News:

The forum has been updated to SMF (2.1.3)!
Please be patient as we work to polish up the place and update features as we can.

Main Menu

New Feature Preview Topic

Started by Atrius, 30, October, 2008, 02:50:00 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

MaxiPower

licks lips.... @ something Big

When the text editor arrives lol it will be so useful  

Rolina

Out of curiosity, is the Djinn data compressed as well?  I'm sure it'd help to edit the stat boosts that djinn give you.  It'd also help to create and rebalance djinn.

Oh, and summons?  It'd be quite helpful to have an editor for those.  Either that, or to have a way to edit the HP% damage and standby djinn cost that summons have?

And... forgive me for asking so much, but... would it be possible to have an effect and/or ailment editor?  I'd love to implement my Sap/Siphon, Disease/Plague, and several other ailments.

I'm not really asking that these necessarily be in the next one, but rather, I'm asking how easy or hard you think that adding these would be.

This post has been edited by Role on Sep 25 2009, 01:31 AM

Atrius (He/Him)

Djinn & Summon editors are probably easy enough to manage.  I *think* I know where the data is for how many standby djinn it takes to summon, but I haven't taken the time to locate Djinn stat increases yet.

If I had to guess I'd say that Effect/Ailment's are most likely coded into the game, but I haven't checked for sure yet.
[sprite=220,4,0]I'm shaking my head in general disapproval of everything[/sprite]

Charon

This is a minor suggestion, but it would be really useful on my part if you could put pointers extracted from the rom which point to various datas in the interface, so people like myself wouldn't have to search for them.

For example, say you load a sprite. It would be very useful if you could place pointers to information such as where the image is located and where it's animation data is, so that curious people such as myself can meddle with it.

I think this would be most useful with the to-be text editor, the map viewer and the sprite viewer.

Atrius (He/Him)

Text, maps, and sprites are all compressed though, trying to edit them in a meaningful way with a hex editor would be extremely difficult.

Though, I have a feeling you'll like the big new feature  
[sprite=220,4,0]I'm shaking my head in general disapproval of everything[/sprite]

Cerulyth

This is slightly off-topic, but what compression scheme does Golden Sun use?

Aile~♥

I haven't tested it myself, but I've heard that it has a unique compression scheme. Perhaps other Camelot games have it too, but it's still a pain to work with.
[sprite=16, 6, 0]:P[/sprite]

Lloyd: Easy as pie.
Genis: Sweet!
Presea: ...Sweetie pie...
Zelos: Let's not start on this again...

[spoiler=epic mindscrew][/spoiler]

Charon

Quote from: Atrius on 25, September, 2009, 11:07:00 PMText, maps, and sprites are all compressed though, trying to edit them in a meaningful way with a hex editor would be extremely difficult.

Though, I have a feeling you'll like the big new feature  
AUGUA xD

Actually, all I really wanted was kind of a pointer to such data, so that I could repoint it. This could be especially useful for the sprite editing...

For the Sprite table, I located it, and I followed the pointer to the Bat's sprite... and I was wondering if the pointer the pointer in the sprite table leads directly to the sprite or something else, because I'm going to experiment with sprite editing.

In other news - songs with intros are unbelievably annoying to insert!

Aile~♥

Speaking of music insertion... Dialga/Palkia Battle at Spear Pillar Brawl Remix FTW!!!
[sprite=16, 6, 0]:P[/sprite]

Lloyd: Easy as pie.
Genis: Sweet!
Presea: ...Sweetie pie...
Zelos: Let's not start on this again...

[spoiler=epic mindscrew][/spoiler]

Atrius (He/Him)

All of Camelots games for the GBA at least seem to use them.

The compression schemes have similarities to LZ77, but are more complex.  One of the sprite compression formats is nearly identical to the LZ77 format that the GBA's bios can decompress, except that it allows a larger number of duplicate bytes to be encoded at a time.
[sprite=220,4,0]I'm shaking my head in general disapproval of everything[/sprite]

Rolina

Quote from: Charon on 26, September, 2009, 08:57:00 PMIn other news - songs with intros are unbelievably annoying to insert!
I can imagine!  That's something that I've always wondered about... I mean, it's been in existence since the NES era, so it's not uber complex, but still, I've not seen a single music program that can play them...  The best you can do is to play the song, and use the [A <-> B] repeat feature with PERFECT TIMING to simulate it...

I've always wondered how they put it in games...  Can't be easy...

Atrius (He/Him)

Continued from the old topic

Happy 1st year anniversary, GS TLA Editor!

Exactly 1 year ago today the first version of the editor was released.  To celebrate, I'm revealing the big new feature for version 0.3 that I hinted about a while back.

The way some of GS TLA's data is arranged is very peculiar, yet very helpful at the same time.  At the end of the ROM file there is a large array containing various types of data ranging from graphics, to the games code itself.  The new feature of the editor will allow you to browse through all of this data.

It's still in very early stages of development, so it will likely be improved before version 0.3 is released.


Viewing a palette for a map


A tileset, eventually you'll be able to load palettes with them so they aren't just black & white.


A menu graphic


A graphic for one of the Pierrot classes attacks.  Despite not knowing what this was the data browser managed to identify at as being compressed, and decompressed it for us, how nice of it.  Using the image viewing mode we can see the actual graphic.


Using the Hex option (which will eventually be a full fledged hex editor) on the data browser we see some unidentified data here.  To the untrained eye it just looks like a bunch of gibberish, but to me this looks a lot like map data, and that makes sense considering what it's surrounded by.  The interesting thing though, is that the editor couldn't identify it as map data which means it isn't actually used in the game at all.  Mmm...  I do believe the unidentified data below it looks a lot like palette, and tileset data that isn't used at all either.  Looks like despite having a map viewer, we still haven't seen all of the maps hidden away in TLA's data.



Also you may notice a value on the top bar of the editor, "1159.57Kb" or something around there.  You may have also noticed that this was present in v0.2, but always read "0Kb"  Well, now that the automatic repointing system (which assists in the editing of compressed data, ensuring it doesn't accidentally overwrite other data in the game) is finished and working, it keeps track of the amount of empty space in the ROM it has to work with.  Golden Sun TLA in fact has 1159.57Kb of detectable empty space to work with, in contrast the original Golden Sun only has 67.36Kb.
[sprite=220,4,0]I'm shaking my head in general disapproval of everything[/sprite]

Sajin

Wow, very nice Atrius! Your programming skills are simply amazing.
All this data is very interesting to view even if it isn't possible to edit it yet. Unused maps, palettes, sprites, who knows what lays hidden in Golden Sun...
Can't wait for 0.3!

Ehic

That awesome. I can't wait to see what can be done once this all editable.

Aile~♥

@Atrius: That picture you said wasn't used? That particular piece of artwork IS used. It's the card from the Perriot's Frost Card Psynergy.
[sprite=16, 6, 0]:P[/sprite]

Lloyd: Easy as pie.
Genis: Sweet!
Presea: ...Sweetie pie...
Zelos: Let's not start on this again...

[spoiler=epic mindscrew][/spoiler]

Atrius (He/Him)

[sprite=220,4,0]I'm shaking my head in general disapproval of everything[/sprite]

Sajin

Now that Jamie says, it is the Frost Card psynergy graphic I think.
In game it doesn't look that way if I reckon correctly...Or does it?
I never used much the Pierrot classes, only at the beginning to fight the chestbeaters so I'm not really sure.

Atrius (He/Him)

It is surrounded by graphics for other attack animations.
[sprite=220,4,0]I'm shaking my head in general disapproval of everything[/sprite]

MaxiPower

Excellent work, great to see your still making great progress, you
willing to share any more secrets on what you been working on for this
historic day hehehe

+ Over 9000 thumbs up for this topic

Atrius (He/Him)

I believe I've worked all the bugs out of text editing.  It'll still complain about letter combinations the compression tables in the game don't like, which is really annoying sometimes.  I imagine it would make doing any type of translation work extremely difficult.  It may be a while before those compression tables can be rewritten.

I've located how playable characters battle sprites are set.

I'm currently working on an LZ77 compression algorithm that I should be able to alter to work with some of the compression schemes the game uses.
[sprite=220,4,0]I'm shaking my head in general disapproval of everything[/sprite]