(moved from the patcher sticky)
QuoteFew questions:
1) What's the best way to ensure an enemy calculator has access to a lot of good spells (flare, holy, petrify, etc) without modifying the normal generic jobs in any player noticeable way? I don't want to mess with JP costs or requirements. (giving them access to dummy jobs or something is fine though)
2) [solved] I seem to recall hearing that I shouldn't use the Lucavi sprites for regular enemies. Some quick and not very thorough testing showed that they worked fine. Any pitfalls I might fall into, or is my memory shot?
3) [solved] I found a list of sprite numbers for most the generic jobs (basically what shishi says +1), but this doesn't include calculators, bards, dancers, or mimes. If I want to force one of those sprites for a unit, what numbers should I use?
Elric's reply:
QuoteTo force a generic. Select either generic male, female, or monster as the spriteset. Then choose the job for the unit you want.
When using Zodiac Beasts in other slots make sure to set their SEQ and SHP accordingly (Arute, etc)
I know how to set a character's job and how to set it to one of the generics. What I want to know is how to force
a different job to use those 6 spritesheets, since Generic Male, Generic Female, and Monster interfere with the listing order. I can take a Holy Knight and make them look like a geomancer by setting their job to holy knight and sprite to 76-77. I can't do the same for those 6: sprite sheet number 80
should be Male Calculator (going by the listing shown by Shishi) but is instead taken up by Generic Male. Maybe Dancer and both Mimes are fine (I haven't tested), but even if they are, both calculators and bard seem unavailable.
As for the Zodiac Beast thing that advice sounds like it was meant for shishi, which I'm not making any edits with or anything. If I put a Queklain copy in a random deep dungeon battle alongside other stuff, will anything break or look weird? I'm only asking (and not simply testing myself) since I have a vague memory from years ago that this is a No No. My tests has shown everything's fine except the lack of a death frame. If no one else knows of anything worse than that, then there's no more issue here.
Still wondering about the calculator thing.
Quote
As for the Zodiac Beast thing that advice sounds like it was meant for shishi,
It was, because there is no other difference when using them anywhere you want. Except that, yes, they have no death frame. So you'd need to either edit that and then make them use MON instead of ARUTE or whatever, or you'd have to code an event to trigger when they die to remove them. Unless you are cool with it just looking derpy as hell.
Right, that's the answer I was looking for for that question. Thank you~
When you have more than one zodiac monster on the field at once, things can get a bit strange. I believe that I encountered a graphical glitch when I put both Velius and Zalera on the Zirekile Falls map, but you should test it out yourself.
For the sprite thing, if there's just no listing for those four jobs, you may have to copy and reinsert those sprites into new slots normally used for "special" jobs in Shishi. It might not be the best fix, but it should work.
You won't find them for those spritesheets because they weren't used as undead units in vanilla like most of the others were (or other nonsensical things) if you want to force that sprite outright, you'd need to insert another copy of it in shishi somewhere. The generics are called differently than normal units, (which is why a lot of those other generic sprites exist outside the generic sprite section)
Quote from: nyzer on July 21, 2015, 11:13:38 pm
For the sprite thing, if there's just no listing for those four jobs, you may have to copy and reinsert those sprites into new slots normally used for "special" jobs in Shishi. It might not be the best fix, but it should work.
Yeah that's something I'd prefer to avoid, since if possible, I'd like the patch I'm making to be done entirely with the patcher. Keeps things simple to have one file. Will use other tools if I have to though.
I don't truly understand the logic of the sprite number, so maybe one of the unmarked numbers will give me the sprites I want.
Generally speaking I know that sprite number X will give sprite number X+1 (as shown by shishi) and set the unit's base job to number X. Stuff like Generic Male/Female and Monster really muck things up though, along with setting a sprite number well outside the bounds of the job list (like sprite number B8 or something weird).
The spriteset number is the same as shishi. It was just badly documented. It's the same as shishi + 1. The only exception is generics.
Related to question 3: How do I force something to use a monster sprite?
I have several different monsters that I want to force to use the Uribo sprite (to avoid sprite limits, and as a joke), but I seem unable to actually set a unit to use it in the patcher. Setting them to use 8F just seems to pull random spritesheets out of the aether (usually humanoid). I tried overwriting one of the humanoid sprites in Shishi, but the Uribo seems to be larger than a regular spritesheet and the bottom part is cut off.
Any advice on how to force any arbitrary monster to use another monster's spritesheet?
Again... this is set by using the spriteset monster and selecting the job. Same as generics..
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that would turn them into actual Uribos, not things that just have the sprite of a Uribo.
Yes. Same as the generics, they can't be called otherwise.
Not exactly
In the jobs tab of the FFTPatcher, there are 3 boxes: M. Portrait/Palette/Graphic, you can use these to force portraits, palettes and sprites onto jobs. However it only works when the 'Sprite Set' box in the ENTD is set to 82, Monster. I believe that's what the M. stands for.
So you can set those to a job, say Chemist, then whenever you want a monster chemist to appear, set the sprite instead of generic female or generic male, to monster. When you do set it to generic male / female the sprite will be what it's supposed to be as a generic, so there's no harm done!
The numbers to set this to Uribo / Porky / Wildbow are set in those jobs respectively, so you can just copy the numbers from that.
So theoretically you could set the Chocobo job to have Delita's sprite, then have Ramza riding Delita to victory? o_O
@Jumza
Yes, that will work. Thank you!
I don't think this will fix the calc/bard/dancer/mime thing, as I don't see a similar option for humanoid sprites, but it certainly helps my current problem.
Quote from: nyzer on August 06, 2015, 03:52:05 am
So theoretically you could set the Chocobo job to have Delita's sprite, then have Ramza riding Delita to victory? o_O
Kinda. You'd need to completely redo his sprite to draw properly (like, make him do exaggerated ninja run everywhere (http://img13.deviantart.net/d985/i/2010/344/9/5/ninja_run_cycle_by_artygrand-d34linx.png) to make sense), and it would look more like he's carrying Ramza away from battle after he's had his lower torso removed, but yes, you could do that.
There might've been some riding involved off screen during and before chapter 1, if you catch my drift.
^ "Playing the reed flute" as they say.
Quote from: DuxorW on August 06, 2015, 08:34:32 am
^ "Playing the reed flute" as they say.
Omfg. Hahahaha!
EDIT: Kaijyuu, if you're willing to sacrifice some sprite space, you could put the mime / bard / dancer sprite on one of the unique sprite slots. Then you can tack those onto whatever job you want regardless of what they actually are. That's what vanilla does for the undead units IIRC. That's why there are duplicates of things like the Knight and Wizard sprites. Of course, if you need them to be generics (for whatever reason) then I guess that doesn't work either.
Good point. I ended up having to move Serpy to the regular non-monster space, so yeah moving those over the unused male squires is probably what I'll do.
Markin' that one as solved.
Update: I'm having a problem with Shishi which is actually preventing me from solving the sprite issue.
Using the "restructure iso" option when opening an iso in Shishi makes the first worker 8 event crash the game. I don't know why. On my pSX emulator it spits out some errors and continues on as normal, but on the PSP it simply sits at "Now Loading" forever.
Has anyone else experienced this? It seems strange that this would go unnoticed if it was shishi's fault, but it crashes every time with an iso that's completely untouched except for shishi.
If I can't fix this I can't use shishi. Period. So, an alternative way to access sprites 80 and above would be nice (in particular I need Serpentarius's sprite to be set through the patcher and not just through the monster setting).
Change the last byte in your iso from 00 to 01
Didn't seem to work. pSX 1.13 spits out the same errors, and on the psp it continues to sit at now loading forever.
To confirm I'm doing the right thing:
1) I take a clean, unmodified iso.
2) Open it in Shishi (the one that came with the patcher suite .482).
3) Hit "Yes" to restructure the iso.
4) Close shishi.
5) Open the iso in a hex editor.
6) Change the very last byte from 00 to 01.
7) The iso should be fixed.
yes it should, if the error is related to worker 8. what else have you done that would affect that scene?
Nothing. The only thing that's touched the iso is shishi. No sprites have been changed either; all I did was hit yes when asked about restructuring.
I suppose something could be wacky with my test save? It works fine without the iso restructure though. I'll try a handful of different saves.
I looked further into the changing the final byte fix thing, and notably I'm not using PPF patches at all right now. I'll keep this whole thing in mind when making a patch to distribute, though.
EDIT: Different saves all have the same issue.
Are we certain this isn't just a bug in shishi? Worker 8 is the last sprite on the list (other than the weapon sprites), and it could be a bug related to that. Inaccurate emulators (epsxe and pSX) seem to load the event fine, so people might just not be noticing it normally. Furthermore, CD Mage claims an iso restructured by shishi is corrupted and can only seem to find a few files.
You need load CDMage as mode 2...
Yes I'm certain because Jot5 has been console tested for the next release.
Quote from: Elric on August 15, 2015, 01:25:01 am
You need load CDMage as mode 2...
I'm doing so. It's able to read
some of the disk in mode 2; the other modes just don't work.
I obtained another ISO thinking mine might be broken in some subtle way, but nope, same issue.
Dunno what to tell you other than something is wrong, could be your version of shishi, but i use .482
I've been modding FFT for 4 years. And with what I do I've switched iso/bin/img files many many times and restructured many images. There should be absolutely no issue loading a restructured image in CDMage B5 as long as you load m2/2352 and hit yes for the popup.
I ended up avoiding the whole thing by not using shishi and changing sprites around manually. I never wanted to insert new sprite sheets (just wanted to change the numbers around), so this works for me. Marking as solved again.
My best guess is all the ISOs I found were slightly corrupted in such a way that it confused shishi.
How many bytes is your FFT Image?
It should be 552,701,184 bytes. If it isn't, you need to expand it.
My base iso appears to be 541,315,152 bytes. I got it as an .ecm and that size is after being decompressed into a .bin.
Which tool would be used to expand it?
I meant after Shishi
Before shishi would be 541,312,800 bytes.
And hex editor.
Ah, apologies for the misunderstanding.
Post Shishi, the byte count is indeed 552,701,184.
I don't know really anything about the iso's format, but I did notice the end of the file is different post-restructure. In the unmodified iso, there's just a very large number of 00s, but in the restructure there's a lot of random bytes (http://i.imgur.com/sQpaoq8.png).
If it's relevant, this (http://i.imgur.com/S1nErG1.png) is the error CDmage gives me. After hitting OK, it only shows me the BATTLE and DUMMY folders and their contents, along with battle.bin; all the other files aren't shown (maybe deliberately? I don't know what exactly the restructure is supposed to do other than rename the sprites in the battle folder).
Also if it's relevant, these are the errors pSX gives me (http://i.imgur.com/1payzpN.png) when loading the Worker 8 event.
That's not an error in CDMage. That's normal after restructure
http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=10806.msg208833#msg208833
Ok, so why haven't you tried downloading yourself a new FFT Image yet?
Also, Elric's idea couldn't have worked, he's misremembering an issue where when making a ppf, you need to set your original ISO's last byte to something else than 00 (after manually expanding it to 552,701,184 bytes long). Otherwise, patching would not expand the FFT Image completely, because the patching program would be all like "hey, both those bytes are 00, so not need to patch anything there, right?". I've never heard of this issue happen outside of improperly made PPFs.
So really, on top of your file index breaking, shouldn't it be a dead giveaway that it's your FFT Image?
Quote from: Xifanie on August 18, 2015, 01:48:19 am
Ok, so why haven't you tried downloading yourself a new FFT Image yet?
I have; two different sources. Next I'll probably try ripping an ISO myself.
Also CDmage doesn't spit that error prior to shishi's restructuring.
Quote from: Kaijyuu on August 18, 2015, 02:28:00 am
Also CDmage doesn't spit that error prior to shishi's restructuring.
Quote from: Elric on August 17, 2015, 11:09:02 pm
That's not an error in CDMage. That's normal after restructure
I can tell you that it took me like four different sources for FFT on the PSX before I could find one that was actually usable so I could patch Jot5 over it. Ultimately, if you have the ability to rip the game yourself, it should always be your go-to option.