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Using spreadsheets as game editors

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I made a spreadsheet and a python script you can use to patch games.

The spreadsheet has an editor sheet with explanations for the data in yellow, and editable fields (all in hexadecimal) in green. It's frozen for easy scrolling.

There's a digits tab for convenient referencing of item and skill names, and for getting 2 byte values for money drops and HP.

Changes from the editor sheet are concatenated in the CSV sheet, along with the names of the files they are to be written to, and the address within those files where the writes begin.

The changes are applied this way:
  1. Go to the CSV sheet and save it as a CSV file.
  2. Open up Powershell, navigate to the directory where the CSV file, writeCSV.py, and the files to be written to are stored.
  3. Run writeCSV.py
The Python script handles the writes, and other than what I described above no user input or know-how should be needed besides learning how to use the "cd" and "dir" commands in Powershell, and ensuring you have at least the same version of Python 3 as I do.

I made this out of frustration with writing GUI editors in Java. I'm not done with it yet - I need to find a way to do mass imports of files into a disc image using command line tools on Windows and Linux - but since you guys mostly work with SNES and GBA games it should work out of the box for you.

Ripping data and especially text from a file and formatting it for pasting into a spreadsheet is an enormous pain so I might write a Python script to do those too. I can currently do it with a good hex editor and judicious use of Find->Replace All, but it sucks and most people wouldn't think to do that. It only applies to people who make the editor, not to those who use it, so for now it's not a pressing issue.

Given that spreadsheets have built-in functions for all sorts of things, this could be very, very useful for anyone who wants to customize the size or attributes of item data tables or what have you.

It should also work nicely with semi-assembled ASM hacks - ones where part of it is left up to the user to decide. You can write explantions on what various numbers mean, convert them to hex, and concatenate them together with the rest of the hack.

I don't know if you could write a checksum on the data in such an editor, but it should be possible given that checksums are just math and everything is already in there. My editor in particular is in LibreOffice ODS format because I hate Microsoft and Excel, but it might work with Excel. If you stick to LibreOffice then you can use it's Python and Basic scripting capabilities. Having a set of code modules available for different uses would be handy.

edit

The monster data editor is finished, as is the spark talents editor. As of this edit, I'm working on a (initial) character data editor. Updates can be found on our Saga Frontier modding discord, which is here:
https://discord.gg/dR6HwQT
 
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