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Miscellaneous Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: nfitc1 on 2012-10-16 21:25:38

Title: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: nfitc1 on 2012-10-16 21:25:38
Ignoring the color scheme, this is a graphical representation of a string found in ff7.exe. It looks like it should be an image with a CLUT, but I can't find it so I made some colors up.

(http://imageshack.us/a/img526/7968/mysteryt.png)

It might look more like this in-game:

(http://imageshack.us/a/img543/9628/mysterysmall.png)


In case you're wondering, it's 4096 bytes long and 64x64 with values ranging from 30h - 38h which represents the characters 0 - 8 in ASCII.
0 - Black
1 - Grey
2 - Red
3 - Orange
4 - Yellow
5 - Green
6 - Purple
7 - Blue
8 - White

There are 12 other little blocks of text that look similar to this one (in range, not shapes). This one starts at 0x991F00.
Title: Re: Can anyone identify this?
Post by: Tenko Kuugen on 2012-10-16 21:28:08
Isn't the chance high that this is essentially dummy code?
ff7.exe is full of that, right?
Title: Re: Can anyone identify this?
Post by: nfitc1 on 2012-10-16 21:33:50
It looks like it's used by the submarine mini-game. That's what some of the debug text surrounding it indicates. It's possible it's some kind of explosion texture with the black being transparent.

EDIT:
Actually, I think I know what this might be. After looking at some of the others and watching a video or two on the sub minigame, I believe this is one of a number of randomly selected terrain maps. At least it's a part of one. I'm going to do this to the others tomorrow and compare them all. I'll do shades of blue though since it seems to be topographic.
Title: Re: Can anyone identify this?
Post by: Aali on 2012-10-16 21:43:23
Those are the maps for the submarine minigame.
It seems to be a heightmap in plaintext, probably inverted (8 - low elevation, 0 - high elevation).
Title: Re: Can anyone identify this?
Post by: nfitc1 on 2012-10-16 21:48:14
Those are the maps for the submarine minigame.
It seems to be a heightmap in plaintext, probably inverted (8 - low elevation, 0 - high elevation).

Yeah, you posted this while I was verifying this. Well, that solves that...
Title: Re: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: DLPB_ on 2012-10-16 22:17:51
Wow that's class!  I think I know which values you mean...  the massive list of 30's and so forth in the exe?  Is there an easy way to mod that so we can mod maps?
Title: Re: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: Vgr on 2012-10-17 00:37:41
Wow that's class!  I think I know which values you mean...  the massive list of 30's and so forth in the exe?  Is there an easy way to mod that so we can mod maps?

This should be really hard itself to do IMO, but there are textures applied to that as well, unless it's the radar map (it could be what's displayed on the radar map instead of the actual map, or it could be both).
Title: Re: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: nfitc1 on 2012-10-17 01:07:44
Wow that's class!  I think I know which values you mean...  the massive list of 30's and so forth in the exe?  Is there an easy way to mod that so we can mod maps?

I don't see why not. I was thinking of making a basic map viewer for it so an editor wouldn't be vastly different.

This should be really hard itself to do IMO, but there are textures applied to that as well, unless it's the radar map (it could be what's displayed on the radar map instead of the actual map, or it could be both).

I don't see any textures. They all look like gradients to me. If they are then it'd be easy to modify.
Title: Re: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: DLPB_ on 2012-10-17 02:59:11
How do the mine placement work?  Just random?
Title: Re: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: nfitc1 on 2012-10-17 14:51:04
How do the mine placement work?  Just random?

Possibly. It's not in the maps.

So I have images of all of them. There are 13 locations of maps in memory, but there are only 6 unique ones and one of which is completely unused. If I'm not mistaken, that means that the ones that are copies can be replaced and that frees up literally 4K per map for additional data for use for modding.

So according to my viewer:
0x981000 = 0x982004 = 0x994708 = 0x996F10 (yep, four identical maps)
0x983008 = 0x991F00
0x98400C = 0x98F6F8
0x985010 = 0x98CEF0
0x986014 = 0x98A6E8
0x9874F0 is unused

Removing those dups (as well as pointing their current pointers to a common map) and the unused one will free up 32K worth of space. It's not contiguous. :( Best you could get is removing 0x981000 - 0x987017 and getting 24K of contiguous space out of it.
Title: Re: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: Vgr on 2012-10-20 03:30:44
I don't see any textures. They all look like gradients to me. If they are then it'd be easy to modify.

I meant when you play, the underwater map is textured. It has to be.
Title: Re: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: DLPB_ on 2012-10-20 03:46:17
It doesn't....  it is drawn.  It is simple colours and wireframe.
Title: Re: [SOLVED] Can anyone identify this?
Post by: nfitc1 on 2012-10-20 03:56:27
Well I got a basic 3D rendering viewer of these maps, but the draw order is all off. I just wanted something basic at first. It could become a basic (sub)terrain editor if there's any need/desire for one.