Topic: Final Fantasy VI Advance (GBA)

[Troy Lundin]

Update (14 FEB 2012): 291 scenes captured.
Update (15 FEB 2012): 430 scenes captured. Starting cleanup.

Gonna start on this game. If it's already been started, let me know.

Found out the following information:

This game uses the most disorganized memory allocation I have ever seen. Character and screen positions are held in multiple locations. Some are 16-bit while others are 8-bit. the Map IDs are held in a similar fashion.

FFVI uses separate screen and character locations. It also does what Sword of Mana does. When I put the character location to (0, 0), the screen location stops at (16, 16). Though, in this game's case, I am able to nudge the screen to the very edge to grab the missing pixels. An interesting feature about the missing pixels is that they are absolutely useless. Basically, anything past where your screen can normally go seems to be repeated tiles. This applies to outdoor maps only.

Indoor maps are a bit different. They consist of multiple rooms. They have (so far) a maximum size of (2048, 1024). After these dimesions are passed, the map starts to repeat even though the character position doesn't reset. For example, if I were to go past 2048 on the x-axis, it wouldn't reset to 0 but the map would start repeating. Both the x- and y-axis go up to 65,535.

I'll attach an example of an Outdoor and Indoor map. You'll notice the Outdoor map (Narshe) is stuffed with garbage on it's edges. The indoor map (Jidoor) contains some random pots.

Also, if anyone knows the offsets for animations, I'd love it.

[Troy Lundin]

After taking a break (teeth pulled) and a bit more investigation last night, I found out what the garbage is in the two scenes I posted before.

Apparently, the tile set changes based on the exact location of your character. The tiles used are based on the map ID. So, the jumbled mess is actually just shown with the wrong tiles. Also, after looking through FlyingArmor's maps of FFVI for the SNES, I can say the maps seem to be the same. I have decided to capture the Dragon's Den and put those up. I will continue to capture the other scenes and may put those up later.

[Troy Lundin]

Man, been so busy today haven't had time to work on anything.

I did a quick mockup of the first room in Dragon's Den (Earth Labyrinth). It's not complete but shows the basic layout I am trying to accomplish.

[Troy Lundin]

I was messing around in the VBA Memory Viewer and found a neat way to access any map I wanted. Though, when entering the map, I couldn't move my character which made capturing impossible.

Poked around for another 15 minutes or so and I got it to work perfectly. Tried a couple random IDs and one happened to be Lete River. Yes, the abhorred Lete River.

There were four animations I had to freeze (two waterfalls, the river and the splashing) and luckily they were easy to find. Took just a couple minutes to capture it after freezing the animations and I present it here.

Note that it wraps horizontally and vertically. It is not tagged.

[Revned]

That would be painful to map manually. Well done.

[Troy Lundin]

After much procrastination, I finished my first full prototype, Zozo.

I initially tried to use just letters to mark everything. This didn't work out how I hoped. The font in this game is much to small and is pretty hard to distinguish from most backgrounds. I chose to surround it with a colored square. This allows the letters to actually be seen and recognized. I chose to mark entrances with purple and items with blue. This allows the items to be seen and distinguished from the entrances quickly and easily. I placed the colored tiles directly on top of the entrances or the containers that hold items. So, instead of seeing a chest or pot or whatever, you will just see the colored tile.

I feel the layout works nicely.

[Troy Lundin]

Ok, decided to do a few of these. I am just capturing raw scenes so nothing will be marked.

I noticed that some maps repeat. For example, review the following scenes:



They are the same town. The first two are from the World of Balance though they have separate IDs, 0154 and 0155, respectively. The third scene is from the World of Ruin.

Each room has it's own ID. Though, if I pass through the wall and map the entire area they look the same. Take the following, for example:



The IDs are 0196 and 0198, respectively. As you can see, they look almost identical. The only differences are the sprites. When you enter a room, only that room's sprites get loaded. Every other room on the scene is a dummy. No sprites and the doorways don't work.

I have found how to freeze animations and sprites so all the scenes will contain them. I was not able to successfully capture background layers in certain mountainous scenes. I am up to 291 scenes currently.

[Troy Lundin]

Finished all 430 scenes. There are ~114 that need minor touchups (mostly color fill).


Thought I would share a scene that shows how devoted this game is to looping scenery.



As you can see, the top appears to be cut off. In fact, it isn't. It loops around to the bottom. The sides loop around as well. These kinds of scenes would be a complete headache with traditional screenshot capture, I would imagine.