Item Stat Editing

[RockBassGuitar]

I'm in the process of making a simple mod, nothing fancy; no graphical upgrades or new monsters.  All I've done so far increase the amount of AP monsters give you so you don't have to spend hours leveling up materia.  I was curious if anyone knew how to edit Weapon/Item stats (i.e. Materia growth, Attack, Hit Percentage, etc.) and if anyone knew how to change the number of slots available on any particular weapon.  I've done some searching, but to no avail, for an editor or for some information on weapons and items.  If anyone has any research or infomation on this, please let me know.  Thanks.

[gjoerulv]

http://wiki.qhimm.com/FF7/Kernel/Kernel.bin

This is a link to FF7's Kernel info. All your requests can be done by editing the kernel. But you need to decompress the files 1st. There is a program available for compression/decompression (don't remember where. Try searching for "decompress kernel.bin" or something). However I don't think there are any programs for the editing itself. You'll have to do it manually by a hex editor.

[RockBassGuitar]

Do you know how I decompress the kernel?  If I simply open it in a hex editor, none of the values match the wiki information.  I'm at a loss otherwise.

[TTK_86]

http://spinningcone.com/ff/stormmedia/projects/ff7_gzip.zip download this program, it allows you to decompress and compress kernel.bin. when decompressed, open the file you want to edit with hex-editor...and remember file count starts at 0(at qhimm wiki it starts with 1) so if you want to edit weapons the file you need to edit would be kernel.bin5 . Happy editing  more info can be found here http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=6621.0   offtopic: gjoerulv, you have done amazing job with the new monsters, i hope to see more things like that in the future...



Edit: oh, and remember to backup your original files 

[RockBassGuitar]

I got the decompression to work and edited Kernel bins 5 and 6 (weapons and armor).  But I had some issues with trying to compress the files once again.  The first time I tried, I found that it would crash the command prompt because the Kernel.bin was in the folder in a Read-Only state.  So I tried removing the file (Kernel.bin) from the folder and when I ran the ff7dec e kernel.bin, it created a file that was only 1 kb long.  So I tried the same thing, but with having the Kernel.bin in the folder and not set as read-only, only to have the same thing happen.  Do you know what I'm doing wrong that is causing the program to not actually compress the files?  I haven't renamed any of them, so it should have any problem knowing which files to compress.  I'm at a loss.

[TTK_86]

Well, i hope you remembered to back up, because those bin files are not going to work. What you need to do now is to restore your backup-files(i hope you have edited backups of kernel.bin5 and 6 too, or you have do the whole thing again). Explanation is simple, if you already have a kernel.bin in the same folder where you are trying to compress the kernel.bin thats a crash. So, remove the kernel.bin in your directory before compressing. This happened to me once too and i had exactly same problems(and i didn't backup those files i edited, so i had to do the whole thing again  )

[RockBassGuitar]

Yeah, I got back-ups of the files.  I'll try it and see what I come up with.  I don't know if there will be a difference.  If you change the values in the kernel do you need to edit something else to bring a check-sum value back to normal?  I was wondering if maybe that was my problem.  Do these files even have check-sums?

[RockBassGuitar]

You know, it's always the simplest things that we overlook.  That was the problem.  When I was moving files around in the folder, I didn't notice that the kernel.bin was still there once the file was decrypted, so that was indeed why it was crashing.  But I had my first successful weapon mod that I was able to encrypt back into the kernel.bin.  Thanks for your help, I do appreciate it.

[TTK_86]

You're welcome. I don't know does the kernel.bin have checksums, propably not, because I've been messing around with it for so long and it still works . I just think it has unique headers , and thats why we need ff7dec. But if you are going to mod some more and like to change scene.bin(where the enemy data is stored), then you need a program that will update things in the kernel.bin. I recommend to download hojo for that http://www.ffheaven.fr/projects/Hojo 1.0.zip , you don't need to uncompress scene.bin yourself and it updates the kernel.bin too