Changing in battle weapon sprites

[Will]

I just tried to change the weapon sprites using the item palette index here because I thought it would be cool to turn fell swords into regular swords with an added spell effect, like the icebrand. The problem persists in that while the weapon sprite changes on the menu screen, the in battle sprite remains the same. Is there any way to change this, or is it impossible to make such changes to the game? And I am using the PSP version of the game btw.

[3lric]

In shishi, the WEP1 sheet are the in-battle sprites.

[Will]

Oh ok. So I am assuming that changing a color on any pallet will change all the colors on all weapon that share the same pallet. But what if I want to change only one weapon? For example I wanted to change the Nagnarok to the sword located on 7D in Nevarie's first item pallette. That could be done, but then I would have to change the colors on the others on the same one in sishi as well. More importantly though, I want to change the fell swords to have the same weapon sprite as the Nagnarok, but with different colors. I read somewhere here that with another program, you could use hex editing to change the in-battle sprites of weapons in the BATTLE.bin but I haven't been able to find what program it is. Do you know anything about that?

[Jumza]

I think what you are looking for is in Raven's Workbooks (find the user RavenofRazgriz and his signature has the download), go to the one titled 'Item Workbook Compilation', then go to the tab 'Weapon Battle Sprites and Palettes'. There you can change all the weapon palette / weapon graphic / even the swoosh palette. After you are done, patch the XML tab on the far right using FFTOrgASM.

[Will]

Ok. I seem to have the program working now. Is this for the PSX by any chance? I cannot seem to find the fell swords. And is the swoosh the weapon sprite seen when you swing the weapon in battle?

[Jumza]

Oh sorry yeah, this is psx only. You won't find anything that detailed for editing WoTL unless you make it yourself unfortunately. Sorry I didn't notice this was about the psp version, I really only skimmed the post before

[Will]

It's all good bro lol It might work for the psp as well, but how do I patch the changes with Orgasm? I tried saving them but when I opened Orgasm, there didn't seem to be any option to do that in either program. And when I save the changes in item workbook, does it matter what format I saved the file?

[Angel]

You don't. OrgASM doesn't work with PSP. Raven's workbook doesn't work with PSP.

I really need to make a FAQ for WotL that says if you want to do anything more than replace sprites that weren't added for WotL and make minor edits to the abilities, just don't touch WotL unless you are a programmer with a 4 year degree and familiar with MIPS assembly and are willing to reverse engineer and write the code yourself.

[3lric]

orgASM works fine on the PSP version. The offsets are just different than they would be for the PSX version. From what I understand WotL is actually closer to the japanese PSX version. However, unless you have some ASMs for the Japanese version of the game, this isn't going to help much.

Old quote of Ravens from back when Archaemic was tearing into WotL:

Outside of the small edits like the Oil fixing, english text, etc, the War of the Lions ISO is almost exactly the same as the PSX Japanese ISO, meaning most-all ASM hacks compatible with the japanese version of PSX FFT "should" be compatible with War of the Lions. In fact, not only is the War of the Lions ISO nearly identical - it's actually running an emulated Japanese PSX disk with the equivalent of some ASM hacks applied to fix bugs and add the new content. This reminded me of something similar FDC told me ages back, that the PSP only runs emulated MIPs and not actual MIPs, so ASM hacks have to be written in very specific manners to work on the PSP, even if other methods would be more efficient and run on an actual PSX machine.

This is untrue with some of the files, however, fdc was able to get some working on WotL.

You still won't be able to do what you want, unless you find the offsets for the Weapon Graphics in WotL and rewrite the hack for it, assuming the info is still in the same order.

The MAIN ISSUE isn't that the tools don't work with WotL, because, asside from stuff like the attack.out editor, they do. The problem is that no one wants to spend the time making ASM/rewriting hacks for a version of the game that majority of us feel is inferior to the PSX version, especially when we already have these things readily available on the PSX version, which as I mentioned, is very much the more desired version around here.

[Will]

So I guess it seems I would be unable to do as I please with the weapons unless I start messing around with the PSX version of the game huh? I see. It's ok then. I was only trying to make a cool use of the fell swords because they all suck lol I could add the effects as intended and keep the menu sprites as I please, but it bugs me that in battle the weapons all share the same crappy looking graphics, well the first ones at least. Are all the hack tools here meant for a ROM of the PSX then? Or can they be used to mess around with an actual copy of the game? I have it for the PSX, I just never touched it because I couldn't get used to the dialogue on the Original game, as it was all weird and akward since I was used to the PSP lol

[Angel]

OrgASM stuff

From Xifanie: OrgASM doesn't work with WotL. You can port hacks with effort, but they must be applied by hand with a hex editor, not from OrgASM. (These are her words, not mine.)

From me: The Japanese PSX ISO thing is true, and known, but irrelevant here. The rules of good ASM hacking are far more strict here since it isn't just writing code a PSX can run, but writing code a very specific high level PSX emulator designed to handle one game can run, under another emulation layer entirely. It's neither here nor there, since nobody is writing ASM for WotL, and thus no reason to bring it up in this topic. To the MAIN ISSUE, Shishi has more restrictions with PSP than PSX, TacText has a lot more problems with PSP than PSX, FFTP works almost perfectly fine with one or two asterisks, and the only task that has largely different instructions but is still feasible is replacing character roster sprites. Everything else is, "dunno yet" or, "can't be bothered to look into it".

And to Will: Pretty much everything on the site was written for the PlayStation version, with some tools adding rudimentary support for PSP (some with greater success than others). Very few PSP-specific tools and hacks have been made, and some things that worked alright with PSP before, aren't quite as reliable now. Much like the FFVII modding community has chosen the PC version to stick with, we pretty much only work with the PSX version of FFT. Not to say there aren't tools for other versions, they just aren't as robust, and nothing nearly as awesome has been done.

[Xifanie]

So, here we're talking about fdc, the guy who always did everything manually, even hex edited files rather than using FFTOrgASM, and you're saying he confirmed FFTOrgASM works for WotL? Actually, you didn't say that, you just said he got PSX hacks working on PSP after modifying them, which I have no reason to not believe, and which also are not PSX hacks anymore.

I'm just trying to see how FFTOrgASM could even work as a base. Doesn't the ISO start with all that emulator stuff?

Comparing cheats that all include the memory address in themselves:

PSP CW Cheat	_L 0x002754C0 0x00000001
US PSX	3005EBF0 0001
JP PSX	8005BF44 0001

I find those two vastly different, so I really don't see how it could be that similar.
Also, FFTOrgASM patches to PSX ISO offsets no matter what, I mean sure, we can force the program to write to OPEN.BIN with SCUS_942.21 at offset 4CF0B540, but that's just a tad bit insane, and also means the hacks are perfectly incomprehensible.


EDIT: It sounds like it would be possible by exporting and editing the "JP ISO" inside the decrypted WotL ISO and importing it back. Sounds pretty obtuse, but it sounds possible. I, however, have not ever heard of any mention that it would be required for FFTOrgASM to work. I don't even own the PSP game, so I don't even know for sure if there is a big JP ISO in there that can be extracted as a single file, which would be required for this process.

EDIT2: Assuming there is a single file ISO inside the ISO, is it M2/2352? If not, it would need to be converted back and forth to be used properly with FFTOrgASM. Likewise, it the files aren't stored in M2/2352 to start with, FFTOrgASM couldn't possible patch a WotL ISO properly at all.