Final Fantasy Hacktics

This has been more or less replaced by TacticsCrafter, which can achieve the same things, and should be much easier to use.

Hello there,

Today, I'm making the first public prerelease of TacticsCrafter, my WotL modding tool.



This is more or less a reboot of Chantage, my previous project. Mods can be written using lua, calling a bunch of functions to patch bytes and/or apply ASM. Unlike Chantage however, this time, mods are applied to the .iso ahead of time.

Here are the links to:
 * The tool
 * The documentation
 * A repository of scripts

Hello,

It's simply not true. There is a (small) group of people who work on WotL.
Even if it's not very active, we managed to reverse a good chunk of the game & figure out most of the data offsets.

If you have IDA Pro and an US version of WotL, you can load our annotated disassembly: https://github.com/FFT-Hackers/FFT-Disassembly

I may have been mistaken, and the sprite cap may simply be higher than on PSX. Sorry about that.

If you want to buff your characters early on, just use a save editor like Lion Editor.
If playing with PPSSPP, disable save encryption in the settings (go to memstick/PSP/SYSTEM and edit the .ini), load your game, save, rename FFTA.SYS to lioneditor.bin, edit stuff, rename to FFTA.SYS, and copy the save back.

QuoteIIRC the largest obstacle to increasing enemy variety in battles is the sprite cap. You can sort of get around this by editing their abilities. For example, you could have 3 knights in a battle, but one is equipping a bow with aim/charge as their secondary skill set, another is wielding a knight sword with two hands and has throw, and the third is using the good and old sword and shield with white magic. That's usually as good as it gets for variety. And try to avoid using two jobs of different genders as those count as two sprites.

The sprite cap is a PSX thing. There is no sprite cap in WotL.

Quick update a few months in:

The project is still going on. We've reversed a good deal of WotL at this point, and started to patch more stuff.
I've dealt with item names and descriptions. We've made a dynamic system for item descriptions. For example, edits to weapon's WP will be reflected in the description, new, custom jobs will be listed and so on.
Support for arbitrary amount of new items is getting mostly done. Still need to fix a few issues regarding animations and some menus.
I also worked a bit into expanding support, so new items can be bought from stores or treasure hunted or poached, and so on. Working fine so far!



(Image uses PSP items instead of a custom item due to some difficulties rendering custom item names in shops, but am working on it)

I am not sure I get what you mean, but you probably used your bad 0.3.0 iso as a base when applying the patch. please use a brand new ISO and apply 0.2.0 to it.

@Caster: The 0.3.0 patch was indeed corrupted, causing the crash. Sorry about that.

I'm gonna fix it. In the meantime, you can use 0.2.0.

Hello,

Well, it's not supposed to crash.

Which patch did you use? The clean-EBOOT version or the full version?
You're supposed to either use the full patch on a retail WotL US iso, or the clean-EBOOT version on a decrypted (via FFTPatcher or another utility) US WotL ISO.

Maybe there is a bug in the patch itself, I barely tested it on real hardware. Gonna investigate.

Thanks a lot, much appreciated 

The project is still up and running, it just takes a lot of time. We are (still) working on custom items. It basically work but there is a lot of work to be done to adapt the animation code, inventory code and everything related to saving.

Ok, so from your responses and what I gathered on the internet, it looks like the core problem is that the sound effects are in MIDI, and the MIDI synthetiser on the PSP and the PSX are vastly different.

Maybe we could just load wav files from the memory stick instead, fixing this issue. Are there any accurate .wav versions of the sound effects somewhere? I've seen there are wav sound effects on the ffhacktics website itself, but are those accurate?

@Argy: You mean the description, like it appears on the last screenshot? Eventually yes. Right now it does nothing.

@Heisho: I barely played the PSX version, so I never noticed about the sound. Will see what I can do but I have a metric fuckton of higher priority stuff to do before 

It also works on macOS, albeit being quite ugly (yet).

Yes, we have a .prx version of the slowdown fix that is compatible already.
What's the problem with the sound in the PSP version? I'm not aware of that.

We're working on a FFTPatcher-like tool compatible with Chantage too.

What you mean by blurry is probably bilinear/bicubic interpolation.

In PPSSPP, go to Settings, set Texture Filtering to Nearest, Screen Scaling to Nearest and disable Texture Scaling (not sure of the settings exact names, my emulator is not in english).

@Nyzer: I considered this, but I think it would be too much of a change for a mod that aims to be as vanilla as possible.
I will probably re-make this mod once the ModLoader is complete, as we could then directly give multiplayer items to enemies in the ENTD.

@Zero Dozer: Yeah, you can directly remove safeguard from Elmdore. I didn't, because using Multiplayer, you can get as many Genji equipment pieces as you want. I wanted to replicate that in the mod.

Got it to work on real hardware too!

I understand the frustration. I've lurked over this forum for years before registering, and I've certainly seen a fair share of people wanting to do WotL, before being discouraged by the lack of proper tooling (except for patcher). That's part of why I joined