Messages

1

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: [FF8] Viewing and Changing Rare Card Holder

« on: 2021-01-31 23:54:33 »

The rare cards all have numbers for which deck they're in (eg. 1 is the queen's deck, 240 is the player's deck), and when you start a card game ("cardgame" in the field script) it passes in the deck number for the opponent to use.

You can use "setcard" in the field to move them between decks, "getcard" to award them to the player, or "givecard" in a monster AI script to have them drop in battle.

2

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Re: [FF8R] Draw Points

« on: 2020-10-22 10:35:19 »

Made some progress, the file it's using is FFVIII_EN.exe.dat (which is just a second copy of FF8_EN.exe.dat, so I was kinda right ). It gets unpacked & executed by something called a WEEP emulator. The first 256 bytes are clear so it can read the headers & then there are chunks of zlib compressed data but I'm not sure where the boundaries are yet.

3

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / [FF8R] Draw Points

« on: 2020-10-14 16:37:32 »

I'm trying to update my FF8 randomizer project to work with the Remastered edition and it's been mostly straightforward but the one thing I can't figure out is draw points. In the regular Steam version of the game, the contents of every draw point were stored in a nice tidy block in the main exe file:



eg. the first byte is 0x55 = 0 1 010101
= 0 (normal yield) 1 (renewable) 010101 (spell 21 = cure)
= the cure draw point outside Balamb Garden

Now when I play the remaster, the same data is in memory & it's used the same way...



...But I can't find where that came from on disk. I suspect it's being reconstructed from "ff8_en.exe.dat" in the main zzz archive, just based on the name, but it doesn't resemble the original file at all. Does anyone know how this works?

I do have a backup plan if I can't find it - just going through the field archive changing all the drawpoint calls - but then I'd be limited to the existing set of spells (no Apocalypse, Rapture, etc.) & the patching would take a bit longer. So if this sounds like a pain to deal with don't worry about it, but I would be super grateful for any help. Thanks!