Redrawing the ROM map

[madsiur]

I'll just add to what has already been said.

First: Map expansion. I know it can be done, but I have no idea how to even begin there. I'm sure whatever kind of map data can be expanded would need a dedicated editor to handle it.

FF6LE is open source so this can be done in a relative easy way. When I modified FF6LE to expand NPC, event triggers and exits, I've looked a bit into map expansion. All what is needed to be expanded is pointers, move map data (tiles data) and add a good space buffer for the number of maps you want to add and finally expand a fixed length data for each maps containing like which song play and other things. I think I'm not missing anything here.

Second: Event expansion. The existing events in vanilla take up almost 3 whole banks. Moving the events would be a very difficult thing to do, as they are loaded from so many places. What I would suggest is to move anything out of CC and CD that are not events. The existing event engine can easily handle going into a 4th bank (since 3 is not a power of 2, this should be obvious). I believe CD holds (among other things) the dialogue pointers... which would be an easy thing to move.

Moving dialogues pointers would save roughly 0x1800 bytes. Right after comes the dialogues themselves. The major drawback for this idea is that moving dialogues or even their pointers would break FF3usME dialogue editor. I believe PB added an extra dialogue bank and was obliged to use Atlas after to edit them. This is something that needs to be considered when touching dialogues or their pointers.

Third: Code expansion (specifically the C1 bank). I think one additional bank of code would be all that is needed, although code can go anywhere easily enough with long jumps, provided you can find room for a function to pass the options through.

I think moving the half of C2 like you said is a good thing. I don't know C1 really so I can't tell if part of it can be moved without too much trouble.

Fifth: Monster expansion. I don't know where it is without looking at the ROM Map, but I believe that adding monsters to at least 512 would be fairly easy in most respects. The monster data itself can be placed in a larger area. The sprites would probably be the hardest thing, and I'm sure that can be done as well. AI would probably need a new bank, but that's just one block of data and its pointers, so not too difficult (note that, without some code changes, monster AI scripts above 0x8000 in their bank will not trigger their counter-attack scripts properly, so a hack is needed there).

Yes, expansion up to 512 monsters is possible. There's a lot to move but it can be done without too much trouble. This is the first thing my editor will be able to do. As for the AI bug, does this mean FF3usMe AI expansion is buggy?