Final Fantasy Hacktics

Yes, if I'm not mistaken it will, except for the cutscenes, I belive that's controlled by a different file.

Yea lol, I should of hit Icon 6 months ago but thanks to school I'm still only an Elite.  I check out gamefaqs from time to time, but haven't posted anything meaningful in a while thanks to homework, my accounting homework takes anywhere from 2-3 hours, and my supply chain management homework takes anywhere from 4-12 hours to complete.  Not to mention I also have a business law class and english class so there's lots of papers to write as well.  Thank god I have two easier classes this semester with short homework assignments that only take an hour at most.  I doubt my schedule is gonna get any better, according to my advisor the classes only get harder and the workload only get heavier as I go further, especially because I'm doing a double major.  It's worse because I took it easy in the beginning when the classes were easy and only took 12-15 credits a semester and now I'm forced to take 18 credits a semester until I graduate when the classes are getting tougher.  I haven't actually "played" anything on my PSP in a while either, I think it been a month or more lol.  But anyway nice to see a familiar face again.

The problem isn't importing it's croping and converting the right-front facing sprite into 16 color bitmap, so that they can be imported into the UNIT.BIN with FFEVGRP.

@XUltimaX

I'll see what I can do. I might take awhile since I've got homework and 5 papers to write.  I'll do what I can and post them as I finish them.

Although I recommend you do all your editing in graphicsgale I've never used it either.  I use paint but I don't recommend you use MS Paint, you will experience very bad colorloss when saving as 16 color even though the sprites only use 16 colors.

Just so you know the sprite in the UNIT.BIN is just the front-right facing sprite, so you'll need to remove all the other stuff if you're working from a exported spritesheet.  The sprites in the UNIT.BIN are 24x40 pixels including the black background.

1. First you'll want to create a new folder on your desktop or whereever your workspace is.

2. Load up your ISO in UMDGen.

3  In the USRDIR directory there should be a fftpack.bin, extract that out to your workspace.

4. Next you'll want to load up FFTPatcher.

5. Under the PSP menu thereshould be a utilities  section, select "Extact fftpack.bin..."

6. Select your fftpack.bin that you extracted when prompted and hit open.

7. When prompted to select a location to extract to select the folder in step 1, FFTPatcher will extract all the files inside to that location.

If you look inside the folder you'll have a bunch of folders and files.  The UNIT.BIN is inside the EVENT folder.  Once your done editing the file you'll need to rebuild the fftpack.bin with FFTPatcher and insert the newly created fftpack.bin into the ISO using UMDGen.

Editing the UNIT.BIN with FFTEVGRP is how you change the formation screen sprites.  you need to replace the sprite of the old character with the new characters sprite.  e.g.  You replace Cloud with Sephiroth, you'll need load up UNIT.BIN in FFTEVGRP export cloud's sprite and crop Sephiroth's sprite over his and reinsert the new sprite.

Crap! I'm a friggin idiot.  Completely forgot about Lioneditor.  If you've already got the characters in your party you can use lionditor to just rename them.

It's up for me.

You'll need to use Tactext and replace the name of the person you replaced with the new characters name.  You'll want to be careful, while Tactext is far more stable than it used to be it still can cause issues.  I recommend creating copies of your currently edited ISO as backup.  What you want to do with Tactext is edit the text while keeping the data size increase to a minimum.

The newest release of Shishi does not let you exceed the maximum byte size.  However if you download the older version (I have version .352 which you can get from the lioneditor google page) it can force in sprites which are larger than the maximum.

To have them show up in the formation screen you'll need to replace sprites of characters that have formation screen sprites.  Every special character that joins has a formation screen sprite, all generics have a formation screen sprite, and a couple other characters.  Formation screen sprites are stored in the UNIT.bin file.  The very last post of the spriting tutorial is by me I go over how to replace formation screen sprites.

Essentially what you need to do is:

1.  Replace Sprite
2.  Edit Job, skillset
3.  Edit ENTD
4.  Edit UNIT.BIN

I'd give you a personal tutorial but I'm in class right now.  If you can wait I'll post a tutorial or upload a video tutorial later tonight when I'm done with school and work.  Most of the information you need is scattered throughout the boards you can look for it and ue that as well if you cant wait.

Depends on what you want.  Do you still want them to have formation screen sprites? If so there 2 ways to go about this. There's a 3rd option if you don't care about formation screen sprites.

1.  Replace generic jobs that you don't want or need in your game.  But then generics will have access to them.  Even if you make it impossible for them to access at first by having the job require levels in itself they will eventually learn it through spillover JP, to fix that you'll need an ASM hack to stop spillover JP.

2.  Replace special character.  The issure here is that most special characters have cutscenes that they are involved in, if you don't care about the cutscenes then you're all fine.  But if you do you'll need to do some event editing to fix that, which is a time consuming and requires more knowledge than I have.

3.  If you don't care about formation screen sprites then it's easy, there are several characters that utilize multiple spritesheets, simply replace one of them and edit the ENTDs to replace all occurances of the altered sprite with their other sprite.

You could use a combination of 1, 2, and 3 to achieve your goal as well.

There's a spriting tutorial in the Help forums if you need to help on that.

You'll also need to create skillsets and alter jobs stuff for your characters.  e.g. Marach has 2 spritesheets, one of them is linked to a job that has zeroes in both the multiplier and growth values as well as always starting off dead. (The dead one is the one most people replace seeing as the other is the one that joins your party)

1.  You cant get them without hacking

2.  I'll tell you right now, It's not possible to get all those characters in the game the way you want because there is a limit to replaceable formation screen sprites (At most without losing any special characters or generics you can get 3 in) and you'll need to do quite a bit of work in Shishi Sprite Editor, FFTPatcher, FFTEVGRP, and some work in Tactext (to get the lores and names down correctly) just to get those 3.  

3.  If you're willing to ignore them having glitchy formation screen sprite you can add quite a bit more than 3 (you'll be able to get most of them in there).

4.  If you're willing to do number 3 above and sacrafice some generics or special characters you'll be able to get them all in there.

The major roadblock is that you cant really add anything new, you can only replace things, and replacing requires sacraficing.

You'll want to becarefull with shishi though.  It saves as soon as you change the sprites.  I still prefer the older version as it has certain advantages over the new version.

yup, it's me.  Never thought I'd be back what with school ramped up like it did.  But I somehow managed to get the chance to check the board on occasion.  There's beensome neat advancements in the community.  Some nice ASM hacks, new custom sprites, I found out quite a while back that it's possible to change formation screen sprites to some degree on the PSP version.  Patcher now has an animation tab, so now you can put sword swings on just about any skill, or change it so that skills use the summon animation (spinning bubbles before cast), etc.  Check it out if you've got time.  I still don't have time, homework eats up easily 6+ hours of my day.

version .457 is the most recent if I'm not mistaken.  Should be a link from the downloads section.

Yup, oddly enough the thread is still archived there.  Yup he posted his email in the thread it's:

lord_skylark@yahoo.com

Wow, that's an old thread.  From way back in '08, whoa I think that was my freshman year at college.

Yes, it was lordskylark from the gamefaqs boards.  He extracted the AT3 files that he wanted from the PMFs found in the ISO but the AT3 files that are used by the game are not normal AT3 or something like that so they were unplayable and needed to be converted to a playable format.  I did the conversion for him because it required a PSP which he didn't have.

I don't have all of it but I do have some.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YC8O1QB6

The guy extracted the audio from the scenes with mplayer and I converted it to .wav for him.

Just some info

1.  UNIT.BIN is editable on the PSP version as well. (I assume the WLDFACE.BIN is also editable since it can also be loaded after extraction but I havent tested it yet,  I do know that FFTEVGRP can open both.)

Steps Involved:

A.  Extract FFTPack with UMDGen
B.  Decrypt FFTPack with FFTPatcher
C.  Start FFTEVGRP
D.  Load UNIT.BIN/WLDFACE.BIN
E.  Edit just like the PSX Version
F.  Click Save
G.  Repack FFTPack with FFTPatcher
H.  Replace FFTPack in ISO with new FFTPack using UMDGen
I.  Save new ISO with UMDGen

2.  The older versions of Shishi (at least the version packaged with v .352 of FFTPatcher) seems to be able to force in sprites with larger than the Max SPR size.  (not sure if there are any adverse effects though)