(FE4) making holy blood add weapon ranks you don't have

[sirmola]

A while back, i came up with an idea to increase pairing viability and thus replay value of FE4: "simply"(yeah right) change the weapon rank algorithm so that minor holy blood in a weapon type that your class can't equip gives you a C in that weapon type, and major holy blood gives you a star regardless of weather your class can normally equip that weapon type. Of course you would have to keep the game from crashing when using a weapon with no defined animation, although i don't mind a little graphical glitchiness). Unfortunately, my FE4 hacking experience consists entirely of nightmare with a little bit of basic hex editing thrown in. A quick forum search turns up nothing. Does anyone have any idea of how i could try to figure out how to do this? Thanks

Edited May 4, 2014 by sirmola

[jjl2357]

If you knew where the character array was stored in RAM, you could always ASM together something along the lines of "If holy blood, change weapon rank number to C rank, etc." for each character...

[sirmola]

If you knew where the character array was stored in RAM, you could always ASM together something along the lines of "If holy blood, change weapon rank number to C rank, etc." for each character...

I actually thought of that, but there is no "FE4 ultimate tutorial" to help me figure out how asm works in FE4. Holy blood locations for fixed characters are easy to find by reverse engineering the nightmare module, but children characters have holy blood that is dynamically figured out based on pairings, so that might be harder. Additionally, i would want item interference to work correctly. Also, writing 26 if statements for each character would be "fun". Granted, 15 of those statements would have no effect in vanilla fe4, as a situation where a character with baldo or hezul blood can not use swords is impossible, there are no playable Daen characters, dark magic is unobtainable, and the only major holy bloods that can possibly end up on non users are sety and blagi, Not that i wouldn't do it, but it seems like it would take less time and probably be less glitchy to modify the existing script that already does this if you can use the weapon type to remove that if statement (or equivalent, if the code is phrased differently.)

Edited May 4, 2014 by sirmola

[Shin]

I recall there being a patch which gives everyone a D rank in everything, thus they'd get C if they had holy blood. It's somewhere in the Binary collection, I don't have it to hand currently.

[sirmola]

I recall there being a patch which gives everyone a D rank in everything, thus they'd get C if they had holy blood. It's somewhere in the Binary collection, I don't have it to hand currently.

That's exactly what i want. However, it will be a real chore to search through the entire bianary uploader for it given that a) I can't read japanese. and b) my version of the uploader seems to have gibbrished up all the japanese, so that i can't even use google translate. Do you have any idea what part of the uploader i might focus on? Thanks.

[Agro]

check out lamia's fe4 resource thread in the hacking resources section, I think there might be something related there

[sirmola]

Found it (which is odd given that i swear i looked there already.) However, there is the issue that i predicted above where using a weapon with no defined animation for that class causes a freeze.because the game has no failsafe. Also, it unsurprisingly does not work with the english patch(i think they both use the same free space). The fix for that might be in the readme, but the gibrished up text issue might be an issue with my computer given that the version of the uploader on that page also has gibrished up text

Edited May 5, 2014 by sirmola

[Agro]

To read the readme, open it in something that's not Notepad (Notepad++ is a good start) and change the encoding to Shift-JIS, which should allow you to read it (in Japanese)

I'm sure that battle animations have also been addressed by Lamia at some point, my gut says that it can be done with a Nightmare editor but I don't really know the specifics

[sirmola]

To read the readme, open it in something that's not Notepad (Notepad++ is a good start) and change the encoding to Shift-JIS, which should allow you to read it (in Japanese)

I'm sure that battle animations have also been addressed by Lamia at some point, my gut says that it can be done with a Nightmare editor but I don't really know the specifics

Thanks. Now i can read it. this might help figuring out translation patch conflicts. as for the freeze issue, Battle animations can be done in nightmare, but i believe that there is not enough room in the animation table for the number of animations that i would need and i do not know how to enlarge it. It might be less work to install a failsafe the it would be to move the table, although i do not know for sure(the relevent part of the patch readme does not google translate well and seeme to assume knowledge that i do not have.) I have attached the readme if anyone wants to try to make sense of it. (the original can be found with the "weapon rank d" patch in the binary download from lamia's hacking docs.)

readme.txt

Edited May 5, 2014 by sirmola

[Lamia]

there are a lot of battle animations that are simply unnecessary, repetitive, or for unused or unnecessary classes; I had to rework it myself for my project (although, I did eliminate basic throwing axes and lances which frees up billions of space) and I have a fair amount to work with, although your idea does pose a bit of a problem if you overdo it

I'd recommend only making what animations are necessary and obtainable by the characters in question, instead of everyone

there's a way to simply fake the ranks by changing what letter is displayed too, so you can have D be a hyphen symbol (yet is still allowed to increased in rank), making it look less gaudy

as for moving the data itself... which I had to do, it requires repointing, and I'm unsure if you're able to do that

I'm terrible with tutorials and teaching but with the information given in the readme, it should be enough to figure out what goes on, but if you really need assistance (it's been a while since I worked this patch myself) I might be able to help

for starters, this data here

■ Setting
And display of the level
Display in the $ 0A01D0 ~ $ 0A01E7 weapon shop
$ 0A01E8 ~ $ 0A01FF status screen and unit list ( Ken Ono stick , thunder - light )
$ 0BC040 ~ $ 0BC057 unit list ( spear , bow flame , wind, darkness )

I believe is what you're looking for in what to repoint

Edited May 6, 2014 by Lamia

[sirmola]

there are a lot of battle animations that are simply unnecessary, repetitive, or for unused or unnecessary classes; I had to rework it myself for my project (although, I did eliminate basic throwing axes and lances which frees up billions of space) and I have a fair amount to work with, although your idea does pose a bit of a problem if you overdo it

Yeah. I checked last night. The developers defined animations for female barons and generals. The baron alone is almost enough to cover all 9 animations on fixed characters. As for axes, i might make hand axes B rank No used class in the vanilla game can only use C axes, so all this would do was prevent having to make hand axe animations for lex's possible children.

I'd recommend only making what animations are necessary and obtainable by the characters in question, instead of everyone

given that i need to worry about the posibility of any variable kid being the kid of holyn, lex, claude, or levin/azel(same animation), that's still a ton(around 60 in a table with 202 slots). Also, note that i can't make sprites, so i will probably reference existing animations/sprites.

there's a way to simply fake the ranks by changing what letter is displayed too, so you can have D be a hyphen symbol (yet is still allowed to increased in rank), making it look less gaudy.

I figured i could do that. I have never messed with pointers or graphics without a tool though, so i will have to learn. I'll probably just Diff the roms in hxd and copy things from promising looking parts of the origional to the patched rom (and mess with things that look like pointers) until i figure it out. It shouldn't be that hard as it is one graphic that i belive is used nowhere else.

as for moving the data itself... which I had to do, it requires repointing, and I'm unsure if you're able to do that

I do not know how, but i think i know all the prerequisites.

I'm terrible with tutorials and teaching but with the information given in the readme, it should be enough to figure out what goes on, but if you really need assistance (it's been a while since I worked this patch myself) I might be able to help

I tried, but i can't understand what google translate spits out. (exept for the data locations. Those are obvious.)

for starters, this data here

■ Setting

And display of the level

Display in the $ 0A01D0 ~ $ 0A01E7 weapon shop

$ 0A01E8 ~ $ 0A01FF status screen and unit list ( Ken Ono stick , thunder - light )

$ 0BC040 ~ $ 0BC057 unit list ( spear , bow flame , wind, darkness )

I believe is what you're looking for in what to repoint

Thanks. Should i PM you with issues or post in the thread(because not many people other than you really know about hacking FE4)?

[Agro]

I recommend posting in the thread, because everyone else can see it and anyone else who comes along with the same question can simply be redirected to this thread.

Edited May 7, 2014 by Agro

[sirmola]

I recommend posting in the thread, because everyone else can see it and anyone else who comes along with the same question can simply to redirected to this thread.

Will do.

[Lamia]

I only started my project from j2e's translation patch... which I'm guessing you use a different one, hence incompatibility issues? just for clarification before assisting, I haven't noticed any problems with patching j2e's version

Edited May 8, 2014 by Lamia

[sirmola]

Just checked and it works, but only with the original j2e version. the renegade version causes some extremely bizarre errors that manage to be even worse then the ones caused by garnef's patch were. (like lana only being able to use her bow, but only after the first enemy phase). Also, fyi, my finals start tomorrow and lasts till next thursday, but then vacation starts and i will be extremely available.

[Lamia]

how far along are you in your project? I'd almost recommend that you'd start from j2e since it readies up most of what is needed in the menus and the like, plus any possible guttings from the other translations wouldn't get in the way; the most that their patch has done is repointing text, and no special ASM or pseudo-compressed text or anything like that has been added, I just see it as a good starting point (but maybe I'm just promoting what I'm more familiar with)

in any case, if the aforementioned gutting isn't severe in whatever patch you're using (I'd need to know which) and you don't wanna restart with a more fresh ROM (again, promoting) I may be able to help you out with dealing with the patch

but then it could become a problem later on if you decide to use more interesting patches like that, have to consider long-term too, but I'm just looking at worst-case scenario here

[sirmola]

This hack is more of a rebalancing then a full on hack. Honestly, the first step is just to get this aspect functional and there will be a version with just this, but i plan to apply other patches eventualy(strength weight offset, sword skills, tweak the stats so that swords and wind magic are not automatically the best weapon types, and maybe mass around with classes and growth rates a little bit. However, i do not want to socoumb to feature creep, so i will do this first, then make a version that also does other stuff. Honestly, i was planing to use garnef's patch as it is most complete at present. Note that i plan to make extremely minimal dialog changes, So if the j2e patch causes many crashes i will have to eather use a newer patch or just distribute it for a Japanese rom so that a j2e softpatch can be applied and unapplied as necessary. If i did have the skills to insert copious dialog with no tools, the first thing i would do would be to fix the ending, but i do not have those skills.

[Lamia]

let me know what sort of patch you will use, that way it'll be easier to tailor to whatever you might need, since you wanted to add just one feature

[sirmola]

let me know what sort of patch you will use, that way it'll be easier to tailor to whatever you might need, since you wanted to add just one feature

My perfered translation patch for most playthroughs is the newest one, namely garnef's improvement patch( http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=39994 although you might have to hunt in the thread as the link is dead ). I plan to switch to the new progect once it's compleated.(because ending freezes and badyl tranclated dialog are both annoying and immersion breaking), but lets do it with garnef's patch and document what we did so that i can do it again on my own if need be. Also if/when i make a version with other features, i plan to use the sword skills A patch and one of the strength weight offset patches. Nothing else looked really worth adding. If that's too much work (both patches use some free space, although the weapon wieght patches use very little.), then we can just do this and i will use the j2e patch for any more complicated thing latter.

Edit: the latest reparation patch is simaler enough that i don't care that much which one is used. The two might even be compatable from a patching perspective.

Edited May 13, 2014 by sirmola