Tales of Phantasia SNES (Enhancement) (Slow WIP)

[justin3009]

SO MANY NAME VARIATIONS >_<

Yeah, he's going to be definitely playable in the SNES version, which is this one.

[bradzx]

SO MANY NAME VARIATIONS >_<

Yeah, he's going to be definitely playable in the SNES version, which is this one.

Why not make a vote?

Sweet.  Can't wait to see it.

[KingMike]

Here's explanation on Kangaroo

I prefer Brambert, honestly, but Brambard works too.

Oh and I thought it was

Spoiler

Arche who became a statue, not Mint

[close]

Spoiler

It was Mint who volunteered to be the sacrifice when Cless made the deal. Or maybe the witch chose Mint, I can't remember that detail. As the witch is casting the spell on Mint, Arche runs into to take the hit, screaming something like "oh why do you care who it is anyways?"

[close]

[Carnivol]

On the Brambard name; I was always under the impression that it was Brambard, or at least "-bard" for the last bit, with Bard originating from Tolkien's Middle-Earth character Bard the Bowman. Additional quinkydinks to support this is how Brambard, as a playable character, seemingly got replaced by Bowman the Bowshooter (later renamed Chester).

[justin3009]

Brambard will probably be the name then.  Makes the most sense apparently in all context.



Minor update!  Status screen now displays the characters last name AND it syncs it up with their first so there's no more awkward gap.  Only appears on the status screen too :3

It basically meshes two routines together to do this and it works quite beautifully!  Status screen's basics are essentially done then   Item names and such will be the final thing I do as I have no clue how I'm going to get that to work appropriately.

[FlamePurge]

Are the 8x8 numbers sometimes shown in their thin forms that I once drew? Or are they always thick like a fixed-width 8x8 font? Because I can whip you up some standard bold 8x8 numbers if you want, justin

[justin3009]

Right now they're fixed-width.  I'm contemplating on VWFing them but I'm not sure if I want to go that route or not.

[Mirby]

Spoiler

It was Mint who volunteered to be the sacrifice when Cless made the deal. Or maybe the witch chose Mint, I can't remember that detail. As the witch is casting the spell on Mint, Arche runs into to take the hit, screaming something like "oh why do you care who it is anyways?"

[close]

Ah yeah that's right. Thanks for clearing that up :3

[justin3009]

Working on the save screen at the moment!  Christ is this kind of hard to get things going right.



So far only slots 1-3 work and the hand X/Y coordinates are wrong.

The colors that we see change depending on which slot you're on.  So if you went to say Slot 3 that was pure black, it'd show up black on the save slot AND the screen itself when you scroll over to it.  But as you can see, there'll be five save slots now.  I may have to rearrange a bit still but so far it's not too bad.  Tempted to shrink the PC boxes by a 'tad' on this screen though.  Have it be one less column width on the side then bump the save slots over one so the hands can just stay in black space.  Either way, got quite a few bugs to work out, notes to write down and what not.

Also this save screen does something I didn't know was really possible.  Apparently the HDMA on the Save Slots are dictated as SPRITES.  I didn't even know that was possible.  So this whole screen is a big ton of new information for me.

[Shinrin]

Nice names of the characters, Also is there enough room in the Sram for 5 saves?

[justin3009]

Still have to transition the VWF names over to this screen

Right now there's not.  I can knock the SRAM byte up one though and expand the file so I COULD fit five in it, so that's no big deal.  I'll have to expand anyway with how much more data I'll have to be saving anyway.

[FlamePurge]

Hey, Justin, how do you edit the 8x8 font in this game, anyway? Is it in the VRAM or something?

[justin3009]

The 8x8 font that I used has it's own thing but it's mainly only used for the PC names due to them being dynamic.  Otherwise, everything else is pre-rendered then shot into VRAM when it's needed.

Also, may end up having to do three slots only.  I can expand SRAM room just fine but it doesn't seem like the game is capable of reading above the 8kb limit it has due to how the game's mapped out so I can't exactly access the rest of the room if I wanted.

[FlamePurge]

I meant the original 8x8, actually! Is it a tilemap font? I've looked through the ROM and found the dialogue font just fine, but I could never find Tales of Phantasia's 8x8 font.

[justin3009]

It's compressed   I had to change the JSR bit for the routine so it loaded decompressed then throw the font into a new area so it could be edited on the fly

[FlamePurge]

That's what I thought. Thanks for telling me!

[VoltageControl]

I actually did import a test voice for Cless into the SNES version.  Worked nicely and actually almost sounded better on SNES (Though that's probably nostalgia or something).  I was thinking about doing a little version with the GBA English voices.  May just do that later on for fun.

It's probably some Nostalgia, but the SNES has built-in delay and reverb. The GBA only has it if the developers coded it. Besides different compression, the SNES has different audio filter rates due to outputting to a TV versus headphones.
May 26, 2014, 12:02:58 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Is it possible to adjust the speed of the battle system, or is it already pushing the limits of the SNES as is?

[justin3009]

Speed can be altered.  The main reason it's 'sluggish' is because whenever you attack an enemy, there's a FORCED pause on the game to give it an effect of 'damage'.  I have to reinput the ASM work, but I had it awhile ago where it'd ONLY do that on critical hits, which made the battles just fly ridiculously quick.  There'll also be some spells that have NO spell pause (Though many if not ALL spells will have to be redone to be mainly sprites and a tad bit layer 3 with no interference).

It'll pretty much be an entire revamp of the battle system when it comes down to it.

Edit: Just a tad bit progress.  Save screen is reverted to three saves again and everything works fine so far with some missing details.  The 2nd save needs an HDMA sprite box, which it apparently didn't have so that'll be interesting to add in.  Then there's adding in a new 'Location:' box to have each save dictate where you were when you saved to help players figure out what each save was.  I'll also probably implement the whole 'Battles/Gald/Food' amounts as well.

Edit 2: Quite a few bugs suddenly appeared on the Save Screen.. Not sure where to start with fixing them but I've got this going well!

[VoltageControl]

Yeah. I had no idea that's what it was. I figured the game just was not well optimized or the SNES couldn't handle it.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

[justin3009]

Welp, guess I have to redo the Save Screen again!  Apparently that HDMA 'sprite' bit doesn't want to work with an added 3rd one.  I NOW realize why they had it setup the way they did with an HDMA across the screen around the save boxes.  So either I have to remove the HDMA colors on each save box or completely alter the save menu's look.

With that, I've got a update for the 'hopeful' future if I can get to event editing.  I'm definitely planning to add more backstory with Dhaos, basically including things with Winona and crew more into the game.  I also want to add more 'flashback' scenes with Rhea a bit to give her more of a story that she did have.  I can't say if I'll be able to do all of this, it all clearly depends on how much room I have left after I redo a chunk of everything, but I'm very very hopeful for it.

I've also got a REALLY weird but that I'm unable to figure out how it occurred.  It may have just been when I had some bad voice data code and it's still in mid game screwing up, but for some reason, some of the music/sounds are completely broken.  I'm PRETTY sure it's just on this one save.. but I'd have to play through the game on a new game in general to be sure.  If something really is amiss, I'm going to be extremely lost on where to go to fix it.  I have never dealt with a sound related bug before.