Mato Projects (mostly FF4/6 stuff)

[ArkthePieKing]

How about something like that? Colors are a little wrong but I think you get the idea lol

[Celice]

I tried one too.

[PowerPanda]

Here's my take.

[Tomato]

Thanks guys, I'll try the icons out soon and see which one works the best.

For now, I rearranged all of my new code + data to be compatible with the alternate enemy patch that changes enemy graphics & names. Now I can easily build a translation for the original Japanese patch and the alternate Japanese patch. Here are some screenshots of the alternate enemies in battle:



When I finally finish this project and release it, I'll probably release two patches and let players choose whichever they want to play.

[Vanya]

Damn. Nice work there, Mato.
I'm chompin' at the bit to play this one.

[Red Soul]

I always wanted to play FF2 with a more traditional system behind it. This is coming along impressively well.
Will it contain the PSP extras where you fight the reincarnated Emperor? I could be misremembering, but I think they added a few things.

[Tomato]

I'm not very familiar with the original FF2 and don't know much about the PSP version at all, but in this hack you do fight the emperor at least 3 times, and 1 emperor-themed boss guarding a bunch of chests.

[Vanya]

In the PSP and GBA versions there is an after game scenario after you defeat the emperor in the underworld or whatever. Then you play as all the characters that died fighting the empire against a "holy" version of the emperor. It's basically a bonus dungeon called "Soul of Rebirth".

[Red Soul]

Yeah that's what I mean. Would be cool to have that, too.

[Tomato]

While testing out the alternate enemy patch I've noticed a couple enemies load the wrong tile graphics while the tile layouts are fine. It seems to be a problem with the Japanese enemy patch and not my stuff, so I gotta figure out how to fix them. Unfortunately, existing tools don't seem to work given the nature of the enemy patch.

Also, while testing the alternate enemy patch, I ran into a weird problem where the airship doesn't fly over lava. I'm assuming an event flag got messed up somewhere - does anyone have more info? If I can set that flag manually that'd fix the problem hopefully.

[PowerPanda]

The event flag is set in FF4 in the Dwarven Castle when Cid coats the underside of the airship with Mithril. Prior to that, the airship can't fly over lava. I'd bet that event flag just wasn't set.

[Tomato]

I managed to find and fix the lava thing - it was a problem with the original Japanese patch. The Japanese patch actually has a bunch of little issues here and there, and I try to fix them when I can but I don't intend to fix them all (mostly because I don't know how).

Anyway, now to figure out these monster graphic problems
July 09, 2020, 01:37:39 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
I'm now fixing up some problems with battle groups that exist in the Japanese graphics enhancement patch - lots of enemies overlapping, appearing too far down or too far high, stuff like that. I've noticed that when I change the formation ID that a battle group uses, it can sometimes get tricky to select a specific enemy with the cursor.

It's hard to explain but I assume this is something that other FF4 hackers have encountered before. Is there a way to change the "enemy selecting method" to match any given formation? I guess if I can't figure it out, I'll just change the formations and leave a note in the readme that says "the enhanced graphics version will make it hard to select specific enemies sometimes".
July 09, 2020, 07:38:59 PM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
I couldn't find this cursor stuff documented anywhere, but I saw it was an option on FF6Tools, so after some work I figured it out and managed to fix the cursor weirdness in the original Japanese gfx patch, hooray!

Now I need to figure out how to fix the gfx enhancement issues when summoning the two new summons. After that, I think my work with the gfx enhancement stuff will finally be over and I can get back to finalizing stuff in the main translation patch.

[Grimoire LD]

Hmm, two new summons you say? Does that mean something was replaced? If it's size or graphic issues with these summons, Chillyfeez should know all about that. If he is unavailable to help you though he wrote an excellent piece on slickproductions about it.

http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=1890.0

Hopefully this will help a bit. (It is so nice to have this archive of excellent information back!)

[Neon Streetlight]

I'm sure I'm missing A LOT here, so I apologize in advance if I'm totally off, but wouldn't it make more sense to use FFV (or even VI) as the base since the graphics are a bit better and they use four characters in battles instead of five? I know this is just a translation of a hack that was already done, so maybe the reason is that simple.

[Tomato]

There's a lot of stuff in the hack that made me think "whoa, that's clever how they used this thing from FFIV in this new way" so maybe that's why. Or maybe the person just really liked FFIV and/or hacking it. I think it'd be fun to re-create FF1 with the FF5 or FF6 engine, just as a small little hobby project, and I get the feeling the FF2 remake guy had a similar motivation.

[reconstructingmana]

There's a lot of stuff in the hack that made me think "whoa, that's clever how they used this thing from FFIV in this new way" so maybe that's why. Or maybe the person just really liked FFIV and/or hacking it. I think it'd be fun to re-create FF1 with the FF5 or FF6 engine, just as a small little hobby project, and I get the feeling the FF2 remake guy had a similar motivation.

I definitely would be on board for an FF1 remake in a FF6 engine!  I can even think of ways to tackle things like canoe travel (make it similar to the Lete River) and cave design. 

[Neon Streetlight]

There's a lot of stuff in the hack that made me think "whoa, that's clever how they used this thing from FFIV in this new way" so maybe that's why. Or maybe the person just really liked FFIV and/or hacking it. I think it'd be fun to re-create FF1 with the FF5 or FF6 engine, just as a small little hobby project, and I get the feeling the FF2 remake guy had a similar motivation.

Yep, I have a feeling you're right. Sometimes it's all about what you enjoy and what motivates you. I've always wished there had been a FFI-III SNES collection, kind of like what they did with the Dragon Quest series. It would be cool for fans to make that happen all these years later.

[PowerPanda]

I think FFI in the FFV engine makes a lot of sense, since V is set up well for the job system. You could always look into William Kage's SixEngine too. I've thought that it looked a lot easier to use than doing a romhack.

For this project, FFII in FFIV's engine makes a lot of sense. FFII was the black sheep of the series, but the characters map almost perfectly to the abilities from FFIV.

[Tomato]

When you step on this tile, it pops up a question box. The problem is that you can accidentally avoid it and never trigger it at all. I'd like to move the trigger tile down one to avoid this, but I'm having trouble. I know how to modify the trigger data itself, but it appears there's some other piece of data that tells the game "hey this is a trigger you just stepped on, look through the triggers list!".

It's hard to find clear documentation all in one place, so I'm hoping someone will know how this works. I'm fairly certain it'd just be a one byte change... hopefully?

[Vanya]

I think FFI in the FFV engine makes a lot of sense, since V is set up well for the job system.

I have had that thought many times before.
It would probably be the best fit.
There are way more location maps than would be needed so implementing the extra dungeons would be a snap, too.
Plus having all those world maps and underwater maps fit perfectly with my thoughts on how the original should be expanded with more content.