FFT Patcher (.497)

[Argy]

Wow Glain. That is brilliant. Keep up the good work. The amount of time that this will save will be brilliant!!

[Glain]

I can see what other files I may be able to add in there... I'm currently experimenting with EVTCHR and EVTFACE, which would have to be split into sections in Shishi. Are there any specific files that we want to see added in there?

I should mention that I changed the way Shishi deals with 4bpp (16 color) paletted bitmaps in the Other Images section, because the way it was working before was... strange, to say the least. (Exporting the images as GIFs, getting the background color wrong, saving the palette in an arbitrary/random order, oh my!) 

You'll see in the screenshots that there's a "Palette" dropdown for FRAME.BIN and ITEM.BIN. Shishi now imports or exports those images into 4bpp paletted bitmaps with whatever palette you selected, and the imported/exported file should only have that one palette in it. I experimented with allowing an option that would allow you to have all the palette data in one bitmap, but there's really no way to specify multiple palettes in a bitmap as far as I'm aware. We could provide an option to download as an 8bpp (256 color) paletted bitmap, which would allow you to cram all the colors of 16 palettes into one huge 256-color palette, but the image would always display in the first palette, the exported image data would be double the size, and you're still out of luck if you go beyond 16 palettes (FRAME.BIN, for example, has 22), so I didn't want to go there.

As for an update, I've already updated the Git repository, so in theory anyone could check it out whenever, but you may have to compile the code first.  I could do a local build and release it whenever, really.

[Argy]

Glain, a local build would be absolutely brilliant. (I was looking for it on GitHub and couldn't find it. It's just me!!) I have been using Tilemolester for a while and its hard playing with the palettes).

The beautiful thing will be, being able to use Graphics Gale and change the type of sword for example and then recolor it to suit. I am sure this is true for quite a few people. Also being able to make quick changes in the FRAME.BIN as well, will be nice.

Once again, well done on this.  

[Glain]

All right, so I'm now releasing FFTPatcher suite v0.491, which includes all my recent changes to Shishi, as well as a few other changes! I made a release for it on the online repository here, which also includes the release notes. Tell me what you think and let me know if you find anything wrong with it!

[Argy]

Argy quietly downloads......

[Emmy]

Removed the checkboxes. They had no purpose (and took a long time to render when switching tabs!)

Thank you for this!

Fixed various issues with the ASM encoder.

Does this include the bug that I found where 2 hacks that are incompatible with each other might not be found by the Conflict checker?

Anyway thank you for the new Patcher!

[Xifanie]

The conflict checker was made by Choto. The encoder is what turns ASM into hex. If you look at Glain's xml file you'll see all his hacks are stored as ASM in it. He coded that feature entirely on his own as melonhead did not.

*checks out the new shishi*

EDIT: ALL the new features! I really love the ability to easily individually import/export EVTCHRs, BONUS.BINs, And the option to import individual UNIT.BIN frames is pretty awesome too. It all seems to work very well.   
And I'm really REALLY happy that you separated the ITEM.BIN "Orbonne Monastery" from the maps list. We could never tell which one was which and that was really annoying. (And I do like that ITEM.BIN still has the Orbonne Monastery part since it's part of the same image, and that suits my purposes)

I'm surprised some old issues still persist though:

• OPNTEX 12 is the wrong width


• OPNBK4/OPNBK5/OPNBK6/OPNBK7 are all misaligned by a few bytes

Those improvements really kick ass though. We've been wanting for them for a long time. \o/

[Glain]

Thanks! Glad to hear it's working for you!

Thanks for the feedback as well about some problems with the OPNTEX and OPNBK images. I hadn't looked at some of that image data closely. I've updated the release to fix those issues!

[3lric]

Great job Glain, I tested it with WotL (for some ungodly reason) and it turns out you are missing a few EVTCHR, there are 2 or 3 more sheets that extend past the PSX version of EVTCHR.BIN which are used for Luso and Balthier.

Also there seems to be a lot of blank space in many of the images for the PSP version.

[CONMAN]

Just wanted to say thanks a bunch Glain!  This update makes modding a lot easier!

[Glain]

Thanks, glad to hear it!

I added the additional EVTCHRs to the PSP version and updated the release... I think there were six additional EVTCHRs.  And yeah... I noticed that about the image sizes too, where the images had a lot of blank space, but it was that way in the older versions of Shishi as well, and I assume that's just the way those images are in the PSP version for whatever reason.  Some of the PSP images also use a different transparent color and even different color depth than the PSX version.

[Xifanie]

I'm not one who's really using FFTPatcher all that much, but I know that looking at a heavily altered mod's FFTP data, such as JotF, there's blue everywhere... it's pointless and irritating. In fact, I'm not even sure why the "blueing" is there to start with, and I kinda wish it were gone?

And a personal request: in the credits, edit this appropriately >_>; "ZodiacFFTM: For his awesome Excel spreadsheets on which this application was based"

[Glain]

All right, so I've updated the release yet again with those changes as well.

The way I handled the colors for modified values was to make them configurable by adding a Settings.xml.  Set the UseModifiedColor node Value attribute to false if you don't want the colors changed at all, or you can configure the foreground and background colors used by editing the RGB values.  I also changed the default color to be lighter and hopefully not contrast as much.

[Xifanie]

Hell yeah Glain, you're the best!
That bothered me for years!

[Xifanie]

One small issue with this new feature; FFTOrgASM tries to parse Settings.xml. Might want to have FFTPatcher parse it as xml while the extension isn't xml? Idunno.

[Glain]

Thanks!
Okay, so I dealt with the new issue by moving all the XML patches to their own XmlPatches directory, and that's the directory that gets scanned now.  New release up yet again!

[Xifanie]

Actually, I think I prefer it that way. Less clutter. Good idea Glain!

[Xifanie]

Actually, while we're on the subject of improving FFTPatcher...
Abilities 0x017E to 0x01A5 are missing the ability to edit their effect
The 0x0800 flag is "animate effect on item impact". I can't put it in a better way... it's used by chemist items and Ninja balls, yet just makes the game hang if you try to get it to work with anything that doesn't use an item.

Otherwise you already fixed the animation tab...

The "Monster Skills" tab says "Beastmaster" in the PSX version

On the "Move-Find Item" tab, looking at the code, the first flag 0x80 would be "Higher Elevation" not "No Activation"

[3lric]

A couple more things Glain,

1) Are you sure that WLDFACE4.BIN holds the images you have associated with it in Shishi? From my understanding WLDFACE4 is unused, and EVGRP doesn't even require you to load WLDFACE4 to see those images IIRC.

2) While I can add in different memory card images now, they don't seem to work. If I load from one of my saves, I can save all 15 slots on the memory card (or even a new memory card) but in the memory card screen after ejecting the disc (I'm using pSX) it still shows all the old images?

Hoping you can get that fixed since Twin just spent a bunch of time making our new memory card icons for Jot5

[Glain]

1) Yeah, I mean, the image data in the WLDFACE4.BIN section is pulling from there. And yeah, it's duplicate data. It's just a copy of the final 40 entries of WLDFACE.BIN, and probably doesn't get used for anything. But yes, Shishi is pulling that image data from the sector enumerated as EVENT_WLDFACE4_BIN (6314), which to my understanding is where WLDFACE4.BIN is. (WLDFACE.BIN is at sector 6330, so it's not just looking at the end of that file.)

2) I... am not sure why that doesn't work. I mean, if you open your disc image in Shishi and it pulls in the new memcard images, they must have been changed in your disc image's CARD.OUT file (you could verify this by exporting the file and checking the differences with the original). Why that wouldn't correspond to the images actually changing in the memory card screen is another question... do we know when the image to be saved to the memcard is loaded from the disc image? Could it be saving an image that it already loaded before the change was made in Shishi?