Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Don't think to deeply about this

It's not completely ready yet. Click for better view.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Meaningful changes

As some of you might be aware due to posts on qhimm, WM is going through a pretty big change now. I'm trying to make the text work correctly and even make it more non-English language friendly. (Did you know that the exp range for a character is between 31851 and 8123024? You can't make a character need exp outside of that range to get to level 99. Just thought I'd throw that in.) As such, there are going to be two major changes and several minor ones.

First off, WallMarket.dat will be OUT and WallMarket.xml will be IN (yay!). WallMarket.xml will have all the battle info that WallMarket.dat had, but it will be structured differently and not have the character map at the beginning that wasn't really working anyway. It will have things like attack descriptions and materia types in it that if you don't like the way I wrote it, you can re-write it or translate it into a different language. This would allow for multi-language support under most conditions.

Secondly, the text boxes are going to change to look like they would in the game. So instead of seeing the name of the item in black against a white background, you can see the actual font used by FFVII against the default FFVII dialog background colors! This, of course, will mean you can import your own font faces in case you're using a different one! That will probably be in a directory and require an entry in the xml to distinguish between which one(s) to use.

Lots of minor things are going to be changed too like the weapons' menu actions not updating correctly or the materia subtypes not changing properly, etc. Exp curves will now max out at the level 99 value whatever that will be so you can get the clearest view of the growth curve. Drop-downs menus will expand to fit the name of the things that contain them. Lots of really neat stuff. :D

PrC will probably undergo SOME of these changes too (definitely the xml idea), but not many. I don't know if font changes will be worth what I'm doing to WM because of the low level of text usage in the scene.bin. I'll probably still allow for raw data manipulation, though.