Shining Force II Hacking: SF2 Editor 1.4 Release

[Stordarth]

Um, there's a lot in the middle of the list too. Any number from 0 to 255 will be valid.

Most of them is a fairy of pointlessness or a hardlock the game I think..

Also it's occurred to me just now that I could really resort this whole list from an end user's usability perspective instead of making it easy to see the numbers in order. Grouping the spell groups together, etc..

that'd be a nice addition to the next version.

[sulfuroxp]

how i use it?

and how transform SMD to BIN ???

EDIT : ... nothing xD

EDIT 2 :
Edit > Special ... what is this???

In the Class Edit... what is "Other Resistance" ???

I can do this in Promotions???
Priest to Vicar
Vicar to Master Monk

what is the number right at the Atttributes of items??? (Evade Up + 1???)
and the ??? Attribute ???

[SirHedge]

I've just been looking into monster statistics and noticed something with the editor. With heroes/classes, the Other Resists are given as a value, allowing for the addition of a valid entry based on the bitfield that governs these other resistances, but on monsters, it is simply 2 check boxes.

Sorry to bump this old topic, but I was wondering if anyone could tell me which resistance numbers from the heroes are used for the monsters' two check boxes.

I've found 128, 170, 65 and 85 for other resistance. Looking at their binary values didn't do much for guessing which one I might use (by the looks of things only the first one would be "pure.")
CODE 10000000
10101010
01000001
01010101
Thanks for any help.

[Space King]

64 is 'minor' and 128 is 'major'.

I'm merely assuming these fields share a similar function - monsters can cause many more conditions with their attacks, such as poison stun etc so it makes sense that the heroes have more fields that are used.

You'd assume that each bit is actually an "immunity" to a condition and they'd link up to desoul, poison, sleep, stun, muddle, slow, MP Drain and silence... but I don't remember the tests I ran with it being convincing - ie, I don't remember 128 or 64 granting desoul immunity on their own, but I very well could have bungled it at the time.

I dunno. Having checkboxes instead of a vague number would be better for the editor, but which is which have to be identified first.

[Drakonis]

Is there a possibility to flag items to drop? I didn't found any option there...

[SirHedge]

Maybe I'll have to do some checking myself then. Knowing major and minor are 64 and 128 is a helpful starting place. Thank you.

And I too would like to know how the flag items to drop works. Although from what I read in the past (I think you even said it Space King) the extra items for monsters come from specific battles rather than the enemies themselves.

[Space King]

Just tried to upgrade Ze Caravan from .1 so I could get around to trying Cow's scrambler (slowpoke is slow) and it spat up on me.

And I realized I might be a terrible person for not at least telling people what dll's my own program requires. I kind of put this on the burner until I could put my internet ninja skills to use to give a URL to get them - but it'd take me no effort to just list them out.

If you can't even get SF2Edit to start, you maybe need some of the following files:

VBA6.dll
msvbvm60.dll
VB6.olb
mscomctl.ocx (Think I added this for tabs, but ended up never using them. Almost certainly unneeded.)

These can probably just be placed in the same directory as the program, or in system32 and Just Work. Sticking it somewhere else, would require going to Start -> Run -> regsvr32 PATH_TO_DLL

Again, this is only if the thing is a non-starter for you. If everything is fine, don't freak out at my incomprehensible techno-babble. Everything is fine.

[Rusty]

Would someone explain to me stat blocks and what function they perform? I'm a little lost, but at first glance I think I can gather this much: all pre-promoted characters have a value of 1, Bowie and other characters without special promotions have a value of 2, and anyone that could promote into two separate paths has a value of 3. Is that observation correct? If so, what significance does this hold in relation to the other things we can edit? What sort of possibilities does that entail?

Sorry, just trying to get a better understanding of this. I plan to do a balance hack and probably won't mess with that aspect, but I'm curious anywho.

[Stordarth]

the observation is accurate rusty.

This is useful for expanding on class definitions for characters.

Higins for example. set his value to 3, and in the stats editor, Higins will now have 3 entries, for which you can set unpromoted and pegasus stats if you wanted to.

Or if you set one of the other characters to one, you could remove their unpromoted data. Since you can already set characters to start promoted, this is only really necessary if you want to save space (IIRC, the extra character data could overwrite other data if there are too many. Space king could confirm this)

Space King, I have some questions regarding the solos.

I mentioned in my latest post there about the little snag regarding unpromoted classes for claude, zynk and lemon.

lemon we can just stick as a regular baron if need be, but we dont have enough classes to add unpromoted classes (not character data) for claude and zynk. Do you think you could feasibly add in two more unpromoted classes and promotion chains? I know the editor can't, but perhaps manually?

[Balbaroy]

the observation is accurate rusty.

This is useful for expanding on class definitions for characters.

Higins for example. set his value to 3, and in the stats editor, Higins will now have 3 entries, for which you can set unpromoted and pegasus stats if you wanted to.

Or if you set one of the other characters to one, you could remove their unpromoted data. Since you can already set characters to start promoted, this is only really necessary if you want to save space (IIRC, the extra character data could overwrite other data if there are too many. Space king could confirm this)

Space King, I have some questions regarding the solos.

I mentioned in my latest post there about the little snag regarding unpromoted classes for claude, zynk and lemon.

lemon we can just stick as a regular baron if need be, but we dont have enough classes to add unpromoted classes (not character data) for claude and zynk. Do you think you could feasibly add in two more unpromoted classes and promotion chains? I know the editor can't, but perhaps manually?

Are RDBN and BRN 2 separate classes according to the ROM? If so, if we change Lemon to Warrior -> Baron/Gladiator, perhaps the data that contains Red Baron can be turned into a pre-promotion for Claude or Zynk? Then we only need room for 1 new class.

[ehow22]

That's the only difference that I know of, Balb

[Balbaroy]

I knew all that. But I was going off Stor's idea of converting Lemon from Red Baron to Warrior who promotes to regular Baron and Gladiator which would make the whole Red Baron class in the ROM unused altogether. If we could overwrite it with Zynk's unpromoted class (or make Zynk's RBT class his unpromoted and make Lemon's spot the Promoted if the double, crit and counter rates are hardcoded to that class spot).

It would make Lemon a little less effective as a Baron, but if it allows Zynk or Claude to have a promotion chain, then I'm all for it.

And if you think about it, when the game starts out, he wouldn't promote to Red Baron, he only becomes Red Baron because of his possession by the evil spirit that Geshp puts into him. So a game where you start out in Granseal with a young Warrior Lemon, it actually makes sense that he promotes to Baron or Gladiator and not to an undead vampire.

[Space King]

Do you think you could feasibly add in two more unpromoted classes and promotion chains? I know the editor can't, but perhaps manually?

Not realllly. Er, maybe. No, nah.

* The promotion table would have to be shuffled into some empty space. This data doesn't seem to have a pointer directly to it, so the entire block needs to be identified before it can be moved?

* They won't be allowed to equip anything since they fall out of bounds of the item equip flags.

* A bigger issue is that it won't parse the class data table past Red Baron. It'll be all like "What?! Count past 32?! I can't count that high! F* you!" It looks like it just inserts the data from the first class in the table.

It might be possible to change this if you can identify the digit the source uses to decide on how many iterations it counts, though.

* On the upside, you can just add a classname to the name table and it'll Just Work.

* There's a thing somewhere, I'm not sure if BNC told me it or not, don't think it's in my notes, that you'd need to change also to specify how many of classes in the bottom of the bucket (That's from 0 - Swordsman to 11 - Tortise) are considered "basic" classes. Otherwise, you end up with the over exciting promoted battle music and 20 levels added towards the spells you learn.

* On another upside, if you can identify this stuff, it almost certainly wouldn't be too torturous to do by hand. The promotion table is tiny, as far as data tables go. And even if what has to be transfered is much bigger, you can just copy paste since you wouldn't have to worry about overwriting anything.

OT: those guys are totally boring anyway. They're the same exact class, except for some resistances that barely matter. Maybe it'd be better just to turn one of them into a magical floating jellyfish or something?

[Stordarth]

cheers for that. I'll make a separate IPS for those guys methinks. will be easier.

[BigNailCow]

Necro!

Space King, would you be willing to make a new version of SF2Edit with the ability to modify pointers, or perhaps even just to take them into account? Until my big flexible system is in place, it would be convenient to be able to continue editing certain things even if they have moved. The game can find them; so should the editor be able to.

For example, I found that, if the character stat entries are moved, SF2Edit will still look in the same place, messing them up.

[Space King]

Seems like a simple request.

Also let me know if you want it to load in more than just the first ~2 million bytes of the file. I'm pretty sure you want this.

[BigNailCow]

Why, yes. Yes I do. Might as well make it just load the whole file, up to a max of 6 MB (I believe this is the maximum addressable space size on the Genesis.)

Also, while we're at it, let me know if there are any other tiny data bits (like the promotion level, etc) that you'd like me to look up and have you add to the "other" section.

Also also... while working on the solo hack with Stordarth, we discovered that something may be wonky with the way you save the battle sprite index data. It was missing entries. Just to be sure:
- There are always 3 entries of 3 bytes each per character.
- There is nothing important about the order of these entries; it simply parses through these 3 until it finds the right class, and if not, uses Bowie SDMN.
- Empty entries should be FF FF 00.
If there are more than 3 stat blocks for a character, you should just truncate, and, in fact, disable the battle sprite/palette fields on the stat blocks after the 3rd. I know this is bad, but there's simply no way around it if we're just editing data.

And, before you release, if you could send me a PM listing the pointers that are now editable so I could tell you if you're missing any that would be easily changeable, that would be awesome. There are probably a few where you're using baked addresses that have actual pointers somewhere.

AND FINALLY, I tried to add character names to CharacterNames.txt to see if it would load more, and... well, it simply crashes upon loading. Any idea why?

I think that takes care of everything... Thanks again.

A side note: I finally "acquired" Visual Studio 6 (...) but it occurs to me that I do not know VB very well.

[Space King]

AND FINALLY, I tried to add character names to CharacterNames.txt to see if it would load more, and... well, it simply crashes upon loading. Any idea why?

Because it wasn't designed to work like that! It was written as a basic editor. It's not a big deal, just takes some time to repurpose addresses, use dynamic arrays instead of static ones, and such.

A bit of a problem is gleaning how many entries are there when it's an arbitrary number. When there's a pointer listing the address of another table right after, it's not a big deal... like for character stats, that's one large blob, but there's still information in the rom to tell you how many "guys" there are. I can rejigger it to parse their pointers until the next "address" is lower or grossly higher than the current one. Assuming you'd squeeze in another pointer for new guys here.

But still, for something like # of items...

Honestly I don't like using Txt files for anything other than filling combo boxes - look at how I handled the item table, the first form I implemented for crying out loud. The Txt file stores all these offsets, and the current in-dev build doesn't even use them now. Phasing them out is on the back burner. I can't believe I thought mullets were cool..

Can you be very specific how you're twinking the battle sprites? Is this funkiness coming from an interaction from outside edits or is it doing this all inside the closed scope of the program?

[BigNailCow]

Because it wasn't designed to work like that! It was written as a basic editor. It's not a big deal, just takes some time to repurpose addresses, use dynamic arrays instead of static ones, and such.

The TXT files are supposed to be, like you said, for filling comboboxes, and as a sort of general listing of information, not per-rom. However, I've managed to modify them a bit to make a sort of ad hoc copy of SF2Edit for editing a specific ROM once, so it would be nice if the array was dynamic. I successfully added more entries to other stuff, so it shouldn't be too hard, right?

A bit of a problem is gleaning how many entries are there when it's an arbitrary number.

Yeah, I've run into the same problem with the Caravan, but I've just now figured out a way to get around it with the current system.

Can you be very specific how you're twinking the battle sprites? Is this funkiness coming from an interaction from outside edits or is it doing this all inside the closed scope of the program?

I'm not sure. This is an issue of Stordarth doing "something" and then it doesn't work anymore. The Caravan doesn't touch that data at all, and Stordarth didn't know where it was before so there's no way he edited it by hand, so I just have to assume SF2Edit did it.

[Stordarth]

whils't we're on the subject of extending entries, could we get the number of class entries extended? I can edit the hex manually, but its a pain when all I wanna change is one byte, and finding it is a pain. Anything you could do there space king?