psy_commando

Well they're in the rom. You have to extract the rom, then look under data/FONT/kaomado.kao. You can use the batch scripts for doing that automatically too. Then you have to rebuild the rom with the modifications. Think of a ".nds" file as a zip file really. Except you need something else than winzip/7zip to extract/rebuild them. Well, its mainly about finding the UI API functions in the code, then hooking in your modified code. Its not that hard, but it takes time and patience. Especially if you're doing it by hand instead of using something like Radare2 or IDA. And yeah, I plan to release a bunch of QoL asm hacks eventually. I got some done already on my github mainly to load map lists from file and etc.. In order to make modding easier. I'll probably dive back into that eventually, once I can fix my utilities and get to the big map editor I'm planning. You could already fix the sleeping animations though. You'd need to basically copy in the missing sleep anims it looks for from the dungeon sprites into the ground mode sprites for the specified pokemons, and it would work.

Well, it might be possible. But not without some ASM hacking. Right now I don't think we know enough to do it easily. But that could be a possibility.

Well, I mean the unknowns are things I don't know about for the most part. But you seemed to be detailing the overall file structure of the waza_p file, and that's something I already know about and is pretty well documented in my notes and on the wiki. I appreciate the help however.There are still lots of things that weren't investigated yet though. If you wanna play around with script engine commands and figure out what they do, or mess with dungeon data, find reward lists offsets and etc.. There are still a lot of things like that.

@Zerea Yeah, a lot of this I already knew. And I don't recommend removing move xml files when rebuilding them with statsutil right now, since its undefined behavior. I read your posts, but I'm not really sure what you were asking/saying? Sorry. Great! Thanks for the info! I could reproduce the crash, but I'm not really sure what's going on.. I'll have to take a closer look. Seems like it crashes in release, but is completely fine in debug... Looks like its gonna be one of those bugs..

Well, my assumption had been that those were bitfield, aka the game would check for the value of a specific bit to toggle something on or off, but it could also be an enumeration.. I used to modify those bitfield in memory while running the game, and it seemed to me that unk#4-5 values both contributed to the resulting effect of the move. Like unk5 seemed to affect ranged move particularities.. I took some notes from your analysis, but I think it might need some testing to see how it works in practice?

Thanks for the data! I was pretty sure it had to do with critical chance, but I wasn't sure if it was a ratio or something else! And you're not derailing anything, this thread was meant to share research results and etc, so you're welcome to post any findings you wanna share! ^^

Well, like most data stored in SIR0 files, its all meant to be loaded as an array in memory. I haven't yet looked into how the indice for special items is obtained though. But technically, if the item array size isn't hardcoded, you should be able to just refer to the new item ids in the dungeon and shop data spawn lists. But I have yet to make a tool for that, because a bunch of those are hardcoded in the game executable. I've managed to mod the game's binary in the past to load a variable size map list with some asm edits, so I figure I should be able to mod the game to put those lists into files as well. But I'm working on other stuff for now.

Well, when you make tables and etc its nice to not have the rows do line breaks and make everything inconsistent. And well, there's the colors, but also there's the issue that emphasis on text is somewhat tame, probably because it avoid people abusing really flashy text in their forum posts. Maybe a separate forced theme for the wiki could help? With something like times new roman as font or or whatever media wiki uses? And in my opinion, wiki markup was never an issue. As long as I don't have to do raw html too much, and things auto-format nicely. Forum markup tends to be unreliable and capricious. And editing html directly isn't really more convenient its more work, and there's the issue of html compatibility and fitting to the CSS theme and etc.. Well, wikia is riddled with advertisement and etc.. Its not really the best place to host technical documentation. Maybe hosting a sort of wiki on github could work?

Ok, first, never use save states if you're modding the game. Save states are just literally memory dumps of the nds's ram into a file, and since the files inside the rom have changed and aren't at the same place anymore, it will end up being really, really messed up. Regular in-game saves are fine though. Also, its probably not a good idea to post the entire roms here(I downloaded it already, so you probably should remove the link). And, also you really shouldn't need to run any of my tools as administrator. In general, don't run anything as administrator if you can. But yeah, it seems like you have the latest version of statsutil, so that's good. I'll try to run some more experiments! Thanks for the details!

So after testing I can't seem to get the items to corrupt.. Can you tell me more about what you did @Zerea ? Did you use any tools on the rom afterwards? And what version of statsutil are you using? Also I updated audioutil to fix a bug, and add multi-sf2 export on games with no main bank. https://github.com/PsyCommando/ppmdu/releases/tag/ppmd_audioutil_0.37

Thanks for the update! I suspected the item handling was somehow broken, but this confirms it! And yeah, I built my tools to work with the extracted file system from a NDS rom, in order to make it more compatible with other tools. Since editing the .nds file directly would cause a lot of issues on the compatibility side of things. But I'm planning on adapting statsutil's functionalities into a full GUI application eventually. Just like I've been doing with the sprite editor. And eventually make all those tools work together with a map editor. So hopefully this will be a lot less hassle in the future! I'll try to get the bugs fixed with item handling in the meantime. If you have any other suggestions/bugs, please let me know! ^^

I'm glad all this work is useful to some people! ^^ I didn't notice that problem before. Thanks for mentioning this! Do you know if there are some specific items that always end up corrupted like that? And are you using Explorers of Sky? And a workaround could be to use the command line parameter to only export things unrelated to items.

Not gonna lie, I miss mediawiki. One big issue with using the CMS to display articles is how it doesn't adjust to the screen size and there's a lot less width to work with.. And the theme makes it hard to read things or format things.. It would be fine for pages with community guidelines and rules and etc, but its not really enjoyable or easy to write technical documentation using the forum text editor. You're pretty much constrained to things in-theme, and lots of things don't seem to work quite right.. If the issue with mediawiki was just the separate accounts, this could help maybe? https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:IPBAuth

So, after steamrolling a lot of problem and features, I decided to make a new release! https://github.com/PsyCommando/ppmdu_spriteeditor/releases/tag/v1.0.0-alpha.5 There's a bit more stuff working! I even modified bulbasaur's ground mode walk anim a bit and it ran in-game without any issues.

Just a little update! I finally fixed something that was seriously a pain in the butt with the sprite editor. And I'm making some progress! Animation table editing is pretty much done! Besides a few extra features.

Its in the pokemon's monster data entry. There's a ratio for it. It should be on the wiki.

Someone pinged? XD I don't think we know enough about dungeon structure yet to randomize it.. Also, starter pokemons have high poly models for cutscene, while most non-starters don't, so randomizing starters will need some sort of way to bypass the game looking for hi-res models as well, to avoid missing models and crashes on missing animations. And another big hurdle is how everything in the game is referred to using hashes, and we don't know how the hashes are computed yet. Long story short, that game will require a lot of disassembly and asm reading to understand its internals, and that takes time, and its not particularly fun most of the time.

So, after a while and not making progress or getting input on the UI, I decided to just release a build of my WIP sprite editor as-is so people can see it and hopefully I can get some feedback. It can only load game sprites and display them right now. Don't try to save a sprite, or you might end up corrupting something. Here's the link :https://github.com/PsyCommando/ppmdu_spriteeditor/releases/tag/1.0.0-unstable.34 I'd appreciate if sprite makers and etc would let me know what they think about the interface so far. If its sufficient or if there's some ways to improve it?

The link to the zip is in the tutorial post in the forums. Here: https://app.box.com/s/v3ri7qqisu2rf4db0qfvm7rhx8imxnf7 Just overwrite the old version

That's a map tileset. Currently no. But I have something in the works for that. I just have been pretty busy and had to deal with stuff for the last few months. There is still a bunch of stuff to figure out about the format. BPL is for the palette and animated palettes if any. BPC is for a good chunk of the layers and the tileset. BMA have a header, contains several data blocks, some looking like a collision map or something like that.. But its still a bit unclear how it all works together. I'm having some issues dealing with the tiling of tiles.. The maps seems to tile their tiles, and they have a variable dimension for their tiles of tiles, which causes misalignement issues..

Just a quick note, but I updated the first page and fixed all the dead dropbox links I could find! Sorry for putting this off for so long ^^; Also, I'm having some issues working on the sprite editor. I'm not sure how to make the sprite import functionality "spriter workflow friendly"? I was planning on making a sort of "Draw a grid over the various frames of a sequence" on an animation sheet an artist would make.The grid's cells would be adjustable manually, so it would be more flexible. But its a lot of work to do that, and I want to make sure I'm heading the right way.. If anyone reading this is a sprite artist, I'd like to hear what you'd like to have in a tool like this?

I haven't made any tools for randomizing starters. But, that other bit about downloading mods sounds like the mod packaging format that @evandixon was working on. Other than that, idk what you're talking about.

Yeah, but I'm not working on a randomizer? I'm working on modding tools for the game mainly.

Well, you'd need to draw new ones first. Then its just a matter of importing them into the game

Well, its "possible", but like evan said, you'd have to do some pretty extensive asm edits to the game. And right now, the dungeon mode code is not very documented at all. But since exclusive items grant bonuses similarly, and IQ skills do the same as emeras, the basics you could re-use are there I guess. It would be nice if some volunteers would like to map out the game's binaries though! That would speed things up a lot!