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I'm going to open up the interface discussion to a larger group, because I really don't like any of the options in particular.
Here's what I put together quickly:
I don't like that the dialogue selector is way too short and it overall feels kind of crowded.
But I do like having everything you want to edit for a battle in one place.
So, I see a few options to make more room for those selectors:
1. Remove some of the officer meta-data next to each officer listing. Do people find the AP and DP listings useful, or is only the soldier count actually relevant?
2. Remove location selectors. Before people go crazy, I can make it read-only on this tab. It's still editable more easily on the Map tab anyway. This WOULD make it impossible in DoaEditor to make an event / dialogue based battle have a location.
Option 3 is a bit more drastic: Make a new tab just for this. I don't like that because:
* What do I call this tab? Battle-taunts? There's no easy way to describe it as succinctly as everything else.
* Mix of concerns (alternate effect of the above). You've got text in my battles and battles in my text.
* The battles tab has extra real-estate anyway, may as well make use of it.
This stuff probably won't be editable for a couple days, but I figure we can at least get the interface in place.
May actually be exactly it, because the "1" banks are working okay (side effect of how my stacked-lines stuff works).
I'll try that out. Thanks!
/edit: Worked exactly. Further discussion will be in DoaEditor topic :)
I have a question about taunts/closers…
When I see the following, my brain goes WTF for two reasons:
Code:The opening line pointers for all battles are stored at 0x3AF21:A6B7 AE00 0000 2324 8187 2628 8507 8081
8385 8387 8486 8200 8187 6D00 8084 8500
8084 8285 0086 8180 8582 8780 8683 8186
8180 0084 8182 FF86 82B9 8085 84BE D882
8386 DE84 8081 E7ED 5E00 0006 0060 D000So A6 is the Qing Zhou battle, B7 is the Mt. Da Xing battle, AE is the Tie Man Xia battle, etc… The order of the battles can be found above. Which text bank it will use is at 0x3AF79:
0000 00FF FFFF 0101 0202 0101 0201 0202
0202 0202 0202 02FF 0202 02FF 0202 0203
0202 0202 0202 0202 0202 0202 0202 0202
0202 FF02 0202 FF02 0202 0202 0202 0202
0202 0202 0202 0202 0100 0003 FF02 02FFReason 1: The 'text bank' section has 4 values (0-3), but there are only actually two text banks that we read. The closer section also has 4 values.
Reason 2: Each text bank has more than 256 lines. How is a bank pointer / pointer supposed to index all lines? I've tried using
Code:bank * 256 + pointerand indexing into a raw list I have in DoaEditor, but that gets me nonsensical taunts/closers in "bank" two.
Basically what I'm wondering is – how do I combine the bank index + pointer into an index for an actual line? All the ones in 'bank' 0 work fine, so I'm mostly looking for the bank multiplier.
As a corollary question – the Closer section has some 0x81 and 0x80 stuff. The first byte's set for some reason I really don't understand. I assume I should ignore it on read, but do I have to maintain that first byte when I write this stuff back to the ROM?
I think it's a possibility. I'll take a look at the hacking guide, and may post a few questions if something's missing…
I'm still not sure what to use for the UI, but maybe I'll put something together and see if it's usable. If you have any suggestions, it would help :)
Looks like I'd need to incorporate those maps into the editor to get that function working – that map tile has an effective X-Y of (10, 23).
If you can find the actual map section for it in the ROM, I can load that bank in and tack it onto the map (thus allowing map and chapter editing for it).
Right now I have 227 map sections loading from one bank that starts at 0x14010. The other 50 load from a bank starting at 0x18010. Last I checked, those were the only two sections we knew about…
Hey Sonic, trying to get a handle on this cell edit-ability issue…
Is it just the Chapter that's uneditable? That appears to happen if I don't have a marker for that map region loaded earlier – which might happen where the X-Y of the region doesn't match up right.
Any idea where the region itself is located in the code?
Define "cell" here? I can probably make them editable, just need to know where/how to find 'em.
I assume you mean a map region?
I haven't had to work with assembly at all. People here (Xian Zhu Xuande/James initially, then MiDKnighT, MeteorStrike and sonic) have provided 90% or more of the information I used to create DoaEditor. C# was what I used to program the application itself.
I had to spend some quality time with a hex editor early on, but at this point any time I spent re-learning assembly would be time I could spend adding more features. It was more a matter of making modifying the game easy using DoaEditor using knowledge we already had.
Yeah, I saw the post about how much time sonic spent on Ieyasu and was thinking the same things.
#2 – One thing that would actually be fairly easy to implement, and may save time, would be a search option for lines in the text editor. I'd like to do something like automatically insert line breaks, but that may require some "fuzzy logic" regarding when the text banks go over the limit.
#3 – This may actually not be that bad, although I'd have to brainstorm some interfaces for it.
Recovery towns – Was this actually found in the ROM? It would be easy enough to create a new tab for it.
Gullwing locations – Ditto, I don't recall whether this is in the ROM hacking guide (I think it is, but it's kind of vague where they start/end). How are they tied to town names?
#5 (map editing) – This may be pretty high-cost since right now there isn't really any glue to tie regions together. I could do something like I did for the map selector, though.
I've also thought about tossing the DoaEditor code up on Github or on an SVN so others can contribute during my dry spells. I realize most people here wouldn't have much dev experience, but I swear to you that it is easier to learn C# than assembly :)
Eventually, I'd like to do some refactoring of DoaEditor as well, since its, er, "architecture" (haha) was never really designed to handle all these widgets and stuff. At the least it seems like some unit testing may help out with the occasional bugs people have seen.
Huh. That's interesting. So if you can find someone in random encounters, they CANNOT appear in towns.
I guess that makes sense, but it's not really intuitive. Maybe I should rename the field.
Hmm, it looks like it could be a font issue.
If you go to control panel -> display, I assume things are at 100% and DPI ("custom text size" is also at 100%?
I'm not sure what else to ask. If these're a dead end, I can cut a custom release to get things fitting properly for you tomorrow.
Sorry about the Win7/64 bit issue. It's probably due to Win7's Aero theming… although I'm not seeing it show up on my version (also Win7/64).
All of my layouts were, unfortunately, done manually which anyone with significant UI or localization experience will tell you is a terrible idea.
You might try one of the Compatibility options, if you right-click and go to Properties then choose the Compatibility tab… picking Disable Visual Themes would be my first recommendation.
If you could grab a screenshot assuming that doesn't work out, I can release a fix for it.
Cabalpapa – The editor does allow you to move warps around (with the caveats people mentioned above – Gullwings still output you to the old spot unless you fix them manually). The game actually handles the multi-warps on the two town tiles gracefully.
To move a warp, right-click on a square with a warp and choose the warp you want to move. Then right-click where you want to move the warp to and choose "set warp location".
The new warp location DOES have to be a warpable tile (e.g. cave, castle, town).
I only really used Umaro on my initial playthrough, subsequent ones my party is usually Sabin/Edgar/Celes/? (Where ? varies depending on who I feel like taking with me… usually Gogo or Cyan).
It's not a very difficult game, so party composition doesn't matter that much. I was just tired of Umaro doing extremely un-useful things on certain fights. He's a fun character to mess around with, though.
