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I recommend to split this project in independent and small projects. When you have a big project, with many dependencies within itself, it can be ruined if a specific feature can't be implemented and it is required for the functionality of others modules/code. With small projects, if a few are unsuccessful, you still can have something functional instead of a big dysfunctional one.

I believe the project you mentioned isn't easy and i recommend to be humble and implement only the most vital parts of it. Everything else can be aggregated later as an add-on for the main hack, based if it can or can't be implemented.

I can see the following related projects, all related with guests characters and features that can't work correctly in the default game:

The tasks are going to get split up into smaller projects, but the overall goal is to get 2 more-or-less fully functioning additional characters. We can always weed out what doesn't work... Tho having gone through this once already, the only things that haven't been proven and working in the past are the Colosseum (due to having never looked at it), and the OAM (admittedly a bear, but on my bucket list anyway).

It will be far from easy, but I like setting high goals. And its a community project, so even if it doesn't 100% pan out the way I envision it, so long as people enjoy the process and maybe learn a thing or two, I'm happy.

Roster Guests

To expand the roster selection from 14 to 16 characters with the inclusion of two guest characters.

I believe the Guest Adder patch can be used/adapted for this project.

I don't know what Guest Adder does, just adds guests to the airship and party select? I'll look into it.

Colosseum Guests

In the default game, guests can't be used in the Colosseum. If they are selected for the Colosseum fight, the game engine refuses to load the guest data and a bugged, empty and invisible character is loaded instead, triggering a defeat soon or later.

I tried to fix it in the Guest Adder patch but i was unsuccessful. As an alternative, i denied the selection of guests for the Colosseum in the patch.

Admittedly, I've never looked over the Colosseum and am replacing it with something totally different in CoV... but I'm sure we can get something working, but of all things to not work, this one is pretty minor and could potentially just be left out.

Guest Magic

The magic command doesn't work correctly with guests in the default game. I don't know about the MMMagic update patch, but i tried the magic command in the guests with the imbued magic hack and apparently the game engine has a few hard coded settings if magic is used by guests characters. In my case, the spell list for the magic command is empty for the guests, except for his summon spell.

About the Guest Adder patch, to clarify, it doesn't modify the magic system code.

I've got magic covered. It's already fully functioning in C2 for anyone, finishing up C1 changes today, and maybe working on C0 and/or C3 tonight on-stream.

Guest equipment

Guests characters can't change equipment. This restriction can be bypassed and guests can equip items like other characters. However, a few issues arise.

First, there isn't a flag for the guests in the item data to determine if the guests can equip it. An option is to use the imp and merit award flags but their features probably must be abolished from the game.

Second, in shops, in the lower part of the screen, the characters does an animation based if the item is equip-able and if it actually upgrade/downgrade the character. There isn't space for the two guests characters in it. I suppose the two guest characters can be ignored but it should be nice if you know if the item can or can't be used by the guests in shops, somehow...

The neat thing about equipment is that the game doesn't actually disclude character properties IDs 0E and 0F from using the equippable gear byte. If you allow Banon(0E) and Leo(0F) access to the equipment menu, Banon can equip the Imp gear, and Leo can equip anything marked "Heavy Gear". The plan is to move Banon and Leo's properties ID's elsewhere and put the new characters there... OR we can create an ID transformation function to change the ID of the new characters to 0E and 0F... OOOOOORRRR we can do something similar to the MMMMMagic update and create a table that tells the game which properties IDs use which equipment lists, allowing any character to potentially change their gear.

Moving the "Spec active when imp" and "Heavy gear" bits is trivial. In fact, since the MMMMMagic update removes the use of learning magic through weapons, there's a whole extra 8 bits to work with.

Guest sprites

The number of sprites sheets and portraits are limited in the default game. If you want to add news one, they must be expanded and their correspondent graphics must be created/imported.

Sprite sheets are probably the easiest thing to expand, no problem here. I made a video on it like 3 years ago. The original 15th-Man Project code also has expanded portraits. So nothing to worry about here.

New commands

I believe the number of actual commands can't be expanded because of hard coded features or because it should be really difficult. But if you want a new command for the guests characters, it must be implemented in assembly. The complexity of the new command is proportional to the difficulty of the implementation.

The easy way is to call a specific spell when the command is used. Unfortunately, probably a old command must be sacrificed for the new one. Another option is to use a multiple function command. The command can check the character identifier who uses it and change its behavior accordingly. As example, it can trigger a specific spell for the first guest, another specific spell for the second guest and a default spell for everyone else.

It definitely depends on what exactly we pick for each character, but something along the lines of the multiple function command is my idea. Reusing things like the magitek menu but populating it differently with a certain criteria. But yeah, this is a bit more hairy, but I've got a good amount of knowledge on this particular subject.


The only REAL problem to getting additional characters 100% working is the OAM data (shops, saves, and party select menus). I would love to have someone like Eggers around who had a lot of experience with video hardware and helped me get a leg-up on OAM in the first place... but I expect to eventually get around it. Honestly, I expect I will have to do this one myself.

Ultimately, this is an extremely ambitious project... but that's kind of the point. If we only ever do things that have been done before, the community will eventually stall out. I love discovering new things and finding new ways to change whats possible. That's why I prototypted and implemented expanded spritesheets, fully expanded maps and locations (together with Madsiur), and an overhaul of the magic system... As daunting as it can be, the code is surprisingly flexible and there have been few projects that I've done that I had to completely rewrite something from scratch.

It might be easy to believe this idea is short-sighted, but I expect unforseen roadblocks to appear, the difference is, I expect to work around them. It helps that we've already been through this once before and a lot of the work has been done in the past.

I hope to get as many people involved in as many aspects of hacking as possible. Competent and dedicated coders are hard to come by, and I would absolutely welcome your help HatZen if you're interested. This is a project worth doing and has the potential to help a lot of people with their own hacks. If we don't do it, maybe nobody will.

Happy Hacking!