Question about expanding shop/animation data.

[GreatEclipse]

Here yet again. This next question should not be difficult for advanced hackers to answer. Now that I know how to event hack, one thing I have discovered is that you can use it to increase the number of items available for sale in shops, rather than simply change what occupies each slot in the nightmare editor. This has the potential to be immensely liberating, as I have been forced to make some really difficult decisions about what would be available for sale at what point, but I am a bit hesitant to use it out of fear of screwing something up. Is there any danger of something being accidentally "overwritten" if I increase something like this, as well as the number of enemies, the number of animations available in FEditor, etc? That last one is particularly important, because I have been completely locked out of it a few times over the last couple days when trying to load the ROM, and have been forced to revert to an earlier version that had been set aside as a back-up. I do not know what caused it, but I suspect it had to do with importing some animations starting from slot A3, rather than replacing any that were already there.

Also, I made a new high-rank bow that has 3-15 range, but cannot get the attack range to show up at all on enemies. The Longbow is now 3-10, and it works fine for them. A rather obscure problem, but if anyone know how to fix it, that would be great, as I have some late-game scenarios currently on the drawing board that it would be interesting to try out if only this was not an issue.

As always, thank you very much in advance.

Edited August 30, 2012 by GreatEclipse

[CT075]

shop data is in events

you'll have to repoint

ranges other than 1-2, 2-3, 1-3 and 3-10 don't display right and I haven't figured out how to fix the asm

[dondon151]

3-15 should display right because there are items innate to the game that have it (namely, long ballista) but i haven't actually tried it

Edited August 30, 2012 by dondon151

[GreatEclipse]

3-15 should display right because there are items innate to the game that have it (namely, long ballista) but i haven't actually tried it

I thought that as well, but no, all you can see is the enemy movement range. It still works for the player, though with a bit of lag in getting the entire range to show up, so the weapon is at least staying in.

shop data is in events

you'll have to repoint

So, you are confirming that simply adding weapons/items to shops in the event assembler will create problems, and I need to create my own custom ones using the hex editor if I want to expand the inventory? Just making sure, your response is rather vague. Does that also apply to increasing the number of available animations?

Edited August 30, 2012 by GreatEclipse

[CT075]

animations can be done with feditor

with shops you basically disassemble-edit-repoint-reassemble

i wasn't aware that there was an event editor?

Edited August 30, 2012 by CT075

[GreatEclipse]

animations can be done with feditor

with shops you basically disassemble-edit-repoint-reassemble

i wasn't aware that there was an event editor?

I meant the event assembler. I just edited that in my post.

I know how to import animations with FEditor, and how to get them to appear in the game. What I want to know is if I should override existing, unused animations to make space or if I it is safe to expand the list starting from slot A3. I only ask this because I have been locked out of FEditor several times because it had some unspecified problems with "data streams" or something like that, and I figured that was as likely the cause as any.

Same thing with shops, though using the event assembler to simply increase the number of items (without re-pointing anything, at least not explicitly) has not created any problems so far, I only want to know if it will.

[dondon151]

you'll want to increase the max index for new animations - if you replace old animations, it's likely that they'll just get written somewhere else anyway. after you insert a new animation for the first time, if you get locked out of the animation manager on future uses of FEditor, you'll have to fix the checksum for the ROM (go into a hex editor, delete the last 4 bytes, find the CRC-32 checksum, and append the checksum in little endian).

[GreatEclipse]

I have no idea what you are talking about with regards to this "checksum", but I can worry about that if/when the problem ever comes up again. Thank you very much for the strait answer to my main concern.

Edit: With regards to the question about shops, I looked around in the hex editor and the answer is "yes, adding more than 1 or 2 items could overwrite something important ". You need to point to some free space and create your own inventory.

Edited August 30, 2012 by GreatEclipse