[Seihen]

What's that corruption appearing at the bottom of each text box?

Also, I agree on the cursing. But figure that's up to how serious you want the end result to be taken.

[chillyfeez]

What's that corruption appearing at the bottom of each text box?

That happens to FFIV with certain emulators. SNES 9X, for sure. ZSNES not at all in my experience. It's not corruption, though, because it happens with a clean ROM,  too.

The cursing doesn't bother me, for the record. I would think it out of place if this wasn't intended to be a parody, but we know that it is. The biggest problem with a lot of cursing in your hack is that you are bound to alienate some potential audience, as evidenced by Grimoire and Seihen's comments.
But hey, I enjoy the stand-up routines of both Jim Gaffigan and Daniel Tosh, and not one necessarily more than the other. They're just different styles, and one happens to be clean and the other, vulgar.

[Bahamut ZERO]

Cursing isn't a constant occurance in my hack, though it does pop up from time to time. Most of the time it will be from a random npc depending on thier personality or mood.  Watch out for Yang's wife, her lines are word for word things I've heard come out of someone's mouth haha.

some people you meet will be friendly, some people will be mad at the world, and others may be sick in the head. Just like in real life! 

Plotwise, I'm not gonna go overboard with it, though it depends on a character's mindset. DkCecil at the beginning has a different mindset then say, Paladin Cecil after beating the water fiend. Kain probably isn't too happy Cecil left him in the woods after the Mist events.  Tellah's been living in a cave for four months. Edward's...Edward. Palom will probably be the most vulgar as far as main characters go, but that one's not too far off from how he's portrayed anyway.

I can promise this much: There won't be constant sex, drug, and rape references, nor will half the enemies have or be giant dicks and/or balls. 

3/25 UPDATE: Been working on the some more, mainly the lowercase set so it's a bit more readable on smaller screens. Fun fact: Secret of the Stars doesn't even use it's lowercase font outside of naming your character. I still need to fix up the "h" and "u" but all in all it's quickly growing on me.

[Bahamut ZERO]

Figured out how to add squish tiles to the font and how to use them with ff4kster.   

Basically I've added a couple tiles like "ti" and "il" after the 9 in the font using Tile layer. Then opening the font.cfg for ff4kster I added the characters to * 8a, and ( 8B.

It works great for everything but the normal dialogue boxes. For some reason my squish tiles don't appear correctly there, instead showing random stuff ("ti" turns to " e" and "il" becomes "th").

I'd love to get squish tiles working with the normal text boxes, as a couple letters in my font have little spacing issues here and there from being a skinnier font. Plus I could make my apostrophies look way better ( "King's" instead of "king' s" for example") haha

Still, they work just about everywhere else it seems, so Cecil gets an "il" tile in his name lol.

Also, I've decided to nix the job names for the characters and have decided to use thier last names. Last night when I started this I realized I only knew Cecil and Kain's last names from playing Dissidia, so everyone else has made up names until I check a wiki here in a few moments.

Though if I happen to like the made up name more than the actual name I'll probably keep the made up version, or list out the names I've made up with the actual ones, and see what everyone thinks.

EDIT: Hmm, seems like it's gonna be a mix of made up names and actual names, as a couple characters I couldn't find a name for (Tellah, FuSoYa, the Twins),  or too long (Edward, Cid, and Edge's).

I've got some good names for Tellah and the Twins already, I might shorten Edward's last name (Chris Von Muir), and I've got Cid's last name down as Baku, after to the big guy in FF9 that owns the theatre ship at the beginning.

[Grimoire LD]

Figured out how to add squish tiles to the font and how to use them with ff4kster.   

Basically I've added a couple tiles like "ti" and "il" after the 9 in the font using Tile layer. Then opening the font.cfg for ff4kster I added the characters to * 8a, and ( 8B.

It works great for everything but the normal dialogue boxes. For some reason my squish tiles don't appear correctly there, instead showing random stuff ("ti" turns to " e" and "il" becomes "th").

I'd love to get squish tiles working with the normal text boxes, as a couple letters in my font have little spacing issues here and there from being a skinnier font. Plus I could make my apostrophies look way better ( "King's" instead of "king' s" for example") haha

Still, they work just about everywhere else it seems, so Cecil gets an "il" tile in his name lol.

Also, I've decided to nix the job names for the characters and have decided to use thier last names. Last night when I started this I realized I only knew Cecil and Kain's last names from playing Dissidia, so everyone else has made up names until I check a wiki here in a few moments.

Though if I happen to like the made up name more than the actual name I'll probably keep the made up version, or list out the names I've made up with the actual ones, and see what everyone thinks.

EDIT: Hmm, seems like it's gonna be a mix of made up names and actual names, as a couple characters I couldn't find a name for (Tellah, FuSoYa, the Twins),  or too long (Edward, Cid, and Edge's).

I've got some good names for Tellah and the Twins already, I might shorten Edward's last name (Chris Von Muir), and I've got Cid's last name down as Baku, after to the big guy in FF9 that owns the theatre ship at the beginning.

An interesting idea with the Job Names to last names, that's pretty creative.

Whenever I get around to my FFIV Prequel I'll need to ask for that "il" for Cecilia. Heh.

As for last names...

Rydia's "of Mist" is strangely enough almost Arabic in context. Since her name in all official sources is "of Mist", which corresponds to the Arabic practice of "al-Place name". Which is used in various naming practices throughout the Islamic world.

Tellah does not have a last name, which I always found to be so strange, but I read somewhere that this may make sense. Tellah nor Palom and Porom have last names and they all come from Mysidia. Rydia's "of Mist" also implies a lack of a family name. Here's what I found on it...

"As for the last names discussed here, I don't think it's uncommon for magicians or sages to drop their last name in fantasy literature or games. For instance, Rydia is referred to as "Rydia of Mist" - the location is as important to the magician's nomeclature as an actual family name would be.

" So technically speaking Palom, Porom, and Tellah's last names may be "of Mysidia".

Baku's a good choice for Cid, the two do have a lot in common after all.

As for FuSoYa... I always assumed that the "Ya" portion of the name may have been his last name, I say in relation to "KluYa" who has the same ending part as his brother's name. Hence I wonder if it's not Fu (First) So (Middle) Ya (Family) this would make perfect sense as they are an alien race who wouldn't have normal names by any means.

Again, these are all just my thoughts on the matter.

Also I did not know that you could just add in the Squish tiles in FF4kster. Thanks for that!

[pinkpuff]

The reason it's not working in the "normal" dialogues could have to do with the DTE. "Normal" dialogues use a compression technique that assigns certain combinations of two symbols to one hex code. So for example there's a single code for a space " " followed by an "e". When FF4kster sees that code it prints " e". If you assigned one of your squish tiles to something from the DTE table it might cause that kind of mess up.

[Bahamut ZERO]

The reason it's not working in the "normal" dialogues could have to do with the DTE. "Normal" dialogues use a compression technique that assigns certain combinations of two symbols to one hex code. So for example there's a single code for a space " " followed by an "e". When FF4kster sees that code it prints " e". If you assigned one of your squish tiles to something from the DTE table it might cause that kind of mess up.

Hmm, that would explain why one of my squish tiles comes up as "th"...  but I might luck out at some point and come across some combinations I'm looking for when testing out new squish tiles haha.

Also, finally got internet on the new computer!  Now I don't have the navigation cutting off my view of half the top topics lol. Anyways -

@ Grimwoire LD

lol yeah I tried looking around to see if they had last names, but as you said, they don't. Though I saw the word for mist in Japanese translates to "Misuto", so far now at least, Rydia has a last name. Better than Rydia Jones anyway haha.

For Tellah, since I gave him a Scottish accent after doing so with the npcs in Kaipo, so I gave him the last name McLeod. Tellah McLeod.  Turning him into an angry Scotsman is quite fun. So is saying Tellash's name with a mock Scottish accent.
 
As for Palom and Porom,  I couldn't quite figure out a good name, but the holder name they have right now would go great with what I'm planning for after the Cainazzo fight.

With FuSoYa, I dig what you're saying about his and KluYa's naming, being that they're aliens. Until I come up with a better name, something more align with how his first name's spelled, FuSoYa's last name is Moonba. Not the best, but it flows off the tongue pretty well.


As for adding squish tiles in FF4kster, it's nothing short of awesome. And there's a nice big open area in the rom for adding squish tiles/ extra item icons!

And when you get around to your  FFIV Prequel, feel free to ask for the squish tile. Hell, you can use the modified SotS font I'm using if you'd like. I've tweaked it a good bit, mainly fixing some spacing and getting rid of some of the unnecessary pixels since Tecmo was so hellbent on making their mostly unused small case letters so "fancy".  A good bit of the Uppercase letters were left alone, but some, like the "N" and "R" I changed to look a bit better.



Today I'll be messing around with spells and items.  I turned

Venom, Viirus, and Weak in the 3 Bio spells last night, and after an hour of two of finding a good effect to go along with the Bio sequence, I found a pretty nice setup:


Bio - It's the same as Virus was animation-wise, with slightly higher power and mp cost than Fire, Ice, and Bolt. Has a slight miss chance.
Bio 2 - Bio Sequence + Cure4 effect 
Bio 3 - Bio sequence + Holy effect - a wave of diseased birds swoops down on your foe/s, causing an awesome Bio effect. I shit you not. The second I saw this I luaghed so hard that I just had to       keep it.
 
Today I want to see if I can rig up an Ultima spell, using Fission's sequence and the Center explosion spread to the left effect haha.

Need to look into how I can change the "GP" in the menu screen to "Gil". I might have to break down and try a hex editor for that one. That'll be... fun if not a bit intimidating at first lol.

Also finally realized there's an option to change which items do and don't have item descriptions. I wonder how many items can have a description before the game falls apart lmao.. I'm thinking of for the items that don't have a description, just use a blank description box so  you don't have to see it appearing and disappearing as you scroll through your item list.

[Grimoire LD]

I've always been iffy when it comes to graphics, granted my newest work could use some new tiles, is there a tutorial on how to make new tiles and put them into the game? I'm no artist, but I think I can handle simple representations that are in 2 Colors.

I think I can approve of Tellah being Scottish, it fits his personality.

Good thinking on the Bio family of spells. The only game in the FF series to do that is FFT as I recall (and that has 12 Bio spells because some programmer was out of his mind). I opted for a complete elemental coverage of spells myself Dark, Aero, and Dia for... well Dark, Wind, and Holy respectively. Though I did not leave Poison hanging. Venom (or any poison really, but Venom's the only spell to inflict Poison) allows a new spell called Scourge (Scorg) to deal massive damage to enemies that are already poisoned. and Bio is still present. Good work with new sequences and effect correlations, normally one of the most frustrating aspects of FFIV spell modding.

The game can support all items having descriptions, what the game doesn't support is much space for those descriptions. So you have to be stupidly conservative with space before it drags into Battle Messages.

[Bahamut ZERO]

I'm not quite sure about adding new tiles, but you could edit the existing ones pretty easily with tile layer pro. I think most of the tilesets are stored at 97% in the rom and down the list from there. It's definatly confusing at first but if you take an ingame screenshot of the area you want to work on, then change the colors in the editor to match the tile colors, it makes it 1000% less hectic.

Funny enough, I didn't know you could change those colors at first, so I had a screenshot (well, like a dozen different screenshots, heh)  super magnified while I was working on DK Cecil's Overworld sprite. Thankfully I figured it out by the time I started working on his battle sprite.

Which reminds me, I've yet to start work on Edward's edits to make him look like a Red Mage.   Or turning pig status into moogle status. For the moogle, I was thinking using FF6 Mog for the battle sprite replacement (or at least a placeholder). The fun part for that will be making it work well with everyone else's palettes.

he game can support all items having descriptions, what the game doesn't support is much space for those descriptions. So you have to be stupidly conservative with space before it drags into Battle Messages.

Awesome! I hope that includes equipment, lol. Though I figured there wouldn't be a whole lot of space, being as few descriptions the items originally have.


The other day I went through  with Project II open in another FF4kster and undummied my spells and items again. It's like my field guide for umdummying things haha.

I also finally found the graphic for Namingway's portrait in the Naming Screen so I could erase it for the sake of the naming events during the story. It's tiled out at the end of the npc sprties, after Fat Chocobo.

I'd love to figure out some way of displaying a character's menu portrait where Namingway's used to be when selecting someone to rename. It's fun to dream, eh? lol.

[Grimoire LD]

I'm not quite sure about adding new tiles, but you could edit the existing ones pretty easily with tile layer pro. I think most of the tilesets are stored at 97% in the rom and down the list from there. It's definatly confusing at first but if you take an ingame screenshot of the area you want to work on, then change the colors in the editor to match the tile colors, it makes it 1000% less hectic.

Funny enough, I didn't know you could change those colors at first, so I had a screenshot (well, like a dozen different screenshots, heh)  super magnified while I was working on DK Cecil's Overworld sprite. Thankfully I figured it out by the time I started working on his battle sprite.

Which reminds me, I've yet to start work on Edward's edits to make him look like a Red Mage.   Or turning pig status into moogle status. For the moogle, I was thinking using FF6 Mog for the battle sprite replacement (or at least a placeholder). The fun part for that will be making it work well with everyone else's palettes.

Awesome! I hope that includes equipment, lol. Though I figured there wouldn't be a whole lot of space, being as few descriptions the items originally have.


The other day I went through  with Project II open in another FF4kster and undummied my spells and items again. It's like my field guide for umdummying things haha.

I also finally found the graphic for Namingway's portrait in the Naming Screen so I could erase it for the sake of the naming events during the story. It's tiled out at the end of the npc sprties, after Fat Chocobo.

I'd love to figure out some way of displaying a character's menu portrait where Namingway's used to be when selecting someone to rename. It's fun to dream, eh? lol.

Oh no, I meant new squish tiles, for item icons and the like, hence why I mentioned two colors. Haha.


Weapon Descriptions are possible and that was the original plan for Combat Boost, but... again... space. I am hoping eventually that PinkPuff incorporates custom pointers for FF4kster, but there are other matters first to attend to for the editor. That way we can start to expand the ROM which would give us so many possibilities.

One thing to note in Namingway since it uses Project II as a base, the Dispel spell was changed to Curse for obvious reasons, Dispel in its base state is next to useless at best and dangerous to use (for the game) at worst. If it's using Dispel's Routine. Black Hole;s Routine is a much more complete and adequately put together routine which you can easily stick over Dispel.

Hmm, as you just noted Namingway's Graphics are just overworld sprites, but that does beg the question if it can load Overworld sprites along with Battle Sprites there might be a way to instead load the Portraits, I imagine it would be a tricky endeavor though.

[Bahamut ZERO]

Ohhh... hahaha. Well, in that case, it's pretty easy to add new tiles.

1: Open your rom in Tile Layer Pro.

2: Scroll down to 33-34% in the rom (assuming it's unheadered)

3: Go to View -> Format and select Game Boy.

4: Look around a bit and voila- you're at the game's font!

Now an easy to figure the hex number to use to bind your new tiles to keys in FF4kster's Font.cfg is to look at the numbers in the font in Tile Layer as sort of a guidline. In the font.cfg the hex numbers for those are 80 through 89,  so if you want tomake a new tile beside 9, you would bind the key you'd  use to 8A.

Counting hex - pretty much the extent of my knowledge of hex lol.

And the huge chunk of space is pretty much free game to use as far as I know. I took a look at Paladin's version of FF4, and he used the whole space for job names, squish tiles, and more icons. After which I started to go to town.

(I was going to post screenshots, but I couldn't get Tinypic to upload anything, probably due to being on a new computer running a new version of a crappy internet.)

Weapon Descriptions are possible and that was the original plan for Combat Boost, but... again... space. I am hoping eventually that PinkPuff incorporates custom pointers for FF4kster, but there are other matters first to attend to for the editor. That way we can start to expand the ROM which would give us so many possibilities.

Oh man, that would be amazing! I tried setting up everything to have at least one of the blank message boxes as it's description... I think we all know how that turned out. Overflow. Setting the entire weapons list to the first blank message box I saw probably didn't help either haha.

One thing to note in Namingway since it uses Project II as a base, the Dispel spell was changed to Curse for obvious reasons, Dispel in its base state is next to useless at best and dangerous to use (for the game) at worst. If it's using Dispel's Routine. Black Hole;s Routine is a much more complete and adequately put together routine which you can easily stick over Dispel.

Thanks! Not sure if I'm gonna keep dispel or not, but for now at least I'll switch it to black hole's routine.  Though I might make an item that can does Black Hole and use Dispel for something else. Perhaps something for Cid, as I've yet to give him something meaningful.

Which reminds me, I forgot about Cid completely when I redid the spellsets to make Edward a red mage. Well, Here's hoping I can crame black and white magic into the same spellset! I probably was in need of cutting some more of his spells anyhow,  so he feels more like a red mage.

Hmm, as you just noted Namingway's Graphics are just overworld sprites, but that does beg the question if it can load Overworld sprites along with Battle Sprites there might be a way to instead load the Portraits, I imagine it would be a tricky endeavor though.

Yeah that would by tricky indeed, trying to figure out how to work in a way to call the tiles for a specific character when they're selected.  The character portraits are the same format and number of tiles as Namingway's, so it might not be completely out of this world.

UPDATE:  Turned pigs into moogles! FF5 moogles for OW sprites, and FF6 moogles for in battle. Tried using the FF5 moogle for the menu portrait, but that turned out.... awful. I need to just draw one out since the FF6 portraits are four tiles bigger than FF4's. But all in all, a good day.


Update 4/18/15

I've decided to begin rebuilding what I've done thus far on a new rom using Project II. The reason for this is that, well, outside of Grimoire's epic mods using it as a base, Project II has various fixes and improvements that the original game did not, and they are awesome.  The only tedious part of this process will be redoing my text and small event edits, but now that I've tinkered with FF4kster for aa couple months, it shouldn't take much time at all.

I'll continue to work on my current build a little while I test out the compatability of mods and such on the new build.  After that, it's crank engines to full power.

[Bahamut ZERO]

Got new build up and going! Imbued weapons and Magic Weapons go together nicely with User Options + Shadow Mod 


Sadly, Sing Improvement didn't make the cut. Once patched, it turned the Lami's Harp into  "Lamia  e" which, once I'd erase the "e" and spaces caused the game to crash anytime the Sing command was used,

Oh well, I'll take 2 out of 3.

[Grimoire LD]

Now that is odd, well I'm glad to see that Imbued Weapons and Magic Weapons play nicely with Chillyfeez's mods in any event. So much patching though... Yes, Sing Improvement does not work with FF4kster at all. It was really the first time I noticed something wrong in terms of compatibility and that's to do with the way FF4kster saves the data and writes certain code, no matter what is currently there, hence why it destroyed several of my custom commands. Thankfully since I'm relocating a lot of data for the new Combat Boost, I won't have to worry interfering with FF4kster's command compatibilities.

[Bahamut ZERO]

Aha, that explains my sing related issue in a nutshell.  It would work fine until I'd save some changes done with FF4kster lol.

Yes, there's a lot of patching going on here.  I've been playing around with patching order so there aren't compatability issues.  The current build seems to run fine, outside of a returning freezing problem with loading the actors into the shadow party during the scene where Cecil and Rosa talk at night, and that issue seems to only happen on the SNES9x for PSP. I've gone through that scene multiple times on Snes9x 64bit for windows with no issue.


Update 4/25: After multiple builds, I think may have finally found an ordering that makes everything work together.

More testing's needed, but at least Edward and Yang are finally loading/saving into their correct Shadow slots again, instead of loading from "Edward" and "Yang" but saving to their shadows, which I assume would cause some fugged up stuffs.
 
Here's the current mod ordering for Build 5, mainly for my notes in case something's messed up or if it is indeed an order that makes things go smoothly:

(Add Header)
User Options 2.2
Dash for UO 2.2
(Remover Header)
Magic Weapons
Imbued Weapons
(Add Header)
Shadow Mod
Compatability Patch for UO2.2 + Shadow Mod

It's a confusing, somewhat wonky order of patching everything together, but after numerous attempts I figure this would be the best way to ensure Shadow plays nice  .


Update 4/26: So far so good! I'm going through and setting events up for Shadow Mod (sprite changing and correcting actor addition/removal) as well as doing a speedrun via buyable Grimoires and Imps with jacked out exp gains.  This way I can make sure nothing's broken before I start redoing my stuff, AND I get to read through PRoject II's nicely done script in the process. Win/win I say!

Also, for the first time in 5 builds, Salve has become Itemlord. I'm not exactly sure how, (probably the current patch order) but seeing as this build's working perfectly so far, I'll go with the flow.   


Update 4/27 - Hmm, seems everything's running great, but... now my stat changes to Yang and Edward are causing them to load from "Edward" and "Yang" instead of loading the shadow party slots they save to. So, they save to their shadows, but they load up with their initial gear/levels. Crap.

This wasn't an issue in my old build, as I have their stats more heavily edited in the old build, and they load/save from shadow just fine.

Quite perplexed on this one. If I were able to redirect them back to thier proper shadow slots for loading, I think everything would work just fine. I just don't know how, or if it's even possible.

Think it's time I blow off some steam with a nice walk, followed by some rounds of stress-relieving Brutal DOOM as I ponder what to do next.

Also,  glad to hear Combat Boost is still going strong! I've been reading up on your progress - can't wait to conquer the underworld when it's ready!

 If I hadn't gotten so addicted to CB!,  and wondered to myself "How'd he do all this crazy stuff!?" I wouldn't have come across FF4kster. So, thank you.

[Bahamut ZERO]

  It seems seven is my lucky number, as rebuild #7 is fully functional. 

And with the rebuild, comes -gasp- actual progress!


Edward's spellsets have been cut back to both fit the role of a Red Mage as well as for him to play nicely with Shadow Mod.

Palom and Porom's spellsets  have been slightly cut back to play nicely with Shadow Mod (nothing too drastic, Porom loses some status spells like Mini, while Palom loses a couple status spells and Quake)

Dark Knight Cecil's lv up's have been tweaked, mostly to give hime more health so he doesn't have a piddly 2000-something HP at lv 67.

Tellah's lv ups have been changed up quite a bit, done while looking at FuSoYa's base stats as a reference. By the time he hits lv 70 Tellah will be a good deal stronger than FuSoYa. I'll let your minds wander as to why I have done this. 

Event changes for the opening scenes redone, with some touch ups added (mainly timing for music/sound effects)

Edge is getting a makeover.  Since he's normally the prince of a medievil kingdom of ninjas,  I'm gonna go in a different direction entirely. As a hint to what he'll now be, I ask the questio.:

What is the opposite of a ninja?

[chillyfeez]

What is the opposite of a ninja?

??? ...A very clumsy bard?

[Bahamut ZERO]

In a sense of the dry, arid climate you're in when you get the bard in FFIV, you're in the ball park. 

With that said, I'll also state that it isn't a pirate.


Today I think I'll just play around with FF4kster and see what kind of things I can get the game to without exploding.

I'm trying out novel idea: Quickresting at any save point. Right now I have a Yes/No message show after the save point message, along the lines of:


"If you'd like to Quickrest, select 'Yes' for Tents or 'No' for Cabins."


Upon selecting Yes or No, I have it set up to bring up an item screen for selecting said Tents/Cabins. That part works like a charm, subtracting one of said items when chosen.


Now, I've been looking around in FF4kster for a way to call the Tent/Cabin events, and after about 20 minutes of searching, I assume it's safe to to say it isn't. Think I might just recreate the events in the Save Message event. Time to experiment!

UPDATE:

The Quickrest system works! Mechanically speaking anyway. idk how to get the tent/cabin graphics to show, but it DOES heal the correct amounts, and DOES take away the correct quantity of the correct item.

I simply redid the Tent/Cabin  events inside the save message event.

Thing is, i have no idea how the regular Tent/Cabin events call their grapihcs, as they both use the same visual "Erect a Shelter". I also have no idea how the events restart a maps music after the "Sleep" song ends.

i may just rig the Quickrest event to have the character nod, then lie down instead of the visual, and lower/increase the music volume to workaround it.

[chillyfeez]

Yeah, they're not events in the typical sense of the word. The visuals and music (and the healing routine, for that matter, but that can be reproduced using event code) are directly linked to using the item.

[Bahamut ZERO]

I found a nice little work around. 

Instead of a tent/cabin , when you Quickrest your character will nod his/her head for 6 cycles, then lie down for 6 cycles before the screen tinting/fad out.

Figured out the music! Toggle Music Fadout + Visual Effect "Fade Music Volume Up" does a perfect job. The Quickrest system is now fully functional!

So other than ironing out the music part, it's pretty awesome, and doesn't seem to take up a lot of event space to pull off.