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Antinomia: FF6

#11
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Phew, had a bit of a challenge with this portion.

Mog has now been changed to a readily-recruitable guest character who can join the party if you talk to him in Narshe with an open slot.  He can still learn his Dances and retains them each subsequent time you recruit him.  However, he is unequippable and not selectable in the party menu, so in cases where you enter the party selection screen or the game chooses a party for you, he warps back to Narshe.  But I wanted to see if there was a way I could keep him playable even though Leo stole his permanent slot, and so far it seems to be working.

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I did originally put him in slot 0F, but then I took him to the Cave to the Sealed Gate and discovered Kefka co-opts slot 0F in the battle there so Mog just kind of vanishes.  Therefore, I had to re-write the code to put him in slot 0E and then update the battle script with Kefka to refer to Mog's new slot so that he does the cinematic animations along with the rest of the characters instead of just standing there like a dunce.

Now I'm adding a new event before the banquet which required some map modification, but it seems that FF6LE-CE and FF3usME both write to bank F0 with their expansions, and a bunch of my dialogue got corrupted and FF3usME could no longer open it.  Thankfully I always export my dialogue file to text every time I modify it, so I still had a copy.  Also thankfully, I did go ahead and write myself my own dialogue editing tool that can move all three dialogue banks to custom locations, both to allow the pointer list to expand into CD and also now to get the third bank out of F0 so that it's not conflicting with other expansions.  I also wrote it to accept the FF3usME export data as an import, so with that I was able to reclaim my corrupted dialogue and move it to a safer location while giving me more pointers in the process.

I wrote the dialogue editing tool very narrowly around my particular needs so it's not particularly fleshed out as a tool.  It's specifically expecting a ROM that's already been expanded and already has the FF3usME's Town Dialog patch applied, and can then read in all the dialogue lines from the ROM and give you the option to move them to an available empty bank and then edit, add, and save dialogue from wherever you've saved it.  So if this seems like something anyone else might want to use, I can try to put it in a more "release-able" state.
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#12
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This was quite the effort, but the new event before the banquet is finally complete, depicting the Esper assault on Vector.  This is a scene I thought the original game was sorely in need of because it happens off-screen but is the entire impetus of the final quest of the World of Balance.  I thought Gestahl's sudden change of heart, the fact that "Yes, the Espers have gone too far" was the correct answer at the banquet, and the Espers themselves lamenting that they'd killed innocent people and wondering if the Empire would forgive them all fell a little flat when we never saw any of that happen.

Well, now we do, complete with a Leo/Celes party joined by a new pair of Imperial soldier mooks to back them up, and three new boss fights as they protect the citizens of Vector from the Espers.

[Image: NLAbXHK.png][Image: RYObKS2.png][Image: BiQAKoi.png][Image: tP5ECPD.png][Image: s4L4HEk.png]

Piett and Ozzel follow the naming pattern of Biggs and Wedge in that they're two more Star Wars background characters.  Piett appeared alongside Biggs and Wedge in Chrono Trigger, so I knew I wanted him to be one of them, so I went looking through Star Wars wikis for other background characters associated with Piett and found that Ozzel was the character Vader force-choked before promoting Piett to take over his position in Empire Strikes Back, so he got to be the other.  And it's only appropriate that Biggs and Wedge, who follow Terra, were Luke Skywalker's wingmen, while Piett and Ozzel, who follow Leo, are two mooks of Vader's.

Next on the agenda is some minor modifications to the banquet, mostly to force Terra to be present for the scene even if you didn't bring her in the party.  Terra's agency gets brought more to the forefront in this mod and I thought it was kind of a dick move that your party, who's supposed to be the heroes, can make the decision to have her join forces with the Empire and send her to Thamasa to mediate with the Espers without her actually being there to consent.
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#13
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Nattak\'d
Beautiful stuff! Keep up the great work, I can feel the hype right now lol.


We are born, live, die and then do the same thing over again.
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#14
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this is very impressive

I thought of adding an event or at least a reference of what occured in vector a long time ago but never a full fledged playable scenario, this is spectacular


"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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#15
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All right, since I am kind of proud of this event, here's a video demo of it:






The scene is interspersed between the airship crashing and the fade-in of it grounded afterwards.  It opens with a scene that's actually a continuation of another added scene where Celes is jailed and questioned after leaving the group at the Magitek Research Facility.  She also loses all of her equipment then so the "optimize" command is run in the background at the beginning of this event because even when play-testing it myself I kept running into the first fight completely unequipped and Celes can't tank the magic attacks without a sword.  I also added an item shop merchant because Celes is the only magic-user in the party and the map is inescapable, so I wanted to make sure people didn't suddenly find themselves here unprepared.  A quirk with the merchant, though, is that entering and exiting the shop screen resets the NPCs' animations from whatever tile they're currently standing on, so everyone kept shifting.  I corrected this for the other NPCs by re-declaring their initial position at the starts of their animations, but I couldn't do that for the merchant because you could conceivably be standing on that tile and he could potentially trap you, so the merchant has a habit of "wandering" a bit whenever you open the shop menu.

Also, this map is actually a duplicate of the Vector Burning map with all the exits removed so you can't enter the buildings.  However, annoyingly the X-coordinate of the upper exit and lower exit are the same and therefore it allows you to "wrap around" and run off the edge of the map and get trapped in null space.  Therefore, I had to sacrifice some event tiles across the north and south exits to force the party to turn around.  I also added a couple of fires to block certain routes so I could "herd" the party to the desired tiles to trigger the battles.

This was the event I initially needed to create that NPC Event Bit document for, because I added the save point and therefore needed new unused event bits tied to the Espers defining whether you'd already defeated them or not so that their present/not present state would persist after a save.
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[-] The following 2 users say Thank You to Fast Moon for this post:
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#16
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It's a really great scene! Good job!
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#17
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Finished with some additional dialogue at the banquet and on the ship in Albrook, and now we set off for the fateful events in Thamasa.  Most of what I've done up until now has been additions or expansions on existing scenes, but here's where I'm going to start straight-up modifying them. 

The biggest challenge is my plan to slightly tweak the in-battle event between Kefka and Leo beyond just modifying the sprites and dialogue.  The commands for these animations aren't really as well-documented, though I do have the animation event dump to use as reference.  The main issue is that unlike the B2 jump command for regular events that uses a 3-byte pointer (which I have been making liberal use of everywhere else), the jump command in the battle animations only uses a 2-byte pointer which constrains me to the same bank to insert any new code.  I thiiink I have it figured out how to do what I want to do, but we'll see when I get there.

After that, then, would be completely rewriting the scene that comes after Leo's death since, well, he doesn't die this time.  But he's also not joining the party yet.  Oh no, I'm gonna make you have work for him. Tongue
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#18
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All right, that was a project in and of itself.  Re-translating, re-writing, re-animating, and adding a number of brand-new full scenes to the Thamasa event to save Leo from his premature death!

And he still didn't even have the courtesy to join the party full-time at this point. Jerk.

[Image: dpCfqbI.png]
Famous last words

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At least he owns up to it

[Image: LUeAXoE.png]
Plot twist

[Image: RoZvpBl.png]
Kefka's Dissidia taunt vs. Terra makes an appearance.

[Image: 7kaib7y.png]
He got better

[Image: zd5LYWr.png]
Doesn't need this grave anymore.

Now onto the Floating Continent for more shenanigans.  Until next update!
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#19
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Fishing for some idea here:

Leo is going to replace Shadow as the character recruitable on the Floating Continent, which technically leaves Shadow available to be recruited yet in the World of Balance if I so desire.  I was going to insert a scene into the Thamasa event where Shadow joins, but with all of the other stuff I added involving Leo, the cutscene was already running 20 minutes long and I couldn't figure out a place to put Shadow showing up and joining that wouldn't throw off the flow.  So, if I was going to add an event where Shadow could be recruited, where would he be?  He ditched the party in Thamasa saying he was going to "search for the Espers his own way", so it seems like he'd still be on Crescent Island somewhere, though throughout the game he shows up places he technically shouldn't be able to get to, like Albrook in WoB, and somehow getting from Thamasa to the Coliseum in WoR, so he doesn't necessarily HAVE to still be there.

Any thoughts?  This would end up being an optional means of getting him in the WoB.  And thankfully the Blackjack map and events already account for him (and Umaro and Gogo) being recruited for some reason, so it doesn't seem like it would be that much issue to add.
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#20
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Moog
Hmm...

Esper mountain would already be too crowded since that's when Relm shows up (assuming that's roughly the same), so... hrm...

Vector is completely empty after the continent rises, yes? Could put him in the pup there, lamenting that he's not going to get paid.
Alternatively, you could plop him in one of the inns, out cold in a bed. You talk to him there, he says he got pummeled by Yura and he's not sure how he got there, and then he joins?
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