Final Fantasy Hacktics

Great idea, thank you.

I'm guessing the jumps are mostly happening in SCUS so the bits of code inserted there are probably the jumps

Thanks for the help guys, think I've got it now.

Choto: Thanks for the link to those files, I've already got the tools you attached but the reference sheet is really helpful.

As for using psX debugger, I have indeed tried doing that as indicated in the tutorials. My main problem at the moment is working out what to set as a breakpoint and when said breakpoint is going to be referenced. For example, in Xif's tutorial on the website, she knows exactly what she needs to set as a breakpoint and when it's going to be referenced so everything goes swimmingly. However, without knowing you can often miss it completely and for a beginner it makes you think you're just doing it wrong.

I tried to see when the game was checking one of the conditions from RAD's code so I put a breakpoint on the part that checks if a character has a Monk JLvl of X but could never get it to trigger. First I tried to see if it triggered when accessing Formation Menu, then Job Wheel, then Job Change, then I thought maybe it triggers when JP changes so I gained JP on my Monk in battle but nothing etc. I was probably selecting the wrong byte but could've also been doing it wrong.

I'll keep trudging along though. For now I think I'll look at just editing some formulas because there's a bit of an overlap with some of them.

Hi Choto,

Sorry to bother you but could I ask about the hack you made for statuses breaking on HP damage?

I'm a bit unsure as to what the inputs are. At first I thought they would be the status IDs but I'm not sure. It looks like it's looking at the list of statuses from the Data/Table section.

So I should be using those IDs. And I'm guessing Status 1 is for Table 1 (0x20) and Status 2 for Table 2 etc.

Or am I just interpreting this completely wrong?

I also wanted to ask if it's possible to specify the type of damage ie. whether it's physical or magical. I'm trying to create a Magic Ward-like status at the moment (like in Vagrant Story) so I'd only want the status to cancel on magical damage.

Thanks in advance

I just wanted to post here to share my experience with this error as well and at least how I personally avoided it.

I used to load the ISO and modify the text directly through TacText but without fail after doing this about 10 times or so I'd run into this error. I fixed it by not touching the ISO directly but instead creating and saving patches which I then applied to the ISO, and since I've never run into the error.

So if you're opening the ISO in TacText, stop and don't! Open a patch (or create a patch from the ISO), edit that, apply that to the ISO.

Thank you Xif - for now I'll just change the SRL to 0x04 - for some reason I thought that would make it divide by an additional 10 because I was looking at the binary examples in the tutorial on the website but completely forgot: duh, it's binary.

I had a question though (sorry!)

I think this is the source of my confusino: I'm still a little confused by the ori operation. I've read it as basically being an or operation but I've never encountered "or" outside of a condition of some kind. If I say ori r3, r3, 0xcccd - what exactly is that doing? Load into r3, r3 or 0xcccd? How does it decide which? The highest? Since you said later on in your post about 0xcccccccd, that seems like it's sticking r3 and 0xcccd together and storing that in r3?

So when you do ori r3, r0, 0x000a is that setting r3 to 0x000A(10) then you're dividing the Max MP / 10? If so, yeah that makes a lot more sense to me and I'm wondering why the values go so high in the original code for something as mundane as dividing by 10.

Thanks Choto, I've made a thread.

The main issues I'm facing at the moment is knowing what is stored in the registers at a particular time and understanding the constaints on what I can do. Without knowing the former, it's difficult to make sense of anything.

Hi All,

I'm trying to learn some of this but have a couple of small questions at the moment that are stumping me and it'd be great if someone could help .

For example, I would like to use a hack posted on here so that people regenerate 10% of their MP per turn. However, I personally find 10% a bit too high so I'd like to tweak it to 5%.

Now, I would've hoped this would be as simple as taking the existing code and inserting a couple of lines to simply divide where "10%" is stored by 2. However, there's a couple of issues I'm not sure about.

This is the hack at present:

lui r3,0xcccc
lhu r2,0x002e(r16)
ori r3,r3,0xcccd
multu r2,r3
mfhi r3
srl r3,r3,0x03
sh r3,0x0196(r16)
lbu r2,0x0024(r16)
ori r3,r0,0x0010
sb r3,0x01b1(r16)
jr r31
nop

So my two problems:

1. Can I even use constants? If so, I could just add divu r3,0x02 -> mfhi r3?
2. If constants can be used, how do I tell the difference between an offset being referenced or a constant?

For example, on line 1 that looks like a value is being loaded from an offset since a constant of 'cccc' would be way too high, surely? But then with SRL it appears to be a constant of $03.

For now, I've just changed it to look at Current MP rather than Max MP so at least it discourages spamming spells.

Thanks in advance.

That was really useful, thank you. Every step was covered, at no point did I feel lost

That's a shame

Thanks for the reply Choto, to be honest I've tried looking at some of the ASM hacking tutorials because it would be nice to be able to just do it myself. However, I must admit I was quite lost the last time I looked. I'm familiar with hex editing so applying ASM hacks (and checking they applied correctly) hasn't ever been a problem but some of the tutorials have gaps in them that prevent me from following - at least the one on the site. Makes me dizzy!

I'll give it another try in the mean time. The only thing I'm not sure about is that this seems to be adding new functionality to the game rather than simply changing things (like Formula hacks) so if I add more conditions doesn't that mean it'll end up overwriting existing code potentially necessary for the game to work?

My plan was to make it so many of the jobs can "evolve" into stronger versions once mastered, with access to the more powerful abilities (and some new ones) and many with a passive effect. That way there'd be incentive to master jobs and it'd be a good way of keeping the initial jobs more competitive with jobs later down the line.

Hi Guys,

I know this thread hasn't been posted in for awhile but it's relevant to the tool:

Is there any way to add additional conditions in here? There's only 3 to play with but I'd like alot more: I want to be able to place conditions on a few jobs that another job's level is below a certain amount.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Guys,

Trying to use this as well, I understand the topic hasn't been posted in for awhile but this hack looks so good I needed to ask a few questions:

1. I've not been able to quite find an explicit answer in the thread on whether it's possible or not to link one skillset to another? I am also trying to give Lancer's a new skillset but retain Jump as being automatically available when equipping the new Lancer skill set.

Looking at the sheet it appears possible but I wanted to check I'm doing this right.

I've set a new line on the Skillset tab:

Extra Slot - Equal to? - Never - 13 Secondary - New Skillset - 12 Jump

This should grant the use of Jump if I have the New Skillset as a secondary?

2. I understand it takes alot of time but is there any plans to make any form of tutorial for it? The reason I ask is because there's a plethora of stuff that could be done here but I suspect only a select few are using this in earnest because only that few understand it. That seems like an unfortunate waste.

3. Is there a way of plucking out only the part of the hack that I've changed when applying it? In other words, there's alot in this hack that is set to the default values and is included in the XML and in those cases I'm guessing it'll overwrite any modifications I've already made. I only want to apply changes not overwrite everything - is this possible?

Thank you

Hi Niteblade,

It's difficult to narrow down exactly what the issue is with the sprites. For starters, are you playing a burned copy on a physical PSX or emulating?

On the issue with the Archer abilities, unfortunately there's some real stumbling blocks with using bows and special attacks. It's been awhile since I modded any abilities/classes etc. as I'm pretty much finished with my own hobby mod, so my memory is a little hazy, but I can tell you for certain I tried to do something similar to you (I wanted to make the Archer have a lot of utility).

Eventually I managed to get the skills to execute correctly. however the animations were messed up (the arrow wouldn't actually hit the target but just go across the screen).

I think there's an intrinsic limitation with the animation and the "Aim" skill set that the only way to get past is ASM Hacking, which is way beyond my port of call. There are spreadsheets on the site which can produce code for you that acts as an ASM Hack, I believe that's how I got around the issue you're facing with the abilities not executing properly, but the animation fix would require manual intervention.

If ASM Hacking isn't an option for you then I'm afraid you might be limited to just buffing the Aim skill set - I personally made it so it could be used with other weapons so at least Archers had a skill set that transferred to other jobs.

Thanks for the vote of confidence but unfortunately, nope, I'm not!

I'm mostly making modest changes to FFT for my own personal tastes which is the main reason any change to Ramza's sprite I wanted to be able to pull off without any event editing (and of course it'd require editing 20+ events etc.) My Ramza's default class becomes an Arc Knight in Ch4 which is why I needed to make some sprite changes.

I have played around with EVSP though and it looks simple enough I just lack a full knowledge of the syntax available

Quote from: Elric on August 12, 2013, 05:48:34 pm
He could actually add in a event command to choose which palette the specific evtchr calls and could then make it one of the later pallettes. Though that seems like more work. Basicly with EVTCHR. If the EVTCHR has the same native palette as the sprite it will automatically display correctly. If not you can still make it work just fine with the EVTCHR palette command that  I documented in the EVSP thread.

EVTCHR are actually extremely simple one you know what you are working with.

Hi Elric,

Could I get a link to that thread? I probably won't understand it but hopefully it'll be fine! I find the EVTCHR palette stuff incredibly frustrating (had numerous cases of the character showing up with whacky colours).

Edit: Don't worry I found it, I thought EVSP was something else!

Firstly, at least from a starting point: don't change the order in the palette for the EVTCHR BMPs. What that means is, if you want to change Ramza's purple armour to golden, that's ok if you change the purple "slot" in the palette to golden but if you change another slot that you think is unused and repaint him using that colour it'll cause all kinds of weird and whacky effects in-game. The palette "slots" need to stay the same as they are. So as an example, in the Vanilla EVTCHR BMPs, Ramza's purple armour is colours from palette slot 4, 5 and 6. You can change those colours to new armour colours and it should work ok, but if you change the colour of palette slot 10 to golden then paint that over his armour, it will -not- show up as you'd expect. That basically means you're confined in terms of how many colours you can use for each of the parts of the sprite, I'm afraid.

Secondly, in terms of practice, I'd suggest just starting off with colour scheme changes. You can take one of the BMPs, open it in an editor that has palettes loaded (like GraphicsGale) then copy this into a normal image editing program like Photoshop, change the colour scheme to something you'd like using Photoshop's colour adjustment functions (as long as it's within the parameters of the palette) then paste it back in to GraphicsGale. If you're prompted, always choose to use the closest colour in the existing palette (it might change slightly). If you don't it'll add the colours into the palette and we get the same issues described above.

When you import it back in to EVTCHR, the tool does have a separate image for each of the palettes you select. So for Event 27, Ramza's sprite is pulled from palette # 2, so when you import the BMP back in make sure you've selected not only Event 27 but also palette # 2 ("Import" is also the top ?????? ??... button, haha).

Hope this helps.

EVTCHR is pretty finicky.

Hi Guys,

Anyone have any idea how to do this? I've got a modified Ramza sprite for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 so it looks kind of odd to see the old Ramza sprite on the World Map. I've been trying to find where this sprite is stored but unfortunately with little success.

I've searched for previous threads on this issue but they were all unanswered so hoping someone knows now!

Thanks in advance.

Just an additional comment, I think some of it may be my PSX.

My version of the game has been working great, no bugs or anything, but I've just hit a point after fighting Miluda the fight time where Death Corps raid the Beoulve house - the game crashes in this scene every time.

Here's the rub, though: I tried to get past this part simply by playing the Vanilla version of the game and then saving afterwards...this scene crashes even on the VANILLA version.

So...ARH 1.1 might work and it might just be my PSX =(

That's very true actually, thanks for destroying my post!

Hi All,

Thanks for the replies.

I tried with ARH 1.1 as well and unfortunately have run into the same issue. Not sure why this would be if Xif got it working, maybe PSX version differences or something (my PSX is the old "phat" version) but unfortunately I've just had to skip the hack.

Thanks again though

Hey guys,

I'm not sure if anyone will be able to answer this question but I'm hoping!

I recently tried to burn my modified FFT to disc to play on an actual PSX, since I want to be able to sit in bed comfy and cozy when playing FFT! After successfully loading the game up, it's working fine all the way until it has to actually enter the "game world" as such - this would include anything such as entering a scene, a battle, etc. As an example, when I start a new game it goes through everything perfectly fine until the "Orbonne Monastery" scene where the music starts and then hangs.

I've narrowed the cause of this down to one single thing: the ARH hack.

Does anyone have any idea why this would cause such an issue that ONLY appears when playing the game on a physical PSX/PS2 and any way it could be averted?

Thanks in advance!