Thursday, October 25, 2012

Back to it a little

Remember back in the day when WM was being created and all the functions and properties were still being discovered; And how I had to release a new minor version just to update the description of a thing? Well say "screw you" to all that now. PrCMDI's going all xml and going to be using external strings to represent everything now. I recently helped a modder add quadruple and quintuple AP growth on weapons and armor and he'll have to manually edit the weapon/armor data using the raw data editor in WM. There's no option for greater than Triple AP growth in the drop-downs on the weapon or armor tabs because the unmodded game ignores values that are greater than 3. Well, now PrC (and eventually WM) will allow for additional changes like that. For example attack effects only range from 0 - 35 (23h) right now. However, if one adds a 37th effect to the executable, they'd have to edit the raw data in WM. There's no way to do this in PrC so enemy attacks couldn't have this. The new xml feature will allow you to add a 37th effect to the menu if you're awesome enough to know how to do that. I've already added all the texts and tested it. It works great! If I need to make a change to a damage formula or get a description wrong I just change the text in the xml and it's reflected in PrCMDI. This xml is also going to store things like text characters and element names so WM/PrC will be easier to use in other languages. It will also store battle variable and opcode descriptions so you can change them around if you wish. Point is, this is going to make WM/PrCMDI much easier to use. This will be WM's last version and I will likely release its source along with it. The source looks sloppy, but consider that I wrote the majority of it three years ago. :)

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Happy Birthday WallMarket!!...almost

Four years ago, WM was in the middle of beta testing. It's gone through a lot of iterations and bug fixes to get where it's at. It still has some issues, but I'm still proud of it. I created it because I wanted to start a new game of FFVII and I learned there wasn't a tool that would let me have more materia links on the Buster Sword. After googleing my way on to the forums at qhimm I discovered what it was partly known and contributed much to what wasn't. Good times. Back to the point of this blog. So in the interrim between Skyrim and Black Mesa: Source not much has happened at all. I keep picking up PrCMDI and deciding that lots of things need to be restructured. Real life work is picking up, my daughter is starting to walk, lots of things are happening that demand my attention. This being a personal project is lowest priority to me. It still has the potential to be the greatest modding tool FFVII will ever see, but it's going to take a while in the making.