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Quote:Now I just need to talk you in to making/finding tools for RotK 1.
You need to really sell the idea to Niahak. He is the one that made the DoaE tools. But he also has some requests for DoaE tool enhancements also… :wink:
Quote:WOAH WTF happened to Zhang Song's portrait? He literally has four eyes. >_>Dunno, he looks ok in the DoaE tool…
For me using Feidian was infinitely easier than Tile Maker Pro (thanks to Niahak for pointing this out). I am now able to swap portraits in a minute or two. Before we start. Here are some things to know about DoaE1 portraits:
– They are basically stored in rows of 6 8×8 pixels. In the rom the portrait is stored as <top left tile> <top middle left tile> <top middle middle left tile> <top middle middle right tile> <top middle right tile> <top right tile> then onto the next row. CaoJay outlined this pretty well in this post –> Tile explanation
– The portraits are made up of 4 colors (blue green black white). The game has a custom palette that translates those 4 colors into the portrait colors.
Software used (for me):
– Php –> http://www.php.net/archive/2010.php#id2010-03-04-1
– Feidian –> http://feidian.sourceforge.net/download.html
– nes8 template –> Download tiles.rar
– Infranview –> http://www.irfanview.com/
– Nana –> http://www.romhacking.net/utils/137/
– MS Paint
– Destiny of an Editor (DoaE tool)
Put feidian in the Php folder and extract nes8 from tiles.rar and stick it in the Phptiles folder. Also put the rom in the Php folder for simplicity.
OK so here's what we do next.
1. Find the tiles in the rom. You can use Nana to do this. Open the rom with nana at a dos prompt like "nana destiny.nes" and look at the tiles by pressing "t" and change to NES format by pressing a number (forgot which number but it will say NES). To see the portraits right you have to use the "<" key to make the graphics 6 tiles wide then use pagedown or down arrow to find the portraits. You may have to use the right and left arrow keys to align it correctly. Then find the starting address of your portraits. To save time I found these already in the DoaE1 rom. They are at:
0x8810
0xC810
2. Use Feidian to unload those portraits at the DOS prompt (Start–>Command Prompt). Syntax is:
Code:cd <folder where php and feidian live>
php feidian.php -cr nes8,6,128,0×008810 doae.nes outputnes8 = template
6 = # of tiles wide
128 = number of lines
0x008810 = starting address
doae.nes = rom
output = bmp output file
Once you run this you should have an output file that is basically a bitmap. If you open it up in paint you should see the portraits clearly in a blue/green/black/white state. It should look like this:
3. Now you'll want to pull portraits from another Rom. DoaE2 is the easiest… Use nana to find the starting addresses for the portrats in DoaE2 but I found some already at:
0x10
0x4010
0x8010
So the syntax would be:
Code:php feidian.php -cr nes8,6,128,0×10 doae2e.nes d2Now you'll have a d2 bmp file.
4***. The problem with DoaE2 portraits is that the colors are swapped. So if you try to directly use a DoaE2 portrait and put it in DoaE1 it won't look right. To fix this we can use Infranview to swap colors. Edit the palette on your DoaE2 bmp and switch the colors. The skin color of your characters should be green. The colors (specifically) should be:
0 0 0 black
97 207 99 green
57 51 255 blue
220 255 255 whitish
Now save your bmp.
Original DoaE2 colors:
Fixed colors (change green to white, blue to green, white to blue, and black to black (right color codes):
5. Open your DoaE1 bmp and your DoaE2 bmp in paint. Zoom in on both. Cut your portrait from your DoaE2 bmp and paste it exactly over the DoaE1 portrait you are replacing. So for example you would cut DoaE2 Ji Ling and put him on top of DoaE1 Pang Tong.
6. Save your DoaE1 bmp after doing this (don't do save as, just save). For example here's how my 1st bmp looked for the Yuan Shao mod:
(Note that I painstakingly added backgrounds to some of the portraits in MS Paint using some of the DoaE1 original backgrounds).
7. Now you can load your bmp back into the rom with feidian. Example:
Code:php feidian.php -ci nes8,6,128,0×008810 output.bmp doae.nesNote: If your portraits in the ROM look garbled after this it means that somehow during your process your bmp ended up in the wrong format. It needs to be the exact same format as the one you unloaded (DPI, resolution, colors, etc…)
8. Open Destiny of an Editor and change your general to the portrait you replaced. In this example it would be Pang Tong. It will look like Pang Tong in the tool but in the game it will be your new pic.
You're done!
*** If you want to use pics from other games, it can be trickier. Other NES games are fairly easy like ROTK1. You'll just have to pull the portraits out (either via screenshot or feidian) and change the colors to the blue/green/white/black format using the color codes I provided before by editing the palette in Infranview. If the pic has more than 4 colors (pretty much all SNES portraits do) you'll have to "Diffuse" down to 4 colors in Infranview. This could really mess up the pic if it's a SNES portrait or more complicated portrait because it uses more colors. However, you could always touch it up with MS Paint.
If you want to test and see how your portrait will look in the game (with a white background), edit the palette in Infranview and replace the colors with this:
green = 252 213 156
black = 0 0 0
white = 253 253 250
blue = 256 108 80
It's not exact but close enough… If you want to see how it would look with a different color background change white to whatever background color.
Example from Yuan Shao mod with a white background: (ooh pretty…)
(NOTE: Don't save the bmp with these colors. The game won't recognize them)
Then export this palette for later reference.
Also note that anything that is white will use the background color you use in the DoaE tool. So if their eyes are white and you change the background color to purple their eyes will be purple (not good). To fix this either leave the background white or fill in the white colors in the portrait (besides the background).
EXPANDING YOUR ROM AND USING NEW PORTRAIT BANKS FOR UP TO 340 UNIQUE PORTRAITS
NOTE: I do not recommend that anybody does this yet… Because if you do then you will no longer be able to use "Destiny of an Editor" as it will chop your ROM back down to 256k when you save (until it supports a 512k ROM).
TO EXPAND YOUR ROM:
1. Back up the ROM.
2. Open your hex editor and expand the ROM to 80010 bytes. (ie…add 0's to the end until the last byte is 80010).
3. Copy all the data that currently exists at $3C010-$40010… and paste it to $7C010-$80010 (this is the "master" code of the game, for lack of a better term. It must stay at the end of the ROM).
4. Change offset $00004 from $10 to $20 (to show that you've doubled the size).
Now you have a 512k ROM. This allows us to add more portraits and other stuff!
Now…a little about how the portrait system works. A portrait is made up of 6 horizontal slices. Each slice is indexed from 00 to FF and they are stored in 2 banks in the ROM at 0x8810 and 0xC810. The reason we could never have more than 255 slices before was because of this two character index system. In order to have MORE portraits we need a 2nd pointer, a place to put our new slices, and new code in the game to allow it to use our new banks.
USING NEW PORTRAIT BANKS:
1. The 2nd pointer. Each general has a little "profile" if you will in the ROM. I'm going to borrow an old post from Niahak to show this:
Quote:Officer structure notes (from various sources, as well as DoaEd code)STR
INT
Region
Sprite
Sprite color (AP as enemy)
DP as enemy
Soldiers (Enemy)
Soldiers (Ally)
Tactics
AGI
portrait 1
portrait 2
portrait 3
portrait 4
portrait 5
portrait 6
portrait BG (single-color BG only)
unknown <
unknown
Name spacing
Officer name
See the 2 "unknown" slots? We have never found any use for these 2 slots and it is likely that these were used for Japanese characters. I am using the 1st "unknown" slot for the 2nd portrait slice pointer.
With that said I will be using the following values for that byte:
00 = Use the original DOAE portrait banks.
F1 = This officer's portrait lives in new ROM page 16 or 17 (hex: 10 or 11)
F3 = This officer's portrait lives in new ROM page 18 or 19 (hex: 12 or 13)
F5 = This officer's portrait lives in new ROM page 20 or 21 (hex: 14 or 15)
F7 = This officer's portrait lives in new ROM page 22 or 23 (hex: 16 or 17)
F9 = This officer's portrait lives in new ROM page 24 or 25 (hex: 18 or 19)
FB = This officer's portrait lives in new ROM page 26 or 27 (hex: 1A or 1B)
FD = This officer's portrait lives in new ROM page 28 or 29 (hex: 1C or 1D)
2. The assembly part (nasty). OK for the short version, just open your hex editor and paste this into 0x3CFE4 and 0x7CFE4: "4C3083000000". You'd be pasting this over "10044980E6F1".
Then copy this into 0x30340: "85158425A011B1F31004E9E085F1A51510064980E6F18515A4254CDACF"
That's all the magic right there.
The first copy is changing the code that adjusts the ROM lookup for any slice at index 80 or greater to just jump to $8330 where I put my new code. Here's what the new code is doing and *this* is what took the most time to do:
00:8330:85 15 STA $0015 = #$DA
00:8332:84 25 STY $0025 = #$00
00:8334:A0 11 LDY #$11
00:8336:B1 F3 LDA ($F3),Y @ $AE29 = #$F1
00:8338:10 04 BPL $833E
00:833A:E9 E0 SBC #$E0
00:833C:85 F1 STA $00F1 = #$02
00:833E:A5 15 LDA $0015 = #$DA
00:8340:10 06 BPL $8348
00:8342:49 80 EOR #$80
00:8344:E6 F1 INC $00F1 = #$02
00:8346:85 15 STA $0015 = #$DA
00:8348:A4 25 LDY $0025 = #$00
00:834A:4C DA CF JMP $CFDA
Essentially it has to figure out where to look in the ROM for the slice based on what the index number is and if that new bit is set.
3. Loading your portraits! Of course my preferred method is feidian. The two existing banks you'd load at 0x8810 and 0xC810. Note that any slice at hex:80 or above will go to page 2.
The new banks you can load into will be at:
0x40810 (F1)
0x44810 (F1 – 2nd page)
0x48810 (F3)
0x4C810 (F3 – 2nd page)
0x50810 (F5)
0x54810 (F5 – 2nd page)
0x58810 (F7)
0x5C810 (F7 – 2nd page)
0x60810 (F9)
0x64810 (F9 – 2nd page)
0x68810 (FB)
0x6C810 (FB – 2nd page)
0x70810 (FD)
0x74810 (FD – 2nd page)
And with these new banks you can load 128 rows for each page (the first page has slices 00-7F, the 2nd page has slices 80-FF). Example commands which would load up banks F1 and F3:
php feidian.php -ci nes8,6,128,0×040810 F1_1.bmp doae.nes
php feidian.php -ci nes8,6,128,0×044810 F1_2.bmp doae.nes
php feidian.php -ci nes8,6,128,0×048810 F3_1.bmp doae.nes
php feidian.php -ci nes8,6,128,0x04C810 F3_2.bmp doae.nes
If you were to go nuts with it you could load 340 unique portraits in a couple minutes if your bitmaps were ready.
4. Assigning a portrait to a general. Just like in "Destiny of an Editor" you assign your six slices, however, if you're going to use a new portrait bank you have to set that bit to F# to tell it which portrait bank to use. For example, slice 00 of F1 will be at 0x040810, slice 80 of F1 will be at 0x044810.
You shouldn't have to start over. Use your existing save state on the latest version.
Quote:But editing portrait generals is still the problem due to my lack of studying about PHP.I had to learn that too. I can do a write-up on it.
Good pic of the Guandu battle. I kept meaning to take a picture of that but kept forgetting…
Quote:Just downloaded that third version and then uploaded it to the site.Thx, I don't mean to spam versions… Just still doing some tweaking as people play through it.
And THANKS to those who are playing with it. Your feedback is making this a better mod. 8)
Good job. I beat it the first time but couldn't a few tries after.
My bro (a destiny vet) tried over 20 times before giving up on the last battle. That's no fun…
The new one is still hard but is more winnable. Basically beefed up Guo Jia and Zhang Liao's troops and swapped Xun Yu for Xiahou Dun. Still not easy but at least a little less frustrating.
Quote:Eh, I just beat Chapter 4. No sweat at all, especially with Lu Bu and Zhang He joining.Are you using the version I posted today? That one adds a bit more challenge.
Quote:am wondering, however, when a new tactician joins. I don't know, maybe something 230+ INT? Or maybe it's just my greed.Very soon from where you are.
New version… Had to fix the last battle because it was nearly impossible to beat.
Anybody get to the final battle yet? My bro's having a hard time with it. After a long hard fought battle I got it on the first try but maybe I got lucky.
Quote:Ironically, I think Yuan Xi may have been the most skilled of the three brothers; he had the best stats in RotK8, and he had the common sense to keep his mouth shut and not start a civil war the way Yuan Tan and Yuan Shang did.More common sense perhaps but Yuan Shao always regarded Yuan Shang as his most skilled son and wanted him to take over but didn't make it formal and thus some of the officers went to Yuan Shang and some went to Yuan Tan (the oldest).
I'm going through the game again after raising the AP/AC of the lower level guys. It should be better now. I may need to increase the difficulty a little more though.
Quote:Oh right, I think I remember an older member on here saying that you could do that.I've been using the same savestate after every rom edit. Should be fine.
Quote:Nah, too far into this quest to start over I think. Already heading through Wu but taking a break now.Oh, I thought you could still use a savestate on the new version.
