New Feature Preview Topic

[Mion Sonozaki]

Here's your favorite cake ever:

[Griever]

  wrong cake i think. 

Spriting will be easier with the new feature ><
And Felix has way too many sprites 

[leaf]

Happy birthday atrius! Heh. Even on your birthday you manage to show off more editor awesomeness. Make sure you take a good break today. You deserve it!

[Charon]

Hey there, for my birthday I'm giving you a gift!

Let there be no more doubt what the big new feature for the next major release of the editor is going to be: sprite editing.  The functionality is extremely lacking still, but the interface for it is starting to take shape.

In the first image we see the redesigned sprite interface which will give us the additional access we'll need to do our editing.  We still have our nifty little sprite/animation preview panel from previous versions of the editor, but now we can also browse all of the individual sprites included in the set.  Among the options available here will be to import/export sprites as image files.  The next screen shot displays a basic graphics editing interface which will provide a way to make some changes without the trouble of going through the exporting/importing process.

This made me grin ear to ear. Keep up the good work! (wow, even on your birthday)

[Atrius (He/They)]

It's about time for a feature people have been wanting ever since they could edit items back in v0.1

What we have here is the shop editor so you can finally put all of those nice new items you've been crafting up for sale.  Before you ask, no this data isn't saved in the map's code where the shop is actually at.  So unfortunately you're stuck just guessing which entry is the shop you're looking to edit, right?  Wrong!

I present to you my latest breakthrough working with ASM code.  This new feature in the NPC editor scans their ASM scripts for certain function calls, and values relating to them in order to provide you with easy access to edit even more of the data NPC's use.  By clicking on the entry for the shop function we get the shop editing interface opened up to the specific entry that NPC uses!

[Aile~♥]

Yay! Shop editing!

Alsoalsoalso, artifact setting? That's the next thing after shop editing. So we can finally make all those cool rare items we've been making into Artifacts for sale at shops!

[Atrius (He/They)]

Speaking of artifacts, there's a behavior with shops concerning them that will likely confuse many people.

Because of the way that artifacts are handled (Being able to repurchase ones you've sold/dropped) the artifacts available at a shop are only loaded the first time you shop there.  Basically what this means is that if you talk to a shopkeeper, save, edit their artifacts, reload the game then try talking to them again the changes will not take effect.  You will only see the changes to their artifacts if it's the first time you've talked to that shop keeper with that save game.

[MaxiPower]

Love it :) My new Hydra Blade is gonna hit the shelves ASAP

also
Love the possible unintentional Commando line

And if you want your kid back, then you gotta co-operate, right?
Wrong! (blows face off with Shotgun)

[Atrius (He/They)]

Alright, so here we go, artifacts.  This data is how the game keeps track of which items can be re-bought in the artifacts section of a shop if you sell/drop them.  But wait... Somethings odd here, they're stored as multiple individual lists of items?  Well... Not exactly, but this is the best way I found to represent the way they're actually handled.  The original data only ever puts a single item into an artifact slot, but taking advantage of the way the artifact data is formatted you can actually put multiple items in a single slot creating a list of sorts.  This creates an interesting side effect in game.  Let's take this artifact list with the elemental stars, and play with that effect a little bit.

What, you're selling the Mars Star Felix?!!  No we need that to light the lighthouse!!!
Augh, too late he already did it...  Well, since it's an artifact now the shopkeeper will hold onto it for us so we can buy it back.

Okay Shopkeeper we'll take... Wait what, you have all four elemental stars available!?  But... A minute ago all you had was a Water of Life...  Ok, well Saturos already used our Mercury Star to light the lighthouse, but it'd be nice to have another one as a souvenir, we'll take that.

Now the Mars Sta-....  What do you mean you're out!!!  You had one just a second ago, the rest of the elemental stars too, where did they go!!!


So basically what happens is as far as Shopkeepers go all of the artifacts in a list are grouped together.  The amount you sell/drop/buy of any one artifact in a list will affect how many of ALL of the artifacts in that list the shopkeepers will have available.  In this example I could sell whichever elemental star I had to buy a different one, but I could only ever have 1 at a time.  If I were somehow able to get another elemental star and sold it as well the one I had before, I'd be able to buy any 2 back (even duplicates of the same one)


It should also be noted that you can only put an item in one artifact list.  Nothing can appear in multiple lists.

[Charon]

Felix should have known better than to sell that Mars Star! Regardless, keep up the good work Atrius. :3

[D2J]

-Sweet. Might Make Some New Weapons Snd Sell Em. Can You Tell Me If You Can Finally Edit Regular NCP Events(Add/Edit/Remove) In The Game???

[Aile~♥]

Umm... dude? This is the PREVIEW TOPIC. As in, the version of the editor that has those artifact features isn't out yet.

Also, you already can edit NPC events if you can find them in the map code. There's a hex editor for the map sections of the code, so you can mess around with that kind of stuff.

Also, PLEASE stop capitalizing the first letter of every word! It's really annoying.

[leaf]

Cool. So we could make like... some sort of tokens that you can trade in for new items?

Also, I hadn't thought about this before, but since I noticed that list goes over 256, does that mean we can have up to 4096 items in the game? Not that we'd ever need that many, of course.

[Hoopa]

This can actually make psynergy shops a viable option! Sweet! Can't wait til the next release Atrius, good work! Also, this means we could make a set of weapons in one artifact slot so that you can buy one but not the others? Like if you buy say weapon A, weapons B and C would become unavailable unless you dropped A, or got another of Weapon A some other way and sold that?

[Atrius (He/They)]

This is just artifacts.  There are 300 slots for them, that is the number of slots that exist for keeping track of them in memory & saved games, and no there is no way of increasing it.

The theoretical limit for items is 512 counting the empty slot at 0, so technically 511.


Whizkid, as far as shops are concerned they always have the same amount in stock of artifacts in the same list.  You cannot have item A available without items B & C also being available, likewise if A is unavailable neither are B & C.  The shop uses a single stock value to represent a list, if you buy any item in that list the stock value corresponding with it decreases by 1, likewise the value will increase if you sell/drop any item in that list.

[Atrius (He/They)]

I've been experimenting with some things for selecting animations for abilities since going blindly by number alone is pretty unbearable.



So we've got 2 more things now: Names of Abilities that currently use the animation, and a graphical snippet.  (Ignore the ASM on the right, it's just there for debugging purposes for how the editor figures out where to grab the graphical data from, and how to display it)

It's not perfect, but it took quite a bit of work to get even a graphical snippet like that.  As you can tell a lot of it is garbled, but there's at least something recognizable there thanks to a couple new ASM scanning tricks I implemented.  Unfortunately the ASM for some abilities is formatted in a way that either the graphics, or the data needed to display it recognizably can't be detected.  Still, when it does work it's better than just a number, right?

[leaf]

Much better than just a number.

Life Shear looks weird without those huge scissors. Actually... looking at the still like that, it sorta reminds me of Baiken from Guilty Gear.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Ah.. I happened to notice how part of the scarf she wears clips off the edge and shows up on the left... And with that, I somehow notice the garbled data might do that alittlebit as well.

Unfortunately the ASM for some abilities is formatted in a way that either the graphics, or the data needed to display it recognizably can't be detected.

I wonder how true that is... Surely there must be someway? I hope that you somehow have some luck with it.

[Atrius (He/They)]

The functions I wrote for detecting argument input to function calls can only do so much.  Once it can't figure out where a value is being loaded from, or what the input for part of a calculation done on the register is set to it can't reasonably try to backtrace it's value.  Not to mention the attacks that are basically just particle effects with no real graphics to begin with.

[Charon]

I have a quick question on that... would said particle effects be called as part of the image routine, or are they actually implemented as part of the routine? Like, when Jupiter, for example, is summoned, are these effects called from a particular routine or are they part of the routine, along with the actual djinni's swirling animation?

It'd be really, really cool if we could edit the particles' animations individually but that's practically impossible...