FE8: Creature Campaign Edit?

[Kiwi]

I want to make the Creature Campaign more "involved" with the storyline, so I thought of a few things I would like to edit...

- The random monster appearances on old battlefields? I want to make those appear on castle grounds (inside Renvall (Chapter 5x), inside Jehanna (though it's technically burned down, Ei14), inside Renais (Chapter 16), inside Rausten (Chapter 19), and inside Grado (Eph14).

-Turn those said post-game, in-castle battles from monster encounters to "Rebellions" versus "Restoration Army" (ie soldiers, not zombie things)....with the objective Capture Throne, with no specific boss except maybe a nameless General or Paladin.

-Unlock Vigarde and Mansel? I can just transform Garcia and Dozla via Nightmare/FEditor (since they're useless postgame), but it doesn't seem as climactic. Plus I don't know how to get around their fixation to axes.

-Eh, just cause - turn the "Choose Game" screen's "Creature Campaign" into "Restoration Age" ('Tis possible?)

I'm a noob hacker, and the farthest I've got is messing around with character stats/abilities, switching dummy weapons and etc., and changing names and descriptions in FEditor. So, if I can get any pointers on these, I'd really appreciate it! Thanks!

[Shin Kishuna]

From my understanding, the Creature Campaign is not fully understood.

The easiest way, that I currently know of, to accomplish want you want to do is:

- Castle Battles: Reconstruct the castle maps and insert into, say, Melkaen Coast. When a monster appears there, you should be fighting on the castle map.

- Human Units instead of Monsters: Replace all monster class with clone human ones. The ''Seize'' victory condition, I can't help with.

- Vigarde and Mansel? Well, what ''class' would Mansel be? Vigarde is just a General with some OK stats..

- Turning Creature Campaign to Restoration Age: I could be wrong, but I BELIEVE you can do this with FEditorAdv.

The problems with my above solutions are: They invalidate standard playthrough, you must lose some or all monsters, and they are not ''true'' answers to what you seek to do.

It is my understanding that the CC isn't exactly the easiest thing to delve into. From inexperienced guesstimation, I would assume that it's probably the ''hardest to hack'' part of FE8. There's a lot of variables and it's not well-researched compared to other parts of the game. Same with the World Map. The World Map and the CC are probably the most interesting aspects of FE8 to a hacker (in terms of potential), but they are the (arguably) least well-known and do not have the extensive research and backing as other functions of the FE games.

That said, everything I just said could be totally irrelevant. I know there was at least one person researching the CC's mechanics along with Valni and Lagdou... but I do not know if those efforts culminated in enough information to assist in what you seek to accomplish. Sorry mate, but it's just not quite possible yet. I think.

But hey.. a noob hacker right? Me too... maybe you'll end up finding out how to do this yourself, discover all the relevant data, and make a large contribution to the FE8 hacking scene. This is one of those things; It'll be hard to do, probably take a long time, but would yield great boons in the end, if acccomplished.

Again, I could be wrong.. but I'm pretty sure it's just not possible yet (for us inexperienced noob hackers).

[47948201]

Um, there are plenty of things in FE8 that would probably be tougher to change than what was listed. But anyway, FEditor won't do much about changing CC's name--you'll want to use GBAGE, NLZ, or a similar program for editing compressed data.

I went and found the location for you--

Seize conditions might not be too hard either, but I haven't tried yet.

[CT075]

Let's see...

Firstly, you really shouldn't be trying something as ambitious as this until you understand how your game works hacking-wise, which means you should learn how events work. Secondly, I understand that you can have events in the CC (according to Ryrumeli on FEU), so that's how you get the Seize throne thing to work. That's also how you get the monsters to be human enemies instead. You can use GBAGE to edit the words "Creature Campaign".

Unlocking Vigarde and Mansel is (guess what?) more events. You also have to find an empty data slot to put their characters in, because replacing Dozla and Garcia = Dozla and Garcia don't appear in the regular story. As for actually unlocking them via the same methods used to unlock the other CC characters is not something a noob hacker should be trying (Hell, none of this stuff I've been mentioning sans GBAGE should be even attempted until one gains a decent understanding of the game's workings). As a matter of fact, Nintenlord and Arch, perhaps the two best FE hackers around (except maybe Xeld) haven't been able to do it (IIRC).

You'd have to ask on FEU how to change how the random encounter thing works.

If you've noticed that this seemed to have a vibe of "don't try it", you should probably heed that advice and try something else.

[47948201]

I think Ryru has an account here, and last I checked, Nintenlord and General Archibald don't do much FE8 hacking.

[Shin Kishuna]

I guess victory conditions might've been a given for being an event, I just wasn't sure if it'd work in CC. And... the monster units are events in CC? I mean, a great many things are events.. but I was always under the impression that which units shown were locked to some sort of psuedo-random number sequence or some crap like that.

My bad on the CC's name. I forgot those images are compressed.

[Nanami Touko]

I guess victory conditions might've been a given for being an event, I just wasn't sure if it'd work in CC. And... the monster units are events in CC? I mean, a great many things are events.. but I was always under the impression that which units shown were locked to some sort of psuedo-random number sequence or some crap like that.

My bad on the CC's name. I forgot those images are compressed.

The only way to really change all the monsters into humans would be to go into the events for all those areas and change their classes to player classes, which would take forever.

Or, you can do it the easy way, like I did, and change every monster's class and weaponry in nightmare, making them psuedo humans. The only difference is that they still make the monster noises when they move on the map.

Edited December 28, 2010 by seph1212

[Shin Kishuna]

That's what I was trying to suggest, but I didn't even know you could actually go and change the events directly. It's actually something I'll be looking into later for my own project... so it's interesting.

Bah! Monster noises! Us humans are all monsters somewhere on the inside anyway.

[deleted35362]

Can I step in and say that there's a unit editor included in nightmare module packages,

which let's you simply edit the unlockable characters? It's called "Unknown6".