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Antinomia: FF6

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Antinomia: (n.) The state of two laws or principles arrived at through good faith being mutually at odds.

The intent of this hack is to elevate General Leo to a deuteragonist role and periodically shift the focus from the main party to him to explore the events on the Imperial side in parallel with the main casts' actions (kind of like what FF8 did with Laguna).  The overall story progression and mechanics will remain mostly the same, but utilize an expanded ROM and dialogue bank for dozens of new cutscenes and events to expand upon what's already there, for all characters, not just Leo.  Leo's sprite has also been recolored to more closely align with his portrait.

Leo will also survive the encounter at Thamasa and eventually join the party on the permanent roster, taking Mog's slot, but will still spend most of the game as a guest with locked skills and equipment until he has had sufficient chance to truly re-evaluate his loyalties.

The script uses the original Woolsey script as a base, however I'm also using the Japanese script as a reference to fix lines that I felt either mistranslated or misrepresented the original dialogue, so the full game script will also be somewhat fresh, though still familiar.

Basically, it's my own personal take on the age-old question of "What the heck was Leo thinking working for the Empire and what if he'd joined the party?" *points at icon* He's been my favorite FF guy for 25 years, so I thought I'd give romhacking a try for a bit of geeky wish-fulfillment.


Current Progress (2023/05/06):

Version 1.2 RELEASED!

Screenshot samples of what's been completed so far:
[Image: nhp5kOy.png][Image: XUSUKuD.png][Image: h74Gz4i.png]
[Image: WRLjz1k.png][Image: SLEsOZD.png][Image: gLYl6QT.png]

Video demo of new South Figaro event after the Returner Hideout:


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#2
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Just want to say that this looks incredible, very nice work! Best of luck on the rest of everything planned, I look forward to seeing it finished and of course playing it. Smile


We are born, live, die and then do the same thing over again.
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Really nice work so far!
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this looks incredible

I'm looking forward to seeing more

keep up the great work


"Sometimes ninjas do wrong to each other, and in dat way the force of tha earf' comes around da moon - and at that presence, da dirt, it overshadows the grass, so you're like, I can't cut dis grass, there's no sun comin' through. So in order to enable each other the two fruits have to look each other in da eye and understand we can only be right, as da ripe is wrong, you know what I mean?"

-HNIC
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Still making progress on this, adding more scenes and events.  Finally at the point in the game where the party members are selectable, so I'll be poking around for places I could insert some new character-specific scenes.  I may just yet find a reason to bring Cyan or Gau to Zozo.

Some more progress pics:

[Image: UXqQNgm.png][Image: mFqhywO.png][Image: 7MYiP8F.png]
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I might do something similar to this FF6 hack. So I am interested in seeing how this hack goes. What program are you using to expand the rom and put more events in?
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(10-02-2020, 10:29 PM)CrumpledMedal Wrote: I might do something similar to this FF6 hack. So I am interested in seeing how this hack goes. What program are you using to expand the rom and put more events in?

I used FF3usME to expand the unheadered 1.0 SNES ROM, then from the FF3usME expansion manager I added all of the available expansions to the text and maps.  Then from FF6LE-CE, I added the expansion to the event and NPC pointer banks.

Note that there's a difference between event space and event pointer space.  Event space is the code that specifies what happens during an event, and with just a vanilla expanded ROM you have lots of extra space to add that wherever you want.  However, event pointers are in a table that points to the start addresses of each individual event, and that table does not get expanded by simply expanding the ROM, and only has room to add, like, three new ones by default.  So that's why the FF6LE-CE event pointer expansion is necessary if you want to add more than three brand new events that don't piggyback off existing ones.
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Phew, gonna have to pause active development a bit and fully script out every dialogue addition I want to make until the end of the game, since I just realized I'm at risk of running out of dialogue space.  I wasn't even thinking about it since the FF3usME dialogue expansion gives 65KB of new dialogue space which seemed more than sufficient, but it does NOT expand the pointer list, which only has space for about 240 new lines and I've already blown through half of those and I'm only at the Opera House.  Plus the 67 lines of unused dialogue that I can repurpose gives me an upper limit of about 300 new lines total, so I need to make sure I've got space for the plot-necessary dialogue changes before I go about adding any more fluff scenes.  I've also completely removed Siegfried from the game because his existence is utterly pointless and it gives me a boss entry, a field sprite, and about 10 more lines of dialogue I can do something else with, and every little bit helps.

(Though it's kind of a shame because as I was going through retranslating everything, upon reaching Siegfried's Japanese dialogue I realized that he either is or is a homage to Gilgamesh from FF5, just executed very haphazardly).
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I've finished scripting out all the remaining major new scenes and it looks like I have juuuust enough available and unused dialogue pointers to fit it all.

However, it also looks like if I really need to, I can simply move the dialogue pointer table to a larger block of empty space so it has more room to grow and update the address reference to it in the call routine, which I assume would give me however many extra pointers it would take to completely fill bank F0 (bank CD has about 1200 lines in it, so...).  I tested this and it seems to be working, but it then makes it incompatible with the FF3usME dialogue editor.  Really wish FF3usME was open-source so I can tweak where it's looking for the pointer table, because that seems to be all that's confounding it.  But without it, that means if I want to manually add more dialogue beyond what can fit at its original address, I'll have to make absolutely sure I'm done editing all the existing lines before I move it so that I'm only ever adding pointers to the end of the table.
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Continuing to make progress.  My cat was seriously ill last week so I had to take some time off to look after her, but thankfully she pulled through at the last minute before we were going to decide to euthanize her, so things are getting back to normal.

I'm contemplating writing my own dialogue editing tool to overcome the constraints FF3usME imposes, to allow moving both the pointer table and all three dialogue blocks to custom locations rather than be hard-limited to CD, CE, and F0.  With the pointer space I have right now I only have juuuust barely enough to add all of the new lines I need for the plot-relevant additional events, but I have no more space for fluffy optional character-specific scenes, which I wanted to add more of.

This latest batch of new events did see two new optional character scenes added, now giving Cyan and Gau some personalized scenes to find if you take them to find Terra, but until I can give myself more dialogue pointers, I won't be able to add any more of those.

The latest plot-related scene is some Leo backstory, with a new custom sprite where I just pasted Leo's head onto a regular soldier's body and gave him bigger eyes to indicate he's younger, plus a pre-infusion Kefka who is just palette-swapped because he'd still be old enough at that point in time that I didn't want to bother with a significantly different sprite (he'd be 17 in that scene, which is the same age Edgar and Sabin were in their flashback scene and they still had the same sprites).

[Image: MwTISGN.png][Image: D1pCtKi.png][Image: LuFr02q.png]

I'm coming up to the point where Mog was originally recruitable, however now I have Leo taking over his slot.  My intent with Mog is to make him a regularly-available "guest" character kind of like how Shadow is in the first half of the game, where he'll stay in the Narshe mines but if you come to him with only 3 party members you can recruit him as a guest until you get to a party select screen, at which point he'll be sent back to Narshe.
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