Using chapter slots past normal playable chapters

[Topaz Light]

Heya!

So, I'm asking this here because this is extremely relevant to how I go about planning out my hack's story; how feasible is it to turn the chapter slots normally used by event-only maps and such into regular chapters? I know using the Link Arena "chapter" for anything is right out, of course. I read in the Ultimate Tutorial that editing the event map chapter slots is something that would be possible in theory, but that hacking utilities at the time were not currently designed to facilitate doing so.

The thing is that "the time" was several years ago at this point, and I'm unsure if hacking utilities have been updated to support editing those or not (or if other difficulties in doing so have arisen).

Thanks so much for your time!

[Agro]

You can use cutscene-only maps for chapters with great ease. However, be advised that tile changes, events and tilesets and I'm pretty sure maps are all stored on the same index which is only 8 bit, meaning there's 256 entries for all those. Which means you probably couldn't have 256 chapters.

[Topaz Light]

Heh, I'm not especially interested in having 256 chapters; that's way too many. I was just curious if it'd be possible to use the event map slots for chapters and such.

It's good to know about that limit, though! Although I'm a little curious about the "events" thing. Unless they were somehow really crafty about setting things up (i.e. building each support set as a single branching event called multiple times that determines the branch via a variable that's increased at the end of each conversation or something), I'm pretty sure there'd be more than 256 events in battle quotes, death quotes, and support conversations alone, unless those have their own index or something, or there's some way of compressing multiple events into a single slot or something.

EDIT: Oh, also, is it like the sorta thing in the original GB/GBC Pokémon games where each index value corresponded to a Pokémon/trainer class, an item, and a move, depending on the context in which it was called, or is it really all of those things combined crammed into the same 256-entry list?

Edited December 24, 2016 by Topaz Light

[Primefusion]

Agro phrased things wonky, which I think is causing some confusion.

There's two key arrays going on*: the chapter array, and the event array (what people tend to call it). The chapter array is what you'd expect: it's got entries for Battle Before Dawn, Cog of Destiny, etc. Each chapter has several indexes to entries in the event array. Except the event array has much more than just events. It's really an array of pointers to things like tileset data, tileset palettes, tile changes, and yes, events.
It's more like a "Things a Chapter Needs" array.

Each index in the Chapter Needs array can be a pointer to whatever you want really. Know you're not going to use the lava tileset? Make those pointers point to events instead. In the chapter data editor, you can take one of those cut-scene only chapters, and point to the new event pointer you made.

*There's more than two arrays getting used, but these are the big two. Death quotes and support conversations each have their own array.

[Topaz Light]

Ahhh, thanks a bunch! Sorry this is so late, but that definitely answers my question and more; much appreciated!

EDIT: Oh! Before this is locked, followup question; could you conceivably "cheat" event slots by getting crafty with conditional branches and variable and flag checks and stuff to squeeze what would functionally be multiple events—at least as far as a player would be concerned—into the same index entry?

Edited January 2, 2017 by Topaz Light

[Primefusion]

Looking at what EN and Bloodlines have going, the answer is a solid yes (there's limits though). The one caveat is that there's no variables to be used when writing events.

Edited January 2, 2017 by Primefusion

[Topaz Light]

Does that mean that you can't have the event interact with variables in any way, or is it just impossible to create new ones for event usage? Even having the event be able to reference things like the current Chapter ID, turn number, support ranks between certain pairs, etc. would be sufficient for my purposes.

Edited January 3, 2017 by Topaz Light

[Primefusion]

Does that mean that you can't have the event interact with variables in any way, or is it just impossible to create new ones for event usage?

The former

Even having the event be able to reference things like the current Chapter ID, turn number, support ranks between certain pairs, etc. would be sufficient for my purposes.

You'll need to write your own assembly to access this stuff. You can have scenes occur on certain turns natively, but you can't poll the game for the turn number natively.

I recommend looking into how events are written to get a feel for what you can do.

[Topaz Light]

Ahhh, got it. Thanks!