Adding New S Support Options

[apricotstarship]

Does anybody know how to add support options, like in UnassumingVenusaur's Gay Marriage hack? Several possible pairings were left out, some out of concern for the age gaps. (Ricken and Donnel have... very limited options) I want to add them back in. Which file contains this info, and how do I edit it?

Edited October 25, 2020 by apricotstarship

[Topaz Light]

...What? Ricken and Donnel have the same marriage option parameters as every other Gen 1 character; they can marry anybody of the other gender who's recruited by Chapter 12, save for Anna and Sumia, who, along with Chrom, does have limited support options.

The only pairing in Awakening that was "edited out" is Lucina and Owain, who can even still reach S rank, just with the relationship reframed as purely platonic / familial on account of them being cousins.

Edited October 25, 2020 by Topaz Light

[Ertrick36]

The Gamedata.bin.lz file within the Gamedata folder is what actually adds in the options, while the conversations for those options are under the directory [RomFS>m>E] ("E" may be different depending on region, but it's always the only folder in the "m" folder).  Making supports is a two-fold process.  First you have to add the options in - I'm not entirely sure how to do this (you may use Paragon, but I've never been able to get it to work because my ROMs are kinda wonky).  When you add the supports in, they will function in every way except they will not have any conversations attached to them.  The second step, which will require some actual creative juices, is creating the conversations.  There is an easy-to-use tool for this called Fire Emblem Conversation Editor - it has a tutorial on formatting, allows you to use sound effects, and will automatically save the conversation file the way it needs to (just so long as you put it in the correct directory).

This guide will be helpful for you, I think.  It's for Fates, but the same basic premise applies to Awakening, as they more or less have the same support system except with a couple changes (no ad lib voice clips and there are A+ rank options with no associated conversations).

And even if you aren't all that into gay pairings, it'd still be a good idea to install the Gay Awakening hack because it adds in quite a few options all around, especially for Chrom (he can get with Anna, Cordelia, Miriel, and I think Tharja, along with the g a y 🏳️‍🌈 that was added).  You'll need to figure out which support options contain conversations yourself, though, because I'm not sure if anyone's compiled a list for this that's well organized.

[apricotstarship]

On 10/25/2020 at 1:40 AM, Topaz Light said:

...What? Ricken and Donnel have the same marriage option parameters as every other Gen 1 character; they can marry anybody of the other gender who's recruited by Chapter 12, save for Anna and Sumia, who, along with Chrom, does have limited support options.

The only pairing in Awakening that was "edited out" is Lucina and Owain, who can even still reach S rank, just with the relationship reframed as purely platonic / familial on account of them being cousins.

I meant that within what's added to the Gay Awakening hack, Kellam, Ricken, and Donnel don't gain anywhere near as many support options (not even conversations) as other characters, like Chrom or Lon'qu.

[apricotstarship]

On 10/25/2020 at 2:05 PM, Ertrick36 said:

The Gamedata.bin.lz file within the Gamedata folder is what actually adds in the options, while the conversations for those options are under the directory [RomFS>m>E] ("E" may be different depending on region, but it's always the only folder in the "m" folder).  Making supports is a two-fold process.  First you have to add the options in - I'm not entirely sure how to do this (you may use Paragon, but I've never been able to get it to work because my ROMs are kinda wonky).  When you add the supports in, they will function in every way except they will not have any conversations attached to them.  The second step, which will require some actual creative juices, is creating the conversations.  There is an easy-to-use tool for this called Fire Emblem Conversation Editor - it has a tutorial on formatting, allows you to use sound effects, and will automatically save the conversation file the way it needs to (just so long as you put it in the correct directory).

This guide will be helpful for you, I think.  It's for Fates, but the same basic premise applies to Awakening, as they more or less have the same support system except with a couple changes (no ad lib voice clips and there are A+ rank options with no associated conversations).

And even if you aren't all that into gay pairings, it'd still be a good idea to install the Gay Awakening hack because it adds in quite a few options all around, especially for Chrom (he can get with Anna, Cordelia, Miriel, and I think Tharja, along with the g a y 🏳️‍🌈 that was added).  You'll need to figure out which support options contain conversations yourself, though, because I'm not sure if anyone's compiled a list for this that's well organized.

Thank you! I probably should have mentioned that I have the Gay Awakening hack, I just want to add in options for Kellam, Donnel, and Ricken (and others) that were left out. The creator was sensitive to age gaps, it seems. I made this chart to show which couples are possible and have support conversations.

Blue means that a pair can achieve S rank, green means they have an S rank support conversation, orange means a pair has C-A, and red means they don't have anything at all. The yellow outline is for S support conversations that were added by the hack. The question marks are ones I couldn't tell if there's a conversation for or not, because my support viewer got a bit messed up. As you can see, there's a pretty significant red block right around Kellam, Donnel, and Ricken.
Thanks again for the link to the Fates tutorial!

Edit: I can extract the gamedata.bin.lz file using FEAT okay, but the Fates tutorial uses a program called Fire Emblem Fates Support Editor, which is incompatible with Awakening files, and I don't see any Awakening equivalent. I created a project in Paragon, and the only option from there is Modules > data > Person, which prompts opening a file and I have no clue what to do with that. It doesn't seem relevant to creating supports. I'm using a romfs folder attached to a 3ds file of Awakening in Citra, so maybe that's a problem. If anyone can provide a tutorial on using Paragon with Awakening, that would be much appreciated. That or just a hex editing tutorial for adding support options to gamedata.bin...

Edit 2: I dumped the romfs folder from my actual game cartridge and that opens much more options under 'data' in Paragon, and the Characters menu offers a list of characters each character can support with. It also comes with a dropdown of 'non-romantic,' 'slow,' 'medium,' 'fast,' and 'haxxors' underneath each name. Surprisingly, when copying all the files in the romfs/m/E directory of the Gay Fates hack into the romfs/m/E of the dump, it doesn't add any more characters or change any non-romantic supports to romantic. Because of this, I doubt the same mechanic unlocks the gay marriage supports as controls the vanilla marriages. I'll have to see if adding support options in Paragon does anything.

Edit 3: Editing support options then saving creates romfs/data/person/static.bin.lz, I'll add that from Gay Awakening to the dump folder and see what that does. ... The Characters option disappears and the Person tab (which opens the same screen as the Characters tab when static.bin.lz is opened) can't open either. Seems like the Gay Awakening hack is pretty much incompatible with Paragon. (static.bin.lz, at least) Editing existing supports from non-romantic to romantic works! Adding new marriage options also shows up ingame! (tested using Citra)

Edited October 27, 2020 by apricotstarship

[Ertrick36]

On 10/27/2020 at 12:01 PM, apricotstarship said:

Thank you! I probably should have mentioned that I have the Gay Awakening hack, I just want to add in options for Kellam, Donnel, and Ricken (and others) that were left out. The creator was sensitive to age gaps, it seems. I made this chart to show which couples are possible and have support conversations.

Spoiler

 

 

Blue means that a pair can achieve S rank, green means they have an S rank support conversation, orange means a pair has C-A, and red means they don't have anything at all. The yellow outline is for S support conversations that were added by the hack. The question marks are ones I couldn't tell if there's a conversation for or not, because my support viewer got a bit messed up. As you can see, there's a pretty significant red block right around Kellam, Donnel, and Ricken.
Thanks again for the link to the Fates tutorial!

Interesting visualization.  It definitely displays which characters may have received bias (e.g. no red for Tharja or Olivia, but Kellam's looks like it could be a peppermint candy cane with all that red).  At first I didn't realize that to read a particular character's full list of supports I had to first red horizontally until the grey block and then read vertically downwards.

On 10/27/2020 at 12:01 PM, apricotstarship said:

Edit: I can extract the gamedata.bin.lz file using FEAT okay, but the Fates tutorial uses a program called Fire Emblem Fates Support Editor, which is incompatible with Awakening files, and I don't see any Awakening equivalent. I created a project in Paragon, and the only option from there is Modules > data > Person, which prompts opening a file and I have no clue what to do with that. It doesn't seem relevant to creating supports. I'm using a romfs folder attached to a 3ds file of Awakening in Citra, so maybe that's a problem. If anyone can provide a tutorial on using Paragon with Awakening, that would be much appreciated. That or just a hex editing tutorial for adding support options to gamedata.bin...

Yeah, you don't use the Fates Support Editor for editing Awakening support options.

On 10/27/2020 at 12:01 PM, apricotstarship said:

Edit 2: I dumped the romfs folder from my actual game cartridge and that opens much more options under 'data' in Paragon, and the Characters menu offers a list of characters each character can support with. It also comes with a dropdown of 'non-romantic,' 'slow,' 'medium,' 'fast,' and 'haxxors' underneath each name. Surprisingly, when copying all the files in the romfs/m/E directory of the Gay Fates hack into the romfs/m/E of the dump, it doesn't add any more characters or change any non-romantic supports to romantic. Because of this, I doubt the same mechanic unlocks the gay marriage supports as controls the vanilla marriages. I'll have to see if adding support options in Paragon does anything.

Always dump the ROM if you can.  With hacking tools, you always need to have as much of the game's files readily available as possible.

On 10/27/2020 at 12:01 PM, apricotstarship said:

Edit 3: Editing support options then saving creates romfs/data/person/static.bin.lz, I'll add that from Gay Awakening to the dump folder and see what that does. ... The Characters option disappears and the Person tab (which opens the same screen as the Characters tab when static.bin.lz is opened) can't open either. Seems like the Gay Awakening hack is pretty much incompatible with Paragon. (static.bin.lz, at least) Editing existing supports from non-romantic to romantic works! Adding new marriage options also shows up ingame! (tested using Citra)

Ultimately, yes, if the GameData.bin.lz file has been edited before, it'll become incompatible with Paragon.  I discovered this when I tried to edit a modified Fates ROM with the program.  As far as I'm aware, it's only dependent on if the GameData.bin.lz file has been edited, so if you can just get an unedited file (I hope you were making backups, I probably should've given that piece of advice first and foremost) then you should be able to edit it however you please.

Also, store any modified files in the Citra Mods Location folder.  You can find this by right-clicking on Fire Emblem Awakening in Citra and selecting "Open Mods Location".  They need to retain the same folder structure starting from romfs (so you would put a romfs folder in the mod folder, which would just be named a bunch of random numbers), so that way Citra can layer the romfs over the game's normal romfs.  This makes it so that you don't have to keep decompiling and recompiling the ROM and prevents a lot of issues that come with recompiling the ROM with new mods.  That way it'll be easier to test modifications as well, as you won't need to go through the hassle of putting everything back together.

[apricotstarship]

1 hour ago, Ertrick36 said:

Ultimately, yes, if the GameData.bin.lz file has been edited before, it'll become incompatible with Paragon.  I discovered this when I tried to edit a modified Fates ROM with the program.  As far as I'm aware, it's only dependent on if the GameData.bin.lz file has been edited, so if you can just get an unedited file (I hope you were making backups, I probably should've given that piece of advice first and foremost) then you should be able to edit it however you please.

Also, store any modified files in the Citra Mods Location folder.  You can find this by right-clicking on Fire Emblem Awakening in Citra and selecting "Open Mods Location".  They need to retain the same folder structure starting from romfs (so you would put a romfs folder in the mod folder, which would just be named a bunch of random numbers), so that way Citra can layer the romfs over the game's normal romfs.  This makes it so that you don't have to keep decompiling and recompiling the ROM and prevents a lot of issues that come with recompiling the ROM with new mods.  That way it'll be easier to test modifications as well, as you won't need to go through the hassle of putting everything back together.

I'm pretty sure the dumped romfs folder serves as its own backup, as Paragon creates new files in a different location.
That's exactly what I'm doing with Citra, any other way seems way too complex and long-winded. To be clear, the file I'm editing is data > person > static.bin.lz, not m > E > gamedata.bin.lz
Currently I'm seeing how the game behaves with only the new static.bin.lz file, particularly how it'll handle Chrom marrying Donnel. I don't know what the other Gay Awakening files do (barring the support conversations), so I guess this will show if they're necessary for the marriage and child mechanic to work with Chrom and a husband.

Somewhat unrelated, but have you gotten FE Conversation Editor to work recently? I can get it to open with the sounds and BGM working fine, but none of the image files show up. I think I have the resources folder set up correctly, so I'm not sure why it isn't working. (resources > global > bin, img, sound, text)

[Ertrick36]

2 hours ago, apricotstarship said:

That's exactly what I'm doing with Citra, any other way seems way too complex and long-winded. To be clear, the file I'm editing is data > person > static.bin.lz, not m > E > gamedata.bin.lz

Well, I wasn't talking about that GameData.bin.lz (seems there are multiple files named this), but again I've not used Paragon - I just know what files are edited by Gay Awakening because I had to install them manually.  EDIT: I will say that I actually was wrong, there's no GameData folder in Awakening, that's Fates.  There are multiple GameData.bin.lz files, though, however only one of them is edited in Gay Awakening and it's the one in the directory you provided, not the directory I was thinking of.  That is my bad.

2 hours ago, apricotstarship said:

I'm pretty sure the dumped romfs folder serves as its own backup, as Paragon creates new files in a different location.

If you say so.  I'm probably paranoid, but from years of modding games I've learned that if any files get edited it's always a good idea to back them up manually unless you're willing to reinstall them.  But this has been something I've done for, like, ten years, and I've probably grown overly cautious (I'm talking about modding video games in general, not just this game or even Fire Emblem games exclusively).  You do whatever suits you.

2 hours ago, apricotstarship said:

Currently I'm seeing how the game behaves with only the new static.bin.lz file, particularly how it'll handle Chrom marrying Donnel. I don't know what the other Gay Awakening files do (barring the support conversations), so I guess this will show if they're necessary for the marriage and child mechanic to work with Chrom and a husband.

Well, testing is what you should do, it's good that you're at least naturally inclined to do that instead of just winging it and sorting things out later.  Just know that you shouldn't be surprised if post timeskip Chrom ends up "marrying" the village Maiden - that's simply because no one's yet learned how to program the scenes to accommodate the newly added couples, so the game will just default on story cutscenes displaying as though Chrom married no one.  Functionally speaking he should be married to whomever you marry him to, and both Lucina and whatever other potential kid may be produced will inherit appropriate attributes (skills, growths, class options... all that good stuff).  I say this because it's how it is for the Gay Awakening hack.

Of course testing should go as far as acquiring the child (I suppose in this case it'd be Lucina), checking to see if they inherited skills from the secondary parent, and seeing if they can reclass to the secondary parent's classes.  Maybe check some UI elements like the family list in each unit's screen that displays who they're married to or otherwise related to, but just as long as he parent-child stuff is functioning properly it shouldn't matter much.

2 hours ago, apricotstarship said:

Somewhat unrelated, but have you gotten FE Conversation Editor to work recently? I can get it to open with the sounds and BGM working fine, but none of the image files show up. I think I have the resources folder set up correctly, so I'm not sure why it isn't working. (resources > global > bin, img, sound, text)

You have to enter commands in the actual conversation editor box to get things to appear on screen.  Read the tutorial on that.  You have to enter a command for each character's entry/exit, including at the beginning (by default no one appears on-screen).  You also have to click "Reload Text" after typing commands.  There's a specific format you have to write in to make things happen as you want them to, it's easier to handle in Script Mode but you still need to know what the commands are, which you can only find through the editor's provided documentation.

I'd recommend writing a draft of the supports in a word processing program first - maybe write them like a play, where you tell when a character is supposed to perform certain actions or otherwise just write when sound effects might happen/when characters enter/exit scene.  That way you will only have to worry about actual format when copying those support scripts into the editor.  Trying to fiddle around with both writing dialogue and figuring out format at the same time can turn your brain into a real jumbled mess, which is bad for creativity.  I know because I've been writing stories (stories I don't really share outside of when I play TTRPGs with friends, but still stories nonetheless) my entire life.

Edited October 29, 2020 by Ertrick36

[apricotstarship]

On 10/29/2020 at 3:35 AM, Ertrick36 said:

You have to enter commands in the actual conversation editor box to get things to appear on screen.  Read the tutorial on that.  You have to enter a command for each character's entry/exit, including at the beginning (by default no one appears on-screen).  You also have to click "Reload Text" after typing commands.  There's a specific format you have to write in to make things happen as you want them to, it's easier to handle in Script Mode but you still need to know what the commands are, which you can only find through the editor's provided documentation.

I've tried that, and I'm sure I used proper syntax for it. I also tried importing a script from the Gay Awakening hack - no images. If the lack of a script were the issue, the My Unit customizer and child hair color editor would still be visible, and they are not. The resources folder is set up properly, yeah?
I'd definitely do the actual writing somewhere else, but it would be best to have a fully functional script editor before going to that trouble.

[Ertrick36]

3 hours ago, apricotstarship said:

I've tried that, and I'm sure I used proper syntax for it. I also tried importing a script from the Gay Awakening hack - no images. If the lack of a script were the issue, the My Unit customizer and child hair color editor would still be visible, and they are not. The resources folder is set up properly, yeah?
I'd definitely do the actual writing somewhere else, but it would be best to have a fully functional script editor before going to that trouble.

Did you download the resource packs?  I do remember one had to download the resources and the application itself separately, and merge the resource folder in the pack with the one that is already in the application's root folder.  You want the Awakening Core pack to get the visual elements of the supports.

You may also want to try running the application in administrator mode, if all else fails.  If you have this in a place in your computer that is typically locked (e.g. underneath the Program Files folders), your computer might be blocking the app from using certain things.

[apricotstarship]

17 hours ago, Ertrick36 said:

Did you download the resource packs?  I do remember one had to download the resources and the application itself separately, and merge the resource folder in the pack with the one that is already in the application's root folder.  You want the Awakening Core pack to get the visual elements of the supports.

You may also want to try running the application in administrator mode, if all else fails.  If you have this in a place in your computer that is typically locked (e.g. underneath the Program Files folders), your computer might be blocking the app from using certain things.

Yes, I already have the resource packs. Neither fe-conversation-editor.hw.bat nor fe-conversation-editor.sw.bat will open if I try to open as administrator, but the program will run when clicked normally. The program is located the downloads folder of an internal hard drive, I tried copying it to my desktop and encountered the same lack of images. The GBAtemp thread for it has some comments which put emphasis on manually placing the bin, img, sound, and txt folders into the global folder. Is that any different than drag-and-drop or copy and paste?

EDIT: resources > awakening > bin, img, sound, txt makes it work. I have no idea why, as everything in the GBAtemp thread leads away from this folder setup.

Edited October 31, 2020 by apricotstarship

[Ertrick36]

1 hour ago, apricotstarship said:

EDIT: resources > awakening > bin, img, sound, txt makes it work. I have no idea why, as everything in the GBAtemp thread leads away from this folder setup.

I thought that's how it was by default, but yeah, that's how it's supposed to be.  Whatever those other people were saying sounds like nonsense.  Global is, I'm pretty sure, just for the program itself, not any of the UI elements related to the specific games the program supports (the audio files, the images of characters and backgrounds, etc.).

[twinkle star]

hey could someone help me my conversation editor does not open and it always gives an error saying that the sistem can not find the specified path and saying java.io.FileNotFoundException