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Tactics Ogre modding

Started by theultrawolf, November 21, 2015, 04:20:45 am

theultrawolf

November 21, 2015, 04:20:45 am Last Edit: November 21, 2015, 06:21:30 am by theultrawolf
As you may or may not know, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (SNES, PSX) (and its remake for PSP that's FAR superior to WoTL) and the GBA game Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis were made by the same individuals who made FFT, in particular Yasumi Matsuno, Hitoshi Sakimoto, and Masaharu Iwata. There's a forum dedicated to TO and some people over there are in fact interested in modding the game, referenced by the links following:
http://w11.zetaboards.com/Tactics_Ogre_Forums/forum/53562/
http://w11.zetaboards.com/Tactics_Ogre_Forums/topic/928394/1/

My question is this: Would anyone in particular be up for trying to get our two communities to work together on possibly making hacking tools/mods for Tactics Ogre? I have all three games and I would be willing to extract the files necessary to be examined and looked through; these guys have already figured some things out and a few successful Japanese hacks exist, but they can't seem to get the tools to work or get access to them, since they don't have anyone over there who knows Japanese.
I feel like this is a potential gold mound just waiting to be mined, and we could probably find out how to use the Japanese tools in order to create mods for those games just like FFT.

Here's a site with a bunch of sprites and tools on it:
http://www7.atwiki.jp/tacticsogre/pages/67.html
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

Doctus

November 21, 2015, 01:17:30 pm #1 Last Edit: November 21, 2015, 01:25:47 pm by Doctus
As you perhaps knew already, the stuff there appears to be dedicated to hacking the Super Famicom version. The tools seem reasonably robust (aside from the bizarre library dependencies typical of Japanese freeware).

I poked through one of the tools a bit and found a way to (mostly) translate the interface. It's capable of editing items, spells, class features, and some similar things. Surprisingly, it appeared to be sorta compatible with the English translation patch as well... although it looked like it loaded in some different values to a small handful of fields, so no guarantees there; I'm not super-familiar with the game, so maybe those items really did have different properties set.

Another one is capable of exporting and importing character names, portraits, and unit graphics.

theultrawolf

Yeah it does seem like it. I've heard the people on there basically saying that those interfaces are untranslatable/unusable. If you've found a way to translate them, that's great! We might be able to start some piecemeal hacks for TO of our own (There's a fully functional hack out there already, but it's entirely in Japanese) The reason it might load different values I think is because of the fact that they had to change alot of space for the translation; they basically ripped the text straight from the PSX version and inserted it into the SNES version. I don't think that the two versions should be inherently different as far as the classes/abilities/weapons etc go.

(EDIT: Not to mention they had to shorten a lot of the full text for the English version because of character restraints)
If you or anyone else need a reference for what the various things are called, there's a good website for that here:
http://luct.tacticsogre.com/
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

Doctus



Hex edited the interface to English and translated all of the data columns because those were a little more involved than the rows. The three big tabs (ID-Section, Special Data, Encounter Parameters) proved too hard-coded to translate, unfortunately, but every other major interface thing is in English now.

I didn't bother to translate all the item, magic, etc names because that would have taken a very long time. They can easily be edited by putting the right names into the .idn files in the Tactics Ogre folder. (They're just text files that tell the program what names to display for each row.) I translated a few of the item names and some other things to demonstrate how it's done.

I edited the properties of the basic dagger and verified that it seems to work perfectly in-game, but let me know if there are any weird bugs.

Feel free to re-post this elsewhere if people might find it useful.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6-xZxdvNdpbT2JtU2YwSUZLcTQ/view?usp=sharing

theultrawolf

I'll go in there and put the right names in then, I'm very familiar with TO and I can get the translations if I don't know them by simply loading up the JP rom and comparing vs the English ROM or PSX iso (which with the gameshark codes we might be able to come up with something as well). This just might be a big breakthrough though, if this gets completely translated we may be looking at viable English tools for editing the game (and a Tactics Ogre modding section, finally)
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

theultrawolf

I might actually need help editing these unless there's a way to turn the gibberish into Japanese that I can translate. :/
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

Doctus

You need to load the files as Shift-JIS. Most text editors can do this; in Notepad++, for example, Encoding->Character Sets->Japanese->Shift-JIS.

If all else fails you can coerce your web browser into opening the file and set the character encoding there to view the items, and then edit it in whatever program is producing gibberish (it will almost certainly save as ANSI which BNE has no problems reading).

nitwit

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=11168

I can program an editor for you.  I'm best with Java, but I can maybe do something in Python or C.

theultrawolf

Well, right now we have a couple of functional (?) editors for the SNES version of Tactics Ogre, they just need translating. The code is all right there for the set; down to the very language files. It would be neat if you could translate that to the PSX code or improve upon the capabilities of the editors we DO have (check the links I posted for their capabilities) if that's at all possible. On the same related note, we could work on creating a FFTPatcher-like editor for the PSP version, if you know how to work with code handling and hooks & translating that into patchable code (I have hundreds of Gameshark like codes for the game).
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

theultrawolf

Still doing this, if anyone's still interested.
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

enricopintos

Quote from: theultrawolf on February 10, 2016, 09:19:59 amStill doing this, if anyone's still interested.

Hi! It's been long. (really long) and with the release of Reborn which has the most boring class system. I wonder if you were able to finish your project