xdaniel's Random Junk

[SoulofDeity]

The Dreamcast project is kinda on hold right now, one reason being that the initial idea - a port of sorts of the first Etrian Odyssey from DS - has been proven a bit more troublesome than expected, mainly regarding performance... I can't render enough of EO1's original floor tile models to keep a good draw distance without ruining the FPS. Plus, I've repeatedly been running into memory limitations with the PVR GPU - I already had downscaled the textures, but now it's the number of vertices/polygons I'm having problems with. So, while I want to keep the basic gameplay from EO (dungeon crawler RPG, etc.), I'll eventually make my own, less detailed models.

 

Have you tried using meta tiles and triangle strips? With triangle strips, the number of vertices needed is 2 to begin with then 1 more for every triangle.

[xdaniel]

Hah, here I wanna post something new, but I totally forgot to reply to SoD's post from over a month ago <.< Still, let's see...

 

Meta tiles, as in tiles made up of multiple smaller tiles? Don't think there's enough repetition in the floor maps to allow for that, not really sure tho. As for triangle strips, IIRC the PVR uses triangle strips natively, but the models are likely not optimized for them. Kinda short reply, but it's been a while since I worked on that project, so... yeah...

 

As for the new thing I mentioned, that's also related to Etrian Odyssey, but not to my DC semi-port project of it. I'm working on an editor for that game again, but am rewriting it from scratch, instead of picking up where I left off with the one shown in my channel update video thingy from some time ago. I also started this one from a different perspective: instead of focusing on dungeons and their 3D models, I'm first trying to make sense of as much of the other game data as possible, like items and such. So that, you know, there's actually something to edit soon-ish, and more to do in the program than just look at floor plans and somewhat pretty models.

 

Quick explanation. Most if not all of that data is stored inside a common container format of sorts - MBB/TBB files contain tables of either strings (MBBs with MTBL tables) or binary data with entries of fixed size (TBBs w/ TBL1 tables), the latter's binary data format being arbitrary (i.e. not derivable from the binary). On the plus side, the developers were nice enough to give their files descriptive names, such as EncountData.tbb, EnemyData.tbb, Item.tbb, etc., so those can at least give you an idea of what the data inside the file's tables is used for. Item data, for example - or more specifically, equipment data -, was pretty easy to figure out a lot of, especially with the help of some FAQs to look up weapon and armor stats, then comparing those the respective item's entry in the table.

 

And after that clumsy explanation, something prettier (*cough*) for you to look at: http://magicstone.de/dzd/random/eo1/eo1items.htm

 

Hope that made sense, I'm rather tired by now, it being way past midnight and stuff...

 

EDIT: Just for fun... my dumb notes in the code:

 

 

/* Started August 5th 2014, 4:05pm, to "Battlefield - Storm" by Yuzo Koshiro, from Etrian Odyssey IV: Super Arrange Version */
/* Stopped August 5th 2014, 9:59pm, note: CLEAN UP THIS MESS! */
/* Started August 6th 2014, 2:40am, quick fix to w/ message reading/dumping ... (I should put this on Github soon) */
/* Stopped August 6th 2014, 3:45am, some other message-related things... did take a break inbetween tho, playing Digimon Adventure PSP  */
/* August 6th 2014, uh, afternoon... TBB TBL1 reading, EquipItemData parser thingy, dumps equipable stuffs to HTML file! */
/* Started August 7th 2014, 9:08pm, more font rendering work, tho in hindsight... that's kinda stupid anyway. I should try to find the VWF width table, maybe? */
/* Stopped August 7th 2014, 11:20pm, MiscItemData parser & dumping out all non-equipment items to HTML~ */
/* August 8th 2014, after midnight, some EtrianString stuff (cast to string etc)... */
/* Stopped August 8th 2014, 2:40am, housekeeping and generalization via interfaces, ugly HTML dumping code moved out of GameData, etc..... */

 

EDIT 2: The program itself aside, I now (partially) understand item data, resource gathering data and item availability requirements (i.e. sell 3 Small Fangs to unlock Dagger in shop). Enough to, for example, make myself an insanely powerful Knife

 

The editor side of things has seen some improvements too, by generally tidying it up, implementing some more helpers, etc. Nothing to really show yet in that regard, tho.

Edited August 10, 2014 by xdaniel

[xdaniel]

https://github.com/xdanieldzd/Yggdrasil - WIP, WIP, WIP

 

[sairugoth]

Call me stupid, but I clearly don't fully understand what this new program is your making.

Explain it to me as if I am a stupid child

What he said please.

 

EDIT: OK, never mined, I figerd out what your doing more or less now.

[xdaniel]

The Yggdrasil one? In short, an editor for the RPG Etrian Odyssey for Nintendo DS, which is so far capable of changing the stats of the equipment you can buy/find. Saving isn't implemented yet, tho, but that should be easy to do... for the uncompressed data, anyway, equipment data luckily not being compressed

[xdaniel]

So yeah, the Etrian Odyssey editor Yggdrasil is getting somewhere...

 

 

The program automatically decompresses and renames certain files - mainly the data tables it's capable of reading and modifying - and patches the ARM9 binary with the new filenames. After that you can use it to edit (and save changes to) equipment and general item data, item requirements regarding their availability in shops, enemy stats, enemy encounters and encounter groups. The parsers for them are all in varying states of completeness, depending how much of the data has been deciphered so far - some are pretty complete (ex. equipment, encounter stuff), some are kinda limited (general items).

 

It also parses... uh, most message files, and can display the text contained within them, as both, simple text strings in a textbox, as well as using the game's font. Although the font renderer is kinda crappy, and it doesn't support the FBIN archives that contain a lot of the event text, because I couldn't make the game read FBINs with uncompressed data. I'll eventually try to add support for recompressing that data and rebuilding the archive after editing... that is, once I added support for editing and rebuilding message tables... which is not really my priority right now; the priority is more along the lines of adding more parsers for more data tables.

 

All three versions of the game are supported as well, Japanese, European and American, tho the character map for the Japanese one is still missing some 140 kanji.

 

So, let's see, what's to do... More table parsers, as mentioned before, then maybe look into adding undo/redo, because the way the code's structured might make it easy to implement, then... I dunno, actually prepare a release binary as opposed to just all those source code commits, with documentation and all, to let loose onto the net?

[xdaniel]

So, I might as well make a quick post about this here, too, just in case someone here cares about Atlus and/or Etrian Odyssey...

 

Here's Tharsis, a file converter meant for Etrian Odyssey 4 (3DS), but also compatible with other Atlus games (ex. Shin Megami Tensei 4, Persona 3 Portable, ...) because of shared file formats. Builds have so far been posted on Jul, which is also where things happen, basically, regarding this program. The latest build there is a few revisions old, thus ex. still missing support for additional pixel formats in STEX files, but I'll be putting a new one onto GitHub during the next couple of days.

[xdaniel]

Very WIP, much TODO, so no binary (for now): https://github.com/xdanieldzd/NisAnim - A viewer and eventually exporter for Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten (and possibly other Nippon Ichi games) animation files, dood!