Final Fantasy Hacktics

Quote from: "deyama"Sorry for bothering, but it doesn't T__T But the error message has changed to:

What are you trying to use as the filename? From the error message, it sounds like you're using characters that aren't on this chart in the filename... I suppose Ganesha should support Unicode or something for filenames, but for now, can you try using only standard ASCII characters (or, more simply: just alphanumerics, underscore, and period)?

If you're already using standard ASCII characters, then that's a different story...

Come to think of it, it's much easier if I just post a patched world.py file. Just download this file, unzip it, and replace C:\Program Files\ganesha-0.60\game\ganesha\world.py with the unzipped world.py file. That should fix it, but let me know if it doesn't.

Quote from: "deyama"As for Ganesha, there is some error that prevents me from outputting PNG's... I just press O, browse the directory to put the file in and that's what I get ...

Thanks for the bug report. I haven't seen that bug before, but I think I know what's causing it. It's weird that nobody else seems to have encountered it... I can't think of a reason why that part of the program would work differently on different computers.

I don't know when the next Ganesha release will be, but if you're feeling adventurous, I can give you some instructions that might fix this error. It would involve editing just a few lines of C:\Program Files\ganesha-0.60\game\ganesha\world.py. You'd need to use an editor that understands Unix-style line endings (e.g. Notepad++, not regular Notepad). Let me know if you want to try it.

Looks nice, Zodiac!

I don't know why it's not opening in map2gl (I can't test it right now), but there's a section about those black polygons in the Ganesha documentation. Basically, it seems the black polygons are always drawn after the textured polygons, so even if a black polygon is behind a textured polygon, it'll cover up the textured polygon.

You should be able to get around this with the "Invisible from" checkboxes. For the black polygon(s) that shouldn't be showing in your last image (the one with "0.5h" in it), I think you'll want the ESE and SE boxes checked, and maybe SSE too. That will hide the polygon(s) when viewed from those angles (i.e. when the camera is ESE, SE, or SSE of the center of the map). You won't be able to see your changes in Ganesha, but in map2gl and in the game, the polygon should disappear when viewed from those angles. If you want to get a better feel for this, try messing with the checkboxes for a polygon that's normally always visible, like a flat horizontal polygon on a flat map.

In the game, the four two-letter directions (NW, NE, SW, SE) are used when the camera is not rotating (i.e. most of the time), and the eight three-letter directions are used while the camera is rotating. I don't know what ?0, ?1, ?14, and ?15 do, but ?0 is normally checked and the others are not.

I think Ganesha 0.60 and earlier have some of the checkboxes in the wrong place. This shouldn't hurt anything, but it'll make it more confusing when you're trying to find the one you want. They're still labeled correctly, they're just not arranged correctly in relationship to each other.

Yeah, some of the story elements in VC2 are kinda silly. But, on the other hand, I do like that they have story sequences for pretty much all of the characters, not just the major ones like in VC1.

And yeah, the small and often-recycled maps are my biggest complaint about the actual battle system in VC2, but that has its upside too, I guess: It's kind of nice to be familiar with the map while planning your strategy.

In case  you haven't seen it, the official site for VC3 is up:

http://valkyria3.jp/

Here are some screenshots:

http://www.andriasang.com/e/galleries/2 ... 3_screens/

It's on PSP again. Too bad, but at least there's going to be another game. I'm playing VC2 on the PSP right now and enjoying it.

Glad you guys got it working!

Quote from: "Cheetah"Wow okay so I have it running natively through the source Gomtuu and it is running at lighting speed, I feel so dump for not doing this earlier.

I'm still working on March. I didn't get to play much this weekend because of my trip. I did pick raspberries and get some fresh donuts and cider from a local cider mill, though!

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I'm working on adding the editing panel I mentioned. Here's an early peek:

It's going to take some time because GUI programming is slow work, but I think it'll make editing quite a bit easier. (Also, I apologize in advance: Metroid: Other M and Valkyria Chronicles 2 come out on Tuesday, and I'm visiting Michigan this weekend, all of which will slow me down. So I'm just waiting for the Panda3D developers to fix their wxPython package, and then I can distribute my much more convenient .P3D file!

Here's a nice bit of news:

http://kotaku.com/5620258/there-could-b ... kyria-game

It's not much, but it's nice to know Sega's at least thinking about making another Valkyria Chronicles game.

Quote from: "Cheetah"1) Copy paste of palettes and individual colors. It takes me about 10-15 minutes to do each row manually.
2) Copy paste of polygons. I often after multiple maps open at once just taking bits from other maps, and this would save so much time.

I'll look into adding copy/paste features, although I'm not sure how easy it would be to copy and paste between two separate instances of Ganesha...

Quote from: "Cheetah"3) Rotating polygons by 45 degrees.

45 degrees? Wouldn't you normally want to rotate polygons in 90-degree increments (around the Y axis) or by increments that correspond to slope angles (around the X and Z axes)?

Quote from: "Cheetah"4) An automated feature to automatically have the U&V coordinates represent a size equal to that of a new polygon.
5) A similar quick adjust for UV coordinates like what you have for polygons.

New polygons already start with an appropriately-sized UV polygon, don't they? (I mean, except for the bug we've been discussing, where they're one pixel too big in each dimension.) And while a quick-adjust feature might be useful, your question makes me wonder: Did you know you can click and drag the UV polygon? You can either click inside the polygon and drag the whole thing, or click and drag the individual points. You just have to zoom in first by rolling the mouse wheel up while the mouse pointer is over the UV window.

Quote from: "Cheetah"Wow those are some impressive findings, I bet the programmers of those emulators would appreciate hearing about this, it might clear up a lot of minor graphical glitches going on.

Yeah, that would be cool! I asked about it on the ePSXe forums, so we'll see. It seems unlikely to me that nobody would've figured this out before, though, given that coding a PSX emulator would take more technical knowledge than I have and that there are thousands of users to report graphical problems... Maybe there's some reason why emulators sample textures this way.

Quote from: "LastingDawn"As wonderful as this tool is, there is a surprisingly much more comprehensive tool for Zelda 64, called Utility of Time. I'm not sure if it would be Any help as a template. But if you have the time Gomtuu, you should look it up.

I took a quick look at a tutorial video on YouTube. You know, the basic design of the program, with the 3D area on the left and the editing panel on the right, is something I considered for Ganesha early on (since it's fairly common for 3D editors), but I assumed it would be hard to get the 3D stuff and the editing stuff in the same window, so I never tried it. I experimented with it this weekend, though, and it's easier than I thought. I've already added a menu bar with options for saving/loading map files, importing/exporting textures, adding polygons, etc. All the same functionality is still there, but it's all in menus so you don't have to remember keyboard shortcuts, which I think makes things easier.

Now, I could make an editing panel on the right side of the main Ganesha window and move all the stuff from the pop-up windows into that panel (with tabs or something to make it all fit), but I'm not entirely sure that's an improvement. Keeping everything together in one window would make Ganesha easier to use, I guess, but you'd lose the flexibility of being able to move the windows around wherever you want and let them overlap if they don't quite fit on your screen...

What do you guys think?

Quote from: "Cheetah"Bottom line though is that if I just subtract a pixel from the two edges you indicated, then it will all work out.

Most of the time, yes. The point of the exception was that, in some cases, the fact that Ganesha displays the UV polygon too far to the left and top by a half a pixel could also affect the left and top sides of the UV polygon. But this is relatively rare, and even if you get it wrong, the effect is small.

Quote from: "Cheetah"Also, will making these adjustments mess things up when imported into a newer version of Ganesha, or is it all good?

No, you should go ahead and make the adjustments to your polygons. The newer Ganesha won't change your UV data at all, it'll just represent it more accurately.

Speaking of accuracy, here's what I've found so far. The following all sample textures from the center of texture pixels:

• Playstation 2 (original CD)
• Playstation 3 (original CD)
• PSP (PSX ISO running on CFW)
• PSP (War of the Lions UMD)
• map2gl
• The next version of Ganesha

I don't have an original PSX available to test it, but I'm willing to bet it would be in this first category, too.

Therefore, the following all sample textures incorrectly (from the top-left corner of texture pixels):

• Ganesha 0.60 and earlier
• ePSXe 1.7.0 (I tested Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.7 and P.E.Op.S Soft Driver 1.17)
• pSX 1.13
• PCSXTrace 1.5a

Quote from: "Cheetah"So specifically, which corners/sides am I decreasing by one pixel? Just because it is constantly changing depending on the rotation of the polygon.

Regardless of the orientation of the polygon, the right and bottom edges are the ones that need to be adjusted (for an exception, see the note below). Here's another image to show what I mean:

Ganesha 0.60 displays the UV polygon as shown in the left side of the above image. It should (and the next version will) display it as shown in the right side of the image. Notice how the whole polygon is shifted down and to the right by half of a texture pixel. For the top and left edges of the polygon, this doesn't make much of a difference (again, see the note below for an exception), because even though a bit of the texture is being cut off, it's still showing at least part of the top row and left column of texture pixels. But for the right and bottom edges, there is a significant difference, because the texture now includes half a column of pixels on the right and half a row of pixels on the bottom that didn't seem to be included in the UV polygon on the left side of the image.

Exception: In the buttress image from my previous post, Ganesha 0.60 would have given you the impression that the texture would include some pixels from that black area at the top-left edge of the polygon, so if you were making a similar polygon, you might be inclined to move the blue point down one pixel and/or the green point right one pixel in order to avoid the black pixels, but this is not necessary because Ganesha is displaying those points incorrectly: the "real" position of those points (and the red one, too) is half a pixel down and to the right of what Ganesha is showing.

I hope this makes sense. And in the next version of Ganesha, you won't need to worry about it, because the UV window will more accurately show the texture area that the PSX would use.

Quote from: "Cheetah"But I have a problem. I was under the impression that each standard polygon used a 20x20 pixel texture. However, I'm noticing that they are often assigned one pixel less per side, and that with all my careful laying out that an additional row/column of pixels is showing up even though it isn't in the coordinates I assigned it.

Yeah, I noticed that too while I was working on the UV window. At first, I thought it was a bug in my code, but here's a comparison of Ganesha's 3D view, Ganesha's UV view, and an in-game screenshot from ePSXe 1.7.0.

Notice how the right (red-blue) side of the water texture only includes one pixel of the dark (that is, dark when the palette is applied, but light when grayscale) border part of the texture... It seems wrong, but the in-game screenshot is the same way.

HOWEVER, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure ePSXe is doing it wrong. I seem to remember reading that the PSX doesn't sample textures from the top-left corner of each texture pixel, it samples them from the center of each texture pixel instead. Imagine moving that UV polygon down by half of a texture pixel and to the right by half of a texture pixel. Then the border on each side would be 1.5 pixels wide. That's what map2gl is doing, if I remember correctly. I'd love it if someone verified this by playing the original game on a real Playstation 1. It would also be nice to know what the PS2, PS3, and PSP do. These screenshots are from the SW corner of MAP056, if you can't tell.

This would also explain why the monastery's buttresses have that ugly blue fringe in ePSXe:

If that UV polygon was moved half a pixel down and to the right, then it wouldn't include that black stuff, which shows up blue in-game. And indeed, when I view this map in map2gl, I don't see those blue fringes. This seems like pretty good evidence that ePSXe is wrong. (And so is Ganesha.)

Here's what I would suggest: You probably can't go wrong doing what the original game designers did, so just make the right edge of your UV polygons 1 pixel left of where it seems like it should be, and make the bottom edge 1 pixel higher than it seems like it should be. This is because Ganesha displays every point in the UV polygon half a pixel too high and half a pixel too far to the left. Unfortunately, this means the default UV coordinates for new polygons created by Ganesha 0.60 and earlier are one pixel bigger than they should be in both dimensions...

I'll fix Ganesha so it creates new polygons properly, displays the textures properly in 3D, and displays the UV polygon properly in the UV window. It won't match up with ePSXe anymore, but it should be more correct.

Nice catch, Cheetah! Thanks!

Version 0.60 is here! Download it at the Ganesha website:

http://gomtuu.org/fft/Ganesha/

Changes include:

• Added code to detect and fix broken polygons created in 0.55. (Like this.)
• Put new polygons at maxY+12 instead of maxY+1.
• Added ability to edit UV coordinates in a popup window.
• Fixed texture import bug when used in Windows.
• Fixed bug that prevented Guess Normal Coordinates from working on triangles.

See the instructions for information on how to use the new UV Coordinates window.

Quote from: "Seth"WTH is this Now?

Unfortunately, I don't have a clue... I'll try to look into it, though.

Quote from: "Cheetah"So I tried to import a texture and the program throw me a giant error and crashed. Has anyone successfully important new textures? I even tried an unedited png that I had just exported from a different map and it didn't work. I have attached the error message.

This bug was surprisingly hard to track down, yet incredibly simple. The next release, due out any day now, will include the fix.

The next release will also allow easy point-and-click editing of polygons' UV coordinates. Stay tuned!

I love Valkyria Chronicles so far. I want all my tactical RPGs to be made that way from now on. I definitely want to come back to it once I finish FFXIII. It took me a while to warm up to FFXIII, actually, but I'm enjoying it now.

I'll see if I can get to the bottom of that texture import problem. Thanks for the bug report.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I bought a PS3 a few weeks ago, and I was playing Valkyria Chronicles until FFXIII came out.

I'm leaving for a 3-week trip on March 24th, so I'll try to get another release out by then. I'll look into that error, Cheetah. Which texture file were you trying to export/import?

I'm making progress on the the visual UV coordinate chooser, but it still needs a few more days' worth of work. Here's a preview:


You'll see this window when you click the new "Show UV" button in the Edit Polygon window. The magenta polygon (in the upper-left corner of the lower-left texture page) shows the area of the texture that's used by the currently-selected polygon. At the very least, I want to make the magenta polygon update when you click the Apply button so you can see the effect of your changes, but what I really want to do is let you click and drag the points of the polygon around to set the UV coordinates. I'll also try to make it so you can zoom in to pick the right coordinates more easily.

Quote from: "Zodiac"Even if you calculate instantly the coodinates of your new polygon it takes a while to create the poly and enter all its coordinates.

Have you seen 0.57? I added buttons to the polygon edit window that move polygons around a tile at a time.

Quote from: "Cheetah"a quick rotate function for polygons would be amazing. Especially for verticle polygons so that they can be easy made to work from different directions. Even just so that in the create polygon option you could choose it to be verticle and which direction to be facing by default would save lots of time.

Added to to-do list.

Quote from: "Vanya"Perhaps an option to *zero out* a level would be a great addition

You can already do this with terrain by setting the dimensions to 0 and then back to the dimensions you want. But polygons are a different story. I guess I could add a "delete all polygons" option or something. And a feature to create new polygons based on existing terrain tiles has already been mentioned. This is on my list.

Quote from: "Zodiac"Damn, and I edited all the top textures of the gate in Ganesha; displays fine in Ganesha but I still get the "null" textures in-game.
Kokobo told me you working on a fix.

In 0.57, I fixed the bug that causes new polygons to look like that. However, any polygons you had already created in 0.55 will continue to look wrong even if you load the map in 0.57 and save it. I wanted to make 0.57 detect these incorrectly-created polygons and fix them automatically, but that slipped my mind before I released it. The latest development version has this feature, though. So to fix this, you can either load the map in 0.57 and manually replace all the bad polygons, or you can wait for the next Ganesha release, then just load your map and save it, which should fix the bad polygons automatically.

Quote from: "Zodiac"Don't forget to make the Starting Y +12 instead of +1 (to avoid manually lowering by 1).

This is fixed in the latest dev version.

Quote from: "Kokojo"Changed map, thanks to Zodiac's methods of adding sectors.

Very nice! I've been working on a way of giving all the map files more sectors (taking advantage of the fact that about 43MB worth of files in the MAP folder are duplicates and could probably be deleted), but maybe that's not a high priority anymore?

Quote from: "Cheetah"though I'm sure vectors and textures are going to be an uber bitch.

It looks like your map is mostly flat surfaces, so Guess Normal Vectors should take care of most of your polygons. It'll be up to you whether you want to smooth out some of the corners manually.

As for the textures, I'm working on it, but it may take a while...