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1

General Discussion / FFIX Hot & Cold / Confusing hole data

« on: 2020-10-19 16:56:43 »

I wanted to make the minigame easier, but all I managed was to hack the starting timer.

Before the mountain upgrade, the hole ID generated only seems to be from 0x01 to 0x08. The hole ID is stored at 0x80077E85. The game seems to use different sets of holes depending on how many items you've dug up so far.

I have no idea what I'm looking at, tbh. I tried editing the values, and I'm getting weird stuff like menus popping up, the timer freezing and teleporting chocobos when I hit the right spot to dig an item up. This data, with pointers, starts at 0x800FCC36.

Chocobo's Forest 1st item hole data

	00	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	0A	0B	0C	0D	0E	0F	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	1A	1B	1C	1D	1E	1F	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28
Hole 0x01	05	DD	2F	7D	01	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	08	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	01	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	00	00	2C	7F	01	48	01
Hole 0x02	05	DD	2F	7D	02	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	0A	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	02	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	00	00	2C	7F	01	1F	01
Hole 0x03	05	DD	2F	7D	03	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	0C	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	03	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	00	00	2C	7F	01	F6	00
Hole 0x04	05	DD	2F	7D	04	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	0E	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	04	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	00	00	2C	7F	01	CD	00
Hole 0x05	05	DD	2F	7D	05	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	10	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	05	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	00	00	2C	7F	01	A4	00
Hole 0x06	05	DD	2F	7D	06	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	12	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	06	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	00	00	2C	7F	01	7B	00
Hole 0x07	05	DD	2F	7D	07	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	14	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	07	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	00	00	2C	7F	01	52	00
Hole 0x08	05	DD	2F	7D	08	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	16	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	08	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	00	00	2C	7F	01	29	00
Hole 0x09	05	DD	2F	7D	09	00	17	7D	01	00	24	7F	02	17	00	05	DA	06	DA	18	2C	7F	05	D1	25	7D	09	00	2C	7F	05	D2	25	7D	01	00	2C	7F	01	00	00

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Releases / Re: [FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v1.4)

« on: 2017-03-26 22:32:50 »

Just wanted to drop that out there, but good job on the Quality of Life modifications. When making hacks, most people don't realize how important they are, but once you give it to them, they're like "WHOA! I can't believe no one thought of that before and I don't understand why it wasn't that way in the original game!"

I made a lot of hacks for FFT, and those are easily my most popular hacks. I mean, there's no reason to not want them.

• Cross Skip: hold cross and it flies through dialogue (I think your option to skip several portions of the story worked just fine)
• Smart Encounters: only get random battles when you want them
• 2nd squad is not mandatory
• Default option is "Continue" and not "New Game" (no memory card detection, but better than nothing)

Sure, I made really impressive stuff like a Synthesis Shop (link for those who care, v2 is way better but still being testing), but since it's a lot of trouble to think about all the items to synthesize, only 1-2 modders actually use it... (1 released and another mod still in development)

As someone who herself made a bunch of Quality of Life hacks, I really appreciate seeing someone else make efforts to do the same for their mod.
Even a tiny thing such as starting the game with an Enemy Away makes a world of difference for a lot of people, including me.
The Fort Condor teleport was brillant, though I was not impressed by all those consumable rewards. :p

Unfortunately, too many modders either just use the tools provided to make the game harder, or hackers have trouble thinking outside the box. It took years before someone else tried to create a QoL hack after I first did.

3

Releases / Re: [FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v1.4)

« on: 2017-03-20 14:46:34 »

Alright, so I can only describe this bug as strange.

In my tests, Aeris will always replace the party member you chose in your 3rd slot. If you send her left/up, and you head that way as well, that is. (That sounds dangerous if your party leader is in that slot)

Aeris will only bug and be on the left side of the screen, where she can't walk, if it's your second time descending and choosing who goes where, and NOT if Yuffie is your 3rd party member, but WILL bug and WILL be misplaced if it's Tifa.

It's a bit annoying to go through the whole thing every time since I don't have Save Anywhere, so I'll stop my testing here. I've never had such weird things happen to me while making FFT events, but FFT also doesn't handle main characters quite the same way in events.

4

Releases / Re: [FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v1.4)

« on: 2017-03-20 01:23:10 »

A bug list would've been nice, unless there actually was one all along.

Northern Crater:
- I tried to PHS at a save point with 2 characters and I could not exit because I did not select 3. Unfortunately, I attempted this before saving; that sucked.
- I exited the crater after figuring out I was unprepared for the boss of the path that I took. After going back down, I was lazy and just wanted to try out another boss, so I sent everyone the left path, then everyone the upper path, IIRC I chose Cloud/Tifa/Yuffie but Tifa left ahead, while Aeris was all the way over to the left side of the screen, stuck, running in place forever trying to reach me.

Question: Is it possible to steal rare items at lvl 99? I solved my "bosses have too many HP" problem by overleveling (really, what helped was leveling my limits and materias), and now trying to get everyone's better weapons, I find myself dealing with several hundred steal misses without a Sneak glove (I can't steal anything at ALL), and a hundred successful normal steals with the Sneak Glove (100% steal rate). For the record I was trying to steal some Dragon Armlets, but all I ever got were Tents (Crater Dragon) and Remedies (Parasites), and only if I had the Sneak Glove equipped. It seems like the only way I can fix this is to start over or cheat.

5

Releases / Re: [FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v1.4)

« on: 2017-03-10 05:21:52 »

No, those numbers are fine, and the length of the battle is about the same that I experienced. I was talking about Midgard, and that Tifa obviously had her rank-up towards attack.
Of course, Midgard has several bosses weak to poison, but other than those and the first two bosses (Airbuster's replacement was a joke and I always had trouble in vanilla, so the nerf was appreciated), they took a lengthy amount of time to kill.

Jenova in 8min at double speed, so 16min realtime... that's about what I experienced.

I used the IRO from this topic, but I doubt it matters at this point.

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Releases / Re: [FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v1.4)

« on: 2017-03-10 01:00:40 »

If bosses are taking too long to wear down, consider the following:
1) Sadness reduces damage by 30% but it tanks Limit Break output; fights can be a lot faster if you avoid using it and rely on Barriers to defend damage instead. Fury can sorta speed this up a bit more, but the reduced accuracy (30%) of other attacks can make this approach risky.
2) Haste/Slow can get you more turns, particularly on Wait ATB which is the best setting for the game's pacing (Active mangles a lot of the game's timers, making things like Barriers and Speed almost useless); Shiva can inflict it 100% of the time, assuming the enemy can have the status.
3) Back Row reduces damage by 50%, but it also reduces physical attack damage; I'd recommend having physical hitters up front with Elemental + Magic in their weapon to hit 2x damage.
4) Sense can reveal a boss' elemental weaknesses; Holy can be used by combining Restore/Revive with Elemental in the weapon (the element was applied to those Materia in NT).

Unfortunately, that's preeetty much what I've been doing.
Survivability has never been an issue, so I've always been using Fury to spam limits that have always been remarkably weak... it takes a lot of limits at 200ish damage to take out a boss with 5000HP... that eventually heals for 1000HP. IIRC, the final boss before leaving midgard took me about 15 minutes to kill, while the robots after stealing Rufus' shotgun took me about 25min. Bottomswell took me a good 15min too... WITH poison. I haven't game over yet, unless it was intentional (to study a boss). But every boss so far has cost me so many ethers (well, 1-2 per boss) and so much time! I mean, if I can survive, well, I can survive and would be able to continue doing so for well over an hour per boss. I just don't see the point of making battles last so long when it's already been determined that I can dish out many attacks/spells/limits while keeping my party alive. I've actually been wondering if I'm supposed to be grinding lvl3 limits on everyone early game so that boss fights don't last quite as long.

This is seriously my only complaint with the mod, I love so many changes otherwise; free healing after bosses, save points at convenient locations, Fort Condor teleport and revised rewards? Yes, yes yes!

[Spoiler:]

7

Releases / Re: [FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v1.4)

« on: 2017-03-09 21:07:36 »

So, I started playing your mod and am not that far yet; I just reached Costa Del Sol and I think bosses take a ridiculous amount of time to kill because of their massive HP amounts, but otherwise, the mod has been hilarious and I can respect/enjoy most changes.

Spoiler: show

I never expected that awesome extra dialogue for climbing the Shinra building the hard way. And that battery... facepalms.

I will have to request that you make the changelog public; I originally downloaded the IRO version, and to get the changelog I had to download and extract the zip on a remote server (I have a monthly data cap) just to get a 47kb file.

Speaking of the changelog:

\\Cargo Ship//

Shop Inventory
-) The sailor's shop inventory was adjusted for the upcoming boss fight with Jenova.

He was only selling Potions and Phoenix Downs

\\Junon//
Send-Off Minigame
-) The prizes have been changed here as well, with a HP Plus no longer being available.
   The top prize (120+) is now a Mastered 'Enemy Away' Materia, with 2nd Prize being
   a Rune Armlet. There is no longer a consolation prize.

At 150 points, I received a Rune Armlet. Which is really good at that point in the game. I'm guessing this information is simply outdated rather than outright wrong.


I also encountered some glitches with Fort Condor:

• My first time there, there was a guy standing outside, impossible to interact with
• Talking to the Teleport guy my first time there prevented me from exiting the Fort. I had to climb the rope back up and then back down to be able to leave

Spoiler: show

And a random glitch where the Curator is impossible to speak to. I originally challenged the thing, lost, and then I wanted to find more about it and wanted to know its name to google it; but after being defeated I couldn't do so. Without saving, I reloaded my previous save and try to battle it again to no avail.

Keep up the good work!

8

Gameplay / [FF7-Steam] Encounter Rate adjustment

« on: 2016-03-16 12:43:19 »

Dedicated to my wife who hates random battles with a passion~
With this, you can adjust the encounter rate to be anywhere between 0 and 7 15/16th times what it is in the original version.

I might do this for the PSX version too if I can find where the hell I put my FF7 images and if there is demand (I'm a lot more used to hacking PSX games so this would hardly be an issue).

For the Steam version: (hex edit the values at the given addresses in ff7_en.exe)

Active Encounter Rate (Cheat Engine address, 0x00-0xFF)
FF7_EN.exe+9BCAD9

Base Encounter Rate (0x00-0x7F, normally 0x10)
0x1CA644
0x1CA658

Min Enemy Away (0x00-0x7F, normally 0x02)
0x1CA650

Max Enemy Lure (0x00-0x7F, normally 0x20)
0x1CA66B
0x1CA67F   
0x1CA688
0x1CA692

9

Gameplay / Re: FF8 Events

« on: 2015-09-19 12:57:15 »

Oh gosh, sorry, I feel like such a moron for apparently not reading the entirety of your post.

And as you can see from the screenshots my last post, I was successful in "reverting" that party dream world thing. I figured it wasn't necessary to revert the main menu's display, as only the junction/magic exchange screen need to show the passive characters. It was fairly simple, it's one of the many features of the dream world flag, and I just had to disable that (disabling the entire flag itself makes the game crash pretty quickly :p). That's why I used strikethrough on that edit: it wasn't relevant anymore.

You say it's just little endian (off course it is, it's a PSX game), but 0x007 PSHN L, with let's say a value of 3, is 03 00 00 07 unlike 0x128 RESETGF like I said which is 28 01 00 00. That's why I said it was confusing, the identifier isn't in the same place at all just because there's an argument, I'm suspecting. For the record, I prefer editing things live, because it is unbelievably faster to test than to open a program, edit, compile, restart the game (or at least reload the field).

Now I just need to somehow find all the pre/during dream world scripts and I should be good to go. Took me two minutes to find the first one hahaha, this is going to take a while.

EDIT: Derp, I just realized I can just memory search the Map ID.

10

Gameplay / Re: FF8 Events

« on: 2015-09-19 06:22:25 »

Thank you Shard, that looks exactly what I'm looking for.

Sadly, this documentation is all very confusing to me. I just can't find anything about the byte structure of these "opcodes".
It says they are 4 bytes, so what, dying would be 45 01 00 00? Or 00 00 45 01?
I read about the JSM file format, but I can't find any JSM files. Granted, I am very new to FF8 modding, I thought the program called Garden would help, but it refuses to work for me (at least refuses with the steam version).

All I know so far is that Quistis has her junctions removed -twice- before the first dream... so yay, 2 instructions as culprits.

EDIT: Still confused about the format, but at least I know that RESET GF is 28 01 00 00 and one of the culprits. Changing Junction to 03 instead of 01 does not seem to do anything (to help me in this situation). Doing all this and I'll have no idea how to make a patch afterwards lol.

EDIT2: I removed the routine that Resets junctions under JUNCTION, but now while Quistis still as her GFs equipped, they are also available to pick by Laguna/Kiros/Ward. Which is okay since I want Quistis to be in the passive party anyway; does anyone have any idea how in the dream world, party members are kicked out while remaining "Active"?

EDIT3: (Kinda forgot about magic exchange 8D)

11

Gameplay / Re: FF8 Events

« on: 2015-09-18 18:19:24 »

Ah! That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!
I've seen the first page you linked, but basically just skimmed through it and didn't even see that last section with the "opcodes".

I just hope I can manage all this, I have a lot of experience hacking FFT, but this might end up being far more troublesome than I thought. We'll see.

12

Gameplay / FF8 Events

« on: 2015-09-18 16:37:57 »

Hello,

I'm extremely familiar with FFT events, as you can see from all this information I compiled: http://ffhacktics.com/wiki/Event_Instructions

My goal? Removing the "Junction remove" before/during/after Laguna dreams. Which from what I investigated yesterday, is actually characters being kicked out of the active/passive party, and thus have their GF and all their junctions removed. So I'd like to find out that instruction and play with it... I'm thinking that ideally, I'd want "present" characters to still be available for junction-switching, so it allows you to have access to all your GFs/magic without destroying your carefully set junctions.

Does anyone have any information about FF8's events? I want to edit the steam version, but debugging the PSX version would be so much easier, so knowing the event data offset in RAM for PSX would be awesome.

13

Releases / Re: The Reunion [IN PROGRESS]

« on: 2013-07-11 16:41:34 »

I was just wondering about the inconsistency of the commas in the game text you've been citing; it seems the majority of the commas have no space after them, but every 12th one or so does have a space following it. That's really my only criticism, and may be something you're aware of already.