Final Fantasy Hacktics

I was actually thinking Finish touch would make a better effect for Tornado. Tornado looks more like a Sandstorm & Sandstorm looks more like Dust Devil.

Right now I can definitely remove the flashy thingy, but not the sound. However they have more effects around the caster that I'm sure will look better on their own without the flashy thingy.

id love to see this new tornado, without the ice shards too of course..

and i bet as far as sound effect goes, its probably as simple as finding the locatin copy from tornado and paste over whatever is in finish touch.

I'm hoping it's just a single byte or maybe two that tells the animation sequence what s.e. to initiate. As for the twister, the shards should be very easy to remove.

mmm... i didnt want to destroy any big effect files for flood so i tried one that im not particularly fond of (midgar swarm). the file fits inside BUT it doesnt work in battle

which summon spell do you think is the most worthless?

Edit: okay well i think the spell will only work over leviathan, but the flood looks awesome by itself!! ill just remove leviathan from the skillset

Vanya you rule thanks so much!

(mwahaha.. i hate to erase any existing spells but i might remove fairy if galaxy stop works over it.. then ill make a red version)

Edit: *Places official request* please remove the limit and ice shards from the finish touch effect vanya! <3  pleeeese?

OK. Strange that Leviathan didn't work over Midgard Swarm.

its not all about file size.... but it works just fine over original leviathan and then i just assign it to one of the extra bio2 slots and give it all the stats of the dimension magic spells.

sacrificing the leviathan summon isnt such a big deal to me, sacrificing salamander also isnt a big deal (i wonder how it looks without its picture)

Have you tried placing it over any other summon spells? I tried it over Zodiark and it wouldn't work either.
Is it possible that parts of the effect file are referenced by address?
It may be possible to have Flood work over any file larger than itself by one of 2 methods.

1)I either rearrange the image and/or palette to be 'flush' with the new end of the file. (Hoping that it is addressed from the back end of the file.)

2)or somehow insert the new file in it's correct size and then insert a separate blank file after it to fill in the space. (I don't know if this is even possible.)

midgar swarm sucks.. thats why i wanted to use it, the only other effects id consider would be fairy or salamander... all the other ones are too important (to me anyway)  for me to even consider

i think its more like how its arranged within itself...

And normal Leviathan works fine in over other effect files?

nope, it crashes just the same as flood your flood effect is flawless, its just not compatable i bet all summons are probably unique.

It'll take some hacking and pasting to *MAYBE* gut it to work right in other effect files. No guarantee i can get it to work.

its such a huge file that were limited to what can be overwritten

id think that because such a large picture was removed the effect file would be smalle enough to fit into one of those huge oracle effects but its the same size. guess they dont work the same way as sprites. im just happy to have that water spell *cry*

The problem is that from what I can tell, *NOTHING* in the effect files is compressed. The variance in the size of the files comes from the size of the pictures and the complexity of the animation sub-routine it uses to work.

too bad we cant just duplicate the programming for leviathan into midgar swarm so that there is no loss of summon skills. but do you think it would be strange to have that water spell AND leviathan in the same game?

Looking into the .BMP format I'm finding that it should be fairly simple to make a utility to export and import images from the effect files.

Finding the raw pixel data is very easy. The only pain in the ass is the exact locations of the palettes. After that it's just a matter of creating the header for the extracted image data and then organizing it into a full bitmap.

Importing would be the same thing backwards, but without the trouble of creating a header. Just plug the palette back in place and re-organize the pixel data the way FFT uses it.

any luck with the new tornado effect?

im wondering also is sound contained within, or is there just a value somewhere that tells it to play this sound and that sound... anyway enough of that detail. Tornado, how do i remove the limit break and ice shards

thanks to you work on effect files is getting more spotlight

I haven't gotten to the tornado yet, since I haven't started revamping the Black Mage.

The sound effect used is definitely part of the ASM in each effect file. Most likely each sound effect is referenced by a byte or 2 depending on how many sounds the game has access to. It's just a matter of dis-assembling the code and figuring out which instruction(s) call the sound(s). Then all you have to do is change the corresponding byte(s) in the effect file. The problem is I don't know enough ASM to be able to tell what is what.

And if you want to go ahead and try editing Finish Touch yourself do the following:

1) Open the effect file (E257) in FFtView or try to track down a picture of the image to get an idea of where what is in the image.

2) Make a table file that has entries for everything except 0. It also helps if you use various symbols instead of alphanumeric characters. I recommend TableManager for this. Also, to make it easier to see the picture in the hex editor make sure to use a single empty space for 0's character.

3) Now open the effect file in a hex editor. You will NEED to make sure its an editor that can adjust the number of bytes displayed per line. I use Translhextion for this.

4) Open the table file you made in step 2 and increase the bytes per line in the options to 128 if the file is smaller than 70KB or 256 if its bigger.
As you scroll down you'll notice that the numbers make a pattern similer to the image of the effect. Scroll to the left and you'll see a nice Ascii picture that matches the effect image pixel for pixel. The values that make up the picture are indexing colors from the palette. So if you see a 01 that means the first color from the palette goes there.

5) Anyway, now that you have an idea of what it is you want to delete just start over-writing it with 00's. Then just save it, and you're done! =)
Easy!! =P

awww sounds like it would be easy enough, but i've never made a table file before XD

im a real hex newb. i didnt realize  until recently just how closely pictures are linked to all those numbers.

If you use the program I mentioned it'll be very easy to make the table.

Table file are just .txt files renamed into .tbl files.
The format of the file is super simple. let's say you know for a fact that the value 3A in a given file is the hex value it uses to display the lower case 'a'.
you just have to write a line in the table that looks like this:

3A=a

Press enter after to put in another entry and so on.
TableManager has a bunch of fields from 0 - FF and you just type in the characters to be displayed by the value you're inputting in and save. It does all the formatting for you.

another thought for finding sound... if we had a list of the sounds or values that point to specific ones i bet there is a certain number that represents "play sound" instruction and then well see a pattern.