The initial information for this is from
this topic. I think I should make a new one so I don't steal too much of Gingercat's thunder.
Pictures are now up in the release topic on the Game Tweaking board..
9-25: Still have to populate dropdowns (probably tomorrow) before I try to open files. That's WAY more fun than putting all those check boxes and text boxes on the window. Ugh. Talk about Eye strain!
9-26: Finished first draft of Attacks Menu!
Currently showing Freeze. You can notice a few things about it already:-The number under the "Inflict Status" box indicates it's percentage chance of hitting. Haven't found how significant this number is yet
-Even though Freeze's damage type is single target, it has separate animations for single and multiple enemies. Sephiroth can cast it in such a way that it hits all enemies at once.
-Impact Sound is ALWAYS "FFFF" for all attacks in this file. Possibly this is not really sound?
-Times Attacking is always 255 if it's a single hit. Only changes if more than one hit. KotR is 13 hit so I know that's working too. :)
Finished the Reading part of the Weapon and Item sections as well. One of the unknowns on the weapons I MAY have identified.
-0x26 is 05 for all normal range weapons and 2F for all long range weapons with one exception. Barret's Pile Banger is long range and has a value of 05. This refers to sounds of the weapon when it hits, criticals, and misses like I initially suspected and confirmed by LKM below.
And I still don't know what exactly what 0x05 is. Wiki says it's Status attack bit. Could some weapons, at some time, be able to do certain status effects? Maybe it's only an in-battle thing. Not sure. Armor is now done too. Nothing special learned here except Four Slots is somehow "special" compared to the others. Think I'm done for the day. Opening Accessories, and Materia are all that's left before I release this as a beta.
9-28: Officially finished the Accessories tab on Saturday, but didn't update until today.
Materia tab is getting close to being done. Maybe by Monday I'll start requesting beta testers before I begin
writing files.
Phase I is complete and ready to be beta tested. Please PM me your email address if you'd like to help. I'll have to write up some simple command documentation, but I'll be able to do that Monday morning (I hope).
9-29: After a rough start Phase II is underway. What's this mean? The Attack information is now successfully being saved BACK to the KERNEL.BIN1 file and being re-encoded into the KERNEL.BIN file!! The rest is just a matter of time. So phase II beta testing will begin probably by the end of the week if I get enough time to finish the remaining tabs.
I also added the information of the command tab into generic text boxes so nothing to manipulate yet. Just there to observe and see what makes the commands special. (see latest post for more information)
9-30: I've been looking at the weapon/armor/accessory data in the wiki and I think I have an idea for the restriction mask for these. They don't mean usable in battle or appears in battle or whatnot. Rather, it's FE if it can be sold and FF if it cannot. The ONLY objects among the weapons, armors, and accessories that are FF are the Buster Sword, Gatling Gun, and Masamune. These are not sellable. All the other objects are FE and none of them can be used in battle, but they all appear in the battle menu.
Phase II is so mind-numbingly tedious. It's making sure all those little boxes and drop downs are changing the data they should be changing and accounting for things like if they're in hex or not or whether they're too large. Still, I'm done with the Items and Weapons now as well. This is a mighty big if, but IF I can keep this pace up Phase II might be completed later today. (cross your fingers)
PHASE II IS COMPELTE!! I have successfully written/read, modifications to/from the kernel.bin file! This is now ready to undergo in-game testing to make sure all the values are correct. I already have an idea on how to test some of the materia, but I need people now to test other things too. Again, PM me with your email address if you wish to test this. Slight disclaimer: Names do not appear yet. That's Phase III since it's so different from the other methods. I'm not sure how long that will take. I also can't guarantee that I will be able to email you tonight, but I will by the end of the day tomorrow. I might have the time to, I might not. Just be patient. :)
I also took the pictures down because they are now grossly inaccurate. I'll try to put up new pictures soon.
I just performed my own small, and successful I might add, test on changing the Added Cut and Steal As Well Materias from 2-stars to 5-stars. Unfortunately, it didn't perform they way I thought it would. I thought that the Materia Type set to 0x35 would make it perform that action X number of times depending on the level. Unfortunately it attempted to steal each time. So I'm still at a loss as the difference between type 0x25 and type 0x35. Or maybe it's that action 0x5D takes no parameters and just does it every time. So 0x35 is still an unknown if it's different from 0x25.
10-1: Phase III is looking promising. I'm able to read names of attacks based on the kernel.bin18 file. This, however, gives me a little bit of bad news. Not all the attacks are in the kernel.bin1 file. Only 128 are stored in there. That includes (in this order) Magics, Summons, E.Skills, "Extra" Summons (Fat Chocobo, Gunge Lance), Tifa's Limits, Cait Sith's limits, Vincent's Limits, and Braver. Where are the rest of the limits? This seems to be the only question at the moment. I'd like the answer as well. Maybe ff7dec doesn't open it all?
PHASE III IS COMPLETE!!! And it only took about 3 hours! Should have taken less, but I kept screwing up. :) Now that this is done, nothing is left except to test it all (and I need much help with this) and fill in the missing data.
Phase III consisted of reading the names and pairing them with their appropriate entries. Without indexes, it can be reasonably assumed that the data and the names are, at least, in the same order. With some small discrepancies in the Attack and Materia names. This seems to be the case as the weapons, armor, and accessories match up perfectly and they're easy enough to tell apart based on stats. Phase IV (if there is demand of it) will be to make the interface more pleasing. Adding some FF7-related pictures or whatnot. Also, I'd still like to add the raw data at the bottom like I mentioned below. Not necessary, but would be nice. Still trying to find out the best way to do that.
Structurally, this is program is no different from Phase II. It does NO writing to the entries with the names, just reading. Again, this is in compliance with the goal of PC/PSX independence. As long as a US KERNEL.BIN is being opened, it will read the names properly.
PLEASE! PLEASE!! PLEASE!!! PM me and request to test this. I believe it is finished, but any/all bugs need to be squashed.
I'm fed up with ff7dec since it's not working properly in probably 90% of my tests. Therefore I'm just going to run the gunzip/gzip executables myself. I looked into actually getting a gzip library, but the cheapest one is still $50 and I doubt I'll ever need it outside of this program again. So I'm going to have to re-write it slightly to eliminate some of the annoying issues I'm coming up with. It'll give me something to do tomorrow at least.
10-2:
I have rid the dependency on ff7dec since it wasn't performing how I wanted it. At the same time, it was dependent on gunzip, gzip, and the dll it came with. So now Wall Market is only dependent on gzip and comdlg32.ocx.
Made a update to Reply #10. Check it out. Pretty interesting.
10-3: I'm getting tired of seeing the same Visual Studio 6 standard executable icon for this. Maybe I should make it the Hi-Res cross-dressing Cloud? Heh, that'd be great. I hope that everyone who reads the updates on this post also checks out Reply #10 as I have quite a few discoveries listed there. One I just made yesterday and I think I nailed the question about flag 0x10 I had when I discovered it.
One byte of previously unknown piece of data for items identified. Commands have now been split up appropriately and their names have been added.
I also cleaned up the GUI significantly (pics to be updated soon). Things aren't just randomly thrown about now. They're a little more structured than they were. It's mostly for the tabbing purposes, though. I'm trying to keep similar things in the same relative positions.
I think
Phase IV is now complete. However, since this doesn't change anything functionally and it will continue to be updated as new information is discovered, I won't call it significant. I dare not speak of Phase V which I also planned since the beginning. I don't
think it's impossible, but I don't want to try it just to have it fail on me.
Once again discovered that the wiki is inaccurate. The files in the kernel are not numbered higher than 9. Every segment from Command descriptions to Summon Attack names has a file number of 9. I didn't know this until I started testing my kernels. When they all failed I noticed this. I fixed it and they work fine now. :) That and after al the files are concatenated together it ends in 0x0, 0x0.
10-7:
Haven't had anything to report recently because nothing new has happened. Mostly I'm just finalizing the way every thing looks. Started writing a chm for this yesterday and made a new discovery or two (see Reply #10 again). This is getting so close to becoming release I can almost taste it.
Added the "bling" I wanted so now it's ready to be released. I need a host to put it on so I'll take recommendations. The entire package is zipped and is 450,297 Bytes in size.
I had to remove the "New Game" and "Battle & Growth" tabs because I concluded that there is too much information to put in that window size. I may go back and make other programs to modify those, but Wall Market will likely not do that.
10-8:
Less than two weeks from
birth to conception. Now ready for initial public consumption. Enjoy and leave feedback
here from now on.
Drop-down menus are populated at run-time. Probably only reading information will be implemented in the first release.
Command data doesn't exist yet on the wiki and Battle & Growth and New Game info are SO long I may end up writing those differently than in tabs (separately or in a different window I'm not sure yet).
I'd like to have a grid below the frames that displays the item's raw data to show what's happening, highlighting things as they change. If you've seen FF3USME, it's the same idea. Once the prog actually works I'll play with this idea.
I hope I can have a working beta (read, but not write) by October 1st, but we'll see. It may be more complicated than that. It's actually coming together exceedingly well. MUCH easier than I had originally thought. Doesn't look like writing files will take any more time than creating the interface up to this point. Maybe functional beta by end of first week of October. Well what do you know? Phase I to Phase III by October 1st! Am I good or what?
Once everything can be read correctly I'm going to update these pictures with information on certain objects of interest so people can see this actually does work.
The information is all based on Qhimm's wiki so some things will have gaps where they either did not test or did not know.
