zone doctor vs. LE Rogue

[CzarMalboro]

Of the two current level editors posted on romhacking, which is the better program to use? what are their advantages and disadvantages and which has less bugs? I know LE Rogue had the infamous Serpent Trench corruption, which I recall was fixed and ZD is compatible with Multi Editor.

[Gi Nattak]

They are basically the same thing except Zone Doctor can edit events, but it can be quite buggy with ROMs that have been extensively hacked. I just remember getting error message after error message when trying out ZD. The Rogue version release was made to fix the Serpent Trench issue. I like and use FF6LE Rogue CE that Madsiur made that handles all kinds of nice expansions, and do event editing the old fashion way of hex editing. It seems ZD needs some further work to make it more stable.

[CzarMalboro]

They are basically the same thing except Zone Doctor can edit events, but it can be quite buggy with ROMs that have been extensively hacked. I just remember getting error message after error message when trying out ZD. The Rogue version release was made to fix the Serpent Trench issue. I like and use FF6LE Rogue CE that Madsiur made that handles all kinds of nice expansions, and do event editing the old fashion way of hex editing. It seems ZD needs some further work to make it more stable.

I have noticed that after using the latest version of ZD, my rom will sometimes have battle corruption where the game resets. sometimes it cannot even load roms.  Does the new Rogue edition work with ME?  Also the prior bugs such as the exit editing past exit 256 are fixed right?  I went to ZD because of the problems the older editions of LE had.

I guess I need to use a clean rom that is expanded.  I am working on a hack that uses the WoR color palette for the WoB (although some tiles will need to be altered to blend in well).

[madsiur]

If you don't need the expansions, use FF6LE Rogue, otherwise FF6LE CE. Lenophis reported this week that NPC events offsets were not saving with FF6LE CE but I need to check this and fix it. FF6LE Rogue has not the exit bug fixed but FF6LE CE fixed it (see readme for all bugs corrected).

Edit: Also, hacking topics should be put in Magitek Facility sub-forum.

[CzarMalboro]

So LE CE is the most stable of the level editors now?

[PowerPanda]

I use Zone Doctor, but it took me about a month to figure out how to work around its numerous bugs.

The main bug is how it handles the banks CA (00), CB (01), and CC (02). Whenever it shifts data, it converts everything to CA. So if you had something that said "Call Subroutine CB1234 (hex B2 34 12 01)", and you added ANYTHING to the event, it would change it to CA1234 (B2 34 12 00). If you make NPC #3 into NPC #4, then the same thing will happen when ZD tries to shift the offsets for those characters. It'll drop anything but the first 2 bytes. Note that this also happens when branching via casewords.

Also, when you edit an event through ZD, the event has to have the EXACT same number of bytes as it did previously. Since most of my event edits usually CONSERVE bytes, I get around this by padding the end of my event with "Refresh Objects (Hex 45)" till I get to the starting number of bytes. Then I go into a hex editor and truncate the event, padding the rest with bytes that say "00" and end with "FE" (the command to end an event). Later on, if I needed to write a subroutine that I knew would take 10 bytes, I'd search the rom for 10 sets of "00" followed by "FE". I think Divergent Paths uses something like 200-300 LESS bytes than the original rom for events.

Still, even with that HUGE bug, ZD's event editor is what made my "Divergent Paths" project possible.

[madsiur]

So LE CE is the most stable of the level editors now?

All the FF6LE builds are equally stable. FF6LE CE has a few more bugs fixed. I don't consider Zone Doctor to be stable.

[CzarMalboro]

One reason I used ZD was that it does not corrupt the data after using FF6ME and the exit bug does not exist. I was able to connect Vector to the Imperial Base. Now I have experience with both ZD and LE corrupting my files although I have used the latter before ZD was released. I never realized how unstable it was, but I have noticed that the battle system gets messed up. From what I have noticed, any form of tile set editing can easily mess up the rom.

Most of the time, I will edit the sprites or color palettes. One thing I tried doing was adding more railroad tracks in Vector and connecting it to eh base. The last thing I noticed was that Darill's Tomb was corrupted. Also, one of the level editors added an Angler Whelk in the random battles on the path to Jidoor.

Okay so as update: it appears that ZD will corrupt any rom after using ME.

[PowerPanda]

Specifically, when using ZoneDoctor and FF3usME in conjunction, map edits will corrupt the first 10 or so black magic spells, many of which can crash the game. Other times, the game won't crash, but it will softlock. The good news is that you can just go into FF3usME and manually revert all of the black magic back to normal. This is just in my experience though.

[CzarMalboro]

Now when it comes to corruption, will deleting unused rooms to save space for tile editing corrupt the rom?