[FE10 Battle Animation Hacking Question]

Hey everyone,

I'm posting this thread for Illumina25, who is a new user and thus can't make threads. We've both tried to solve this problem with no luck for a few days, so I hope one of you can help him. Here is his problem in his own words:

I have been hacking Radiant Dawn recently, and have understood editing weapon/unit stats and text in general. However I have been having trouble editing the animation for weapons in battle. My exact problem is that essentially I want to make Leonardo's bow into a spear. However, the weapon keeps the animation of the original weapon even if you switch it, i.e. changing Ragnell into an axe and giving it the Urvan icon, it still looks like Ragnell in battle, but has Ike's "axe" model on the map.

I have tried a few things as follows:
In FE10Data.cms, that file really only affects the stats of a weapon, I basically know what each pointer and byte does in the item stats, as explained in the FE10 hacking notes. The only thing that affects the model of the weapon in any way is the ID, the first 4 bytes of the weapon. For example, changing Ragnell's ID into Caladbolg's ID removes Ragnell from Ike's inventory and replaces Caladbolg in the convoy. Its name is still Ragnell, it's still Ike only, and everything else, however the weapon model in battle is Caladbolg. However, this replaces a weapon which I do not want to do.

Since I figured that the Data file did not have to do with weapon animations, I went to FE10Battle.cms and looked there. I sort of have an idea of how this is broken down (as its not in the FE10 notes I believe), which I can post if necessary, but changing the pointers there did not really do anything. The only change that worked was essentially changing the EID pointer of a weapon, which changes the "hit" effect when hitting an enemy. 

Then I just decided to look through the rest of the game on WiiScrubber, and found toward the end files labelled under "xwp." This seemed to have every weapon in the game, including ones not used. I tried replacing Urvan with the Ragnell file to see if that would change the model, but instead just caused it to crash only when using it with animations on.

In short, I've tried all I know and don't know what else to try. I feel like changing the model of a weapon in battle should be easy. I understand pointers/offsets/etc in HxD and understand how to use WiiScrubber to extract and replace, so feel free to explain how in any way.

TL;DR - I tried what I know, not sure how to change the model of a weapon in battle.

[Updating the name graphics in FE12's Guide]

I tried to use GBA Graphics Editor to do this, but I kept running into issues with it, so I wrote my own tool for this.

If anyone else wants to update the Guide graphics, they can just use this tool now.

[Updating the name graphics in FE12's Guide]

Ok, I figured out my second question for the most part. Looking at this documentation: http://www.romhacking.net/documents/%5B469%5Dnds_formats.htm#Custom

It appears "cg" files in FEDS are just NCGR files with basically all of the non-data information stripped out, and "cl" files are similarly-stripped NCLR files. There might be a bit more to it than this, but I managed to reproduce Caeda's intro CG from FE11 with just this knowledge, so I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track. I'm also guessing that "sc" files are stripped NSCR files, but I didn't need to use one to generate the CG.

I also played around with an OAM viewer to understand the structure of the name sprites. It looks like each name is comprised of two 32x16 graphics, as shown below

:

From this, I've tried to locate these graphics in the ROM to modify them, but I still haven't been able to locate them. I've also noticed quite a few "pkcg" files in the game (for example, "name_assassin.pkcg"), but I'm not sure how to parse them. There never seems to be an associated "cl" with them, which makes me think the palette is being bundled in the file somehow. However, when I inspect the decompressed file in a hex editor, I don't see anything that looks like the data I'm used to seeing for palettes.

To sum it up, if anyone has information on the structure of "pkcg" files, that would be fantastic. From there, I should be able to hunt down the graphic I'm interested in myself.

[Updating the name graphics in FE12's Guide]

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to update the FE12 translation patch with the names supplied in Awakening. I've made good progress, but I've hit a roadblock involving this part of the Guide screen:

The name "Roro" is baked into an image file, so I can't change it without modifying the graphics, which I've never done before. I have two questions related to this:

1. Where do these name graphics reside in the ROM? I see a lot of promising things in the dic/ directory, but this leads to my second question...
2. What resources do I need to read/modify FEDS image files? I looked in the Resources subforum for help here, but I couldn't find anything that would let me view graphics in a friendly format, let alone edit them.

Sorry if this question is somewhat noob-ish, but it's hard to find many resources about FEDS hacking at all online.