely the biggest hurdle. It does look like I can't avoid learning hex, which is bad because I'm completely new to it and kind of a slow learner. Any ideas where I can get a comprehensive guide for learning it? I've been looking around and there's a few guides here and there but it's all either assuming too much about what I know, or not relevant enough to how games are scripted.

There isn't a 'guide' to becoming a reverse engineer. Realistically, your steps are, at least, to:

1. Learn about the low-level implementation of computer programs, ideally by learning C
2. Learn how data structures and common flow control structures are implemented in assembly
3. Learn how Win32 x86 binaries are put together; how to debug them and how to use reversing tools
4. Read the Q-Gears source / community documentation around any element pertinent to your project
5. Learn some reversing heuristics, e.g. spotting types of compression, recognizing certain kinds of algorithms and control patterns

You're clearly willing to put the effort in, and that's a good sign to start with. However, becoming a reverse engineer is not like becoming a modeller or texture artist; it is effectively learning to become a programmer. That is a very different task.

Good luck, though.

114

Gameplay / Re: Making playable bosses

« on: 2013-08-19 19:29:31 »

I don't do graphics or modelling work, but I can still respond in the general case.

I've been thinking about making a party consisting of bosses but I'm not really sure how to approach this. Would it be easier to rewrite the script and force the game to load the bosses's models and animations in place of an existing character? Or, should I just replace a character's textures, skeleton, etc. with the bosses's? What are my limitations? It seems like either method has its problems.

You'd have to implement a new set of animations for the player characters. You would probably have to do some work on the models themselves. There aren't really many tools for this, so this project would require a fair bit of technical proficiency. You would have to learn how the animation scripts are built and possibly even do some reverse engineering yourself. If hex editing is something you'd rather avoid, and you don't have much prior technical experience (e.g. as a software developer), this might require a fair bit of learning.

One other thing. Assuming I wanted to do something like this for other rpgs that don't have a PC version to play with, how possible is it to import data into a PSX game? Is a script for importing data anything like one for exporting it?

Anything is possible with the magic of computers! But not necessarily trivial. Whilst the PSX version can be modded, you'll probably have to spend some time learning how the filesystem and lookups are put together. You certainly won't have any tools for doing the imports for you. It is 'harder' than the PC version, because it requires more knowledge about the platform, and because the PSX version has more constraints.

If my point isn't clear after all the elaboration that I did; the question is, simply, how do I make a boss playable, what do I have to consider, and what is the easiest method?

In summary -

To make a boss playable:

• Get the game to point to and render enemy models for party members
• Match up the animations for moves
• Maybe fix animations for being hit and casting spells?
• Fix any spell / move camera angles that no longer work with large models

What you have to consider:

• How much time you can commit
• How much technical knowledge you really want to learn
• How well the community has reversed the parts of the game pertaining to the things you want to modify

The easiest method:

• Work on the PC build
• Work in small steps towards realistic goals
• Find a good hex editor

115

Gameplay / Re: mod suggestion: mobile trabia garden

« on: 2013-08-18 23:30:04 »

I dunno, the story was pretty good in the first disc, before it completely fell apart. As long as all changes are from disc 2 onward, it can only be better though.

Hmm, true. I do have fond memories of those first few hours.

Makes me want to play VIII again, actually.

116

Gameplay / Re: mod suggestion: mobile trabia garden

« on: 2013-08-18 19:54:40 »

Mobile Trabia Garden would completely change the storyline though. and I really mean completely.

It couldn't make it any worse.

117

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7: Enemy AI checks party's elemental affinities

« on: 2013-08-11 23:50:54 »

@SegaChief - That script alone won't do the job. All it does is see if any enemies have an elemental defence of five or above for Earth, and if so, push that data into the targetmask. If the targetmask is not empty, the script outputs a message to the debug console (not visible to the player). The next part of the script immediately overwrites the targetmask for different logic (specifically pushing the identfier of Young Cloud for testing if he's KOed - "LocalVar:0020 <- 8" is passing the spell ID of Life2).

@Karifean - no problem. Come back if you have any further problems writing the logic.

118

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7: Enemy AI checks party's elemental affinities

« on: 2013-08-11 23:04:01 »

I think you misunderstand; I'm not telling you to copy-paste Sephiroth's AI script. I'm suggesting you should look at how it functions (it *does* work - the script just overwrites the target data later) and see if you can have another go at figuring it out yourself.

IIRC opcode 96 is the one that does the work - for any particular 'scan' it writes a defence modifier value into a member variable for each enemy you pass into it with a formation mask. You'd need to read the WallMarket opcode reference for more details, but I'm sure you get the gist of it.

119

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: FF7: Enemy AI checks party's elemental affinities

« on: 2013-08-11 21:38:07 »

I don't have WallMarket available right now, but you should be able to figure this out by looking at Sephiroth's Main AI script. I can't remember exactly what the element defence check actually looks at, though.

120

Completely Unrelated / Re: 100 Things you didn't know about FF7

« on: 2013-07-13 22:47:04 »

I knew most of these. Not all, but certainly most.

That's probably not a good thing.

121

Archive / Re: New Layout

« on: 2013-07-09 20:37:33 »

Tapatalk stuff is being added to the HTML before the Doctype (presumably the intercept message for mobile users). This _seems_ to be triggering a known bug with user agent stylesheets, such that the default text size for table content is being applied to the homepage.

I cannot fix this without access to the server.

122

General Discussion / Re: How to translate Final Fantasy X?

« on: 2013-07-02 19:00:51 »

Are you asking if it'll work? Try it and find out.

123

Completely Unrelated / Re: How to modify this code?

« on: 2013-06-23 17:00:26 »

Sounds like something that should be passed as parameters to a function.

124

Completely Unrelated / Re: Semi Public Confession Without Saying Anything Outright ;)

« on: 2013-06-23 16:59:26 »

I've read this four times, and I still have no idea what you're talking about. Are you announcing some kind of Cait Sith field model?

125

General Discussion / Re: Final Fantasy VII Rerelease thread

« on: 2013-06-23 16:56:45 »

I strongly dislike people who close or attempt to close threads online because they believe that just because they lost interest, that nobody else in the world with internet access will have any reason to read about it or add to it on a later date. Believe it or not, they still teach "History" in schools, and that information is much older than a year old.

[CleverNameHere] did not censure JBedford because he simply 'lost interest', but because the rules of this forum insist that old threads shouldn't be randomly bumped unless someone has something substantial to add.

As it seems you aren't very familiar with this forum's terms of use, I'd suggest you get to know them better before posting further.