Been gone a long time, need to get up to speed.

[Devon_v]

Hello all, don't recall if I ever posted before, but I used to lurk here way back when 1.3 first came out. Basically, as I said in the title, I'm trying to get back up to speed on the current state of hacking. I see many utilities have been improved and updated, and I'm downloading them now, but reading through the forums I'm having a hard time separating the outdated info from what's currently relevant. I'll bold my actual questions to help keep this from getting too tedious.

Shishi now edits the ISO directly I see, that's a nice improvement, and I see that sprite sizes have been sorted out so that everything fits in any slot. However, are the type assignments still hard coded? I see the Type1/Type2/MON etc. drop downs in Shishi, but are those just for the in-editor preview, or can you actually overwrite a Type2 sprite with a Type1? (Yes, I'm looking at you, cloned Celia and Lede.)

As for making room for new characters/jobs, what's with 35-39, 3D, 3F, 42, 44, etc up to 57-5C on the job list? They are duplicate versions of generic jobs. Do they actually do anything, or now that all of the jobs have an associated spritesheet, (after extension) can they be safely rewritten? 9B-9F also work I understand, but anything higher than that has no job data at all, correct? What types are the final five sprites?

For that matter, when creating new playable jobs, is it actually necessary (aside from appearance) to replace jobs with an associated formation sprite and portrait? I recall Gamesharking a lot of villains into my party years ago, and most of them worked fine aside from looking weird in the formation screen. Am I correct in assuming that even with the extended spritesheets, the formation sprite links are still hard coded, and will only work with the same characters they've always done so with?


Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for answering any of my questions. I still love this game, and I'd love to run some custom characters though 1.3 with the PSP text. (1.3 kicks my ass with normal characters.)

[formerdeathcorps]

Type assignments are not hard-coded.  You can change them freely in 457+.  Duplicates can be freely rewritten.  Yes, it is still necessary to replace jobs with the associated formation sprite and portrait because without it, you cannot learn your moves in the formation screen and enemies will set their base class as that of their sprite.

[Devon_v]

So what happens if you don't have a formation sprite? The unit cannot be accessed at all on the formation screen?

There's a difference between not having one and having a glitchy one then, huh? Balmafula I recall doesn't display correctly on the formation screen, but she does have a sprite of some sort.

So does that mean that the jobs listed in Zozma's post here:
viewtopic.php?t=1828&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

...are the only ones that can be used to add a fully playable special character to the game? All of the other duplicates can only be used to create special enemy units?

[Timbo]

I'd like to know which one of these is the best to remove in order to allow for one new playable special unit without affecting gameplay (with necessary changes to the ENTD)?

[Devon_v]

Dead Malak I think, now that the ISO expansion allows you to put a full 64K sprite in his slot. As far as I know, this sprite is used exactly once, in the cutscene atop Riovanes when he's resurrected.

After that it's condensing Agrias/Gafgarion/Rafa/Meliadoul's guest/join jobs.