Temporarily re-railed!

..Mr. Seph sent me the util that he used along with some of the extracted game data, so Ah gots what Ah came heres fohr! Well, to this sub-forum anyway. For this particular instance. 'cause of the thing.

..man, I don't even remember, now. Carry on!


(the fun part is going to be looking at how the levels are put together, and if there might be some way to splice new rooms and/or areas into the existing structure...)

(EDIT: Blargh! It wasn't til I started going through all the files (and the map textures aren't being viewed properly yet, either..) that I got to thinking what a pain in the ass this is. Building new rooms - especially if re-using the textures already present - is not really that big an issue. It's fitting that area into everywhere else in the game!

It needs an entry in the maps list, it'll screw with the Map Completion %% and, if you have any chests, that as well; if there are save spots.. it's good-news bad-news because there're places for expansion in the snapshot icons used in the save/load menu, but you'll have to edit the Teleportation spell data itself, because the game scales MP cost based on distances which is really just the save spot's location in a couple of different files...

...well, it's still cool to finally poke around in the guts of this thing, anyway. Re-textures look easy enough, at least, to provide some amusment. Maybe I'll flip a coin: heads, we make Rosencrantz' weird lip thing into a clearly discernable piercing; tails, we make it look more like a herpes sore than it already does. The public requires a definite answer after all these years: what the hell is that thing, anyway?!)

If you have time please write up structure information as you find it.  Eventually someone will add it to the Q-gears engine. (So people can play VS on there Palm NDS or whatever using it.  It's game preservation!)

Cyb

Maybe someone can assist me with this; Nightcrawler sez I should go ahead and ask about PSX stuff anyway.

Caveat: this is the first bit of hacking I've ever attempted so, yes, probably in over my head. But it's a pet project vs a hobby, so I'm not so interested in mucking about in NES games or something just to make a few initial pokes at this.

What I'm wanting to do is change the drop rate of certain weapons for certain enemy spawns. Specifically:

the Dark Crusader in /MAP/ZONE56.ZMD at 00007410
the Last Crusader in /MAP/ZONE56.ZMD at 00008130

the Dark drops an Ascalon, the Last drops Excalibur. JTilton's guide here sez the enemy drop rates are some percentage of a 255 change; 3/255, 48/255, et cetera. BUT I can't figure out where in the file that bit is stored, that number. Seph 1311 (part of the team that did the Italian translation) sent me a table file, and I'm sharing that here for interested parties to assist in helpin' me out on this.

So far I've just been looking at this in WindHex and flipping through some of the basic tutorials here on the site, so if there's some specific passage I should be looking at for this, you can point me towards that as well. My current stumbling block is, I suppose: using the TBL file, why does stuff like "Last Crusader" show up very plainly, but then its section has a bunch of apparent garbage like accented vowels, etc? I'm working under the assumption that the drop rate is in that first set of Last Crusader text, and not the actual item stats, probably something based on what slot it's equipped in (at least this is how I'd do it)

(oh, and eventually want to tweak the drop rates for the staves that Lich Lords and Deaths carry in Iron Maiden B2, but looking at the other two first because those particular enemies only spawn in two specific rooms under specific conditions, so it's easy to test if a 100% drop rate works)

Re: screenshot: I can do one better. The file's up here; it's about 200kb.

I'd been talking to seph1311 and he said that this was the file where the data was located, and it was a simple thing he did to switch it. It's not in the guide anymore, but the one I linked previously used to have this information in it as well.

Aaand.. I guess I was expecting the drop data to be text itself because I'm clueless and stabbing in the dark here? ;P The couple information sources I'd had on this suggested it was a damn-easy hack if you knew where it was located, so I was figuring it was just going to be a couple of numbers to switch and patch.

A couple posts up I listed the offset it was at, in this exact copy of the file; yes, it's the English version.  Thanks re: view in unicode; I don't normally work with a unicode font so even when I was looking at it in a text editor and saw the funkiness, I assumed it was intentional. ;p

Alright, I get the byte thing now. I know some enemies that ALWAYS drop a thing so I'll start digging through other files and look for tasty-looking bytes in what I think might be the right place. Thanks for the assistance. =) Time to go back to tutorials and info-docs after this methinks. ;P

I'd be greatly interested in seeing a rebalancing mod for Vagrant Story, with this and other related info, in a similar fashion to what the community at http://www.ffhacktics.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=18 has done with Final Fantasy Tactics.

Can this hacking data be collaborated and linked? I'm betting that a forum could be built around it.

http://www.anarchylive.com/index.php?showtopic=48&st=140 was an effort by one person to remake Castlevania: SOTN, which has progressed far, but seems to be stagnating, due to other demands on the coder's time, which is a good reason to make that potential project a collective effort.