Final Fantasy Hacktics

I've replaced the opening video right after it shows the Squaresoft logo. Enjoy.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ylihn9

TUTORIAL TIME:

Disclaimer
This method is very messy, requires a fair bit of hard drive space, and is still currently being tested by me. Also requires use of cmd, so please be familiar with it. I will help people on IRC/this thread, but don't exoect a reply immediately. Most of the info is inside their manual, but can be annoying to understand.


Required programs:
https://kenai.com/projects/jpsxdec/pages/Home
A video encoder that will convert your video to bmp frames (I used Sony Vegas for this, I hear things like VirtualDub can do it as well)

NOTE: I am assuming everything is in the same folder as jpsxdec.

Step 1) Make your video and convert it to bmp frames. Please note that the video must be in 320x224. FFT plays videos at 14.985 frames/sec.

Step 2) You need to create an xml for the program to run. So open Notepad or whatever and type this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<str-replace version="0.2">
INSERT COMMANDS HERE
</str-replace>

The bolded line is where your commands go. Also please note that there is no </xml> at the end, if you put it in, you WILL get fatal errors. The commands look like this:

<replace frame="10">newframe10.bmp</replace>

This means you are replacing frame 10 with newframe10.bmp. That's right. You must replace each frame separately. In the fmv after the Square logo, the full video is 1011 frames, so you will have to 1011 of those commands. It's up to you how you want to create that xml. I used Excel and created it within 3 mins.

Step 3) Now, we should run this thing. Open cmd and go to the folder where jpsxdec is located. Type this in:

java -jar jpsxdec.jar -f FINALFANTASYTACTICS.IMG -x index

You can replace FINALFANTASYTACTICS.IMG with your iso file name. I'm just using the default name for simplicity. I'm not 100% sure what files are accepted, but they should all work. After this command, a file called index should be created in the folder.

Step 4) Open jpsxdec.exe and then click on open index. Choose your newly created index file. Look for the video you want to replace and find the index. Note that it shouldn't be the index of the .str, but the one inside it. For example, mine was 2593. I will be using this number from now on.

Step 5) Back in cmd, type:

java -jar jpsxdec.jar -x index -i 2593 -play

If it works, then you should be able to play the movie, and therefore your index number was correct. This is more to check if everything is correct.

Step 6) Type this:

java -jar jpsxdec.jar -x index -i 2593 -replaceframes video.xml

video.xml is just a placeholder, rename it to what the file name of your xml is. BEWARE THAT THIS PROGRAM WILL REPLACE YOUR FRAMES AUTOMATICALLY WITHOUT WARNING MAKE A BACKUP. If it's working, it should spit our a billion numbers. Just wait until it's done. For me, it took less than a minute to replace the entire FFT opening sequence of 1000 frames.

Step 7) Test the video! TESTING IS IMPORTANT


And that's it. Once again, any problems should be said here, so I can work out what is wrong.


This program says it can also turn midis into music for FFT, but it says it's buggy, so I haven't tried it yet.

Nice work man

You know, if a trailer does get made for Jot5 then it'd be pretty awesome to get an actual custom-made opening for it.

Fixed a bit of the info. Videos play at 14.985 fps, and the xml was slightly wrong.