Friday, June 18, 2010

Forgot to Publish this post.....

Whoops. I started to write this yesterday but forgot to hit the "Publish Post" button. It's important too because I need some feedback.

In the spirit of my last post I've started allowing enemy stats to be edited. Problem is, enemies already have a window devoted to attacks and animations and the like. In order for it to be as editable as possible, I'd like to have it all enemy-related data be on one window. Problem is that's a LARGE window for all that. :( These have been important features of PrC for a while too so I don't want to bury them deeper. Re-arranging these things the way I REALLY want them to be would be a nightmare. It can be done, but that means changing almost EVERY layout and making everything larger. I may do something like that in the future since I need some MDI practice, but let's focus on the present for now.

I did away with the "Edit AI" and "Animation/Formation" buttons. They were always an eyesore to me. Instead I made new menu options that contain them. Now it'll take two clicks to get to each of these instead of one, but I don't see that as being a horrible thing.

So the feedback I need is this: should I try to combine the animations page with the stat page or just make links to them both from the other?

Also, for item drops/steals/morphs I have it ready to open a KERNEL.BIN/kernel2.bin file to read the item names. I don't want to use the stock names (especially in English) so I suppose I have to load these. Should I make it mandatory? If I do that, why not copy the attack data from the KERNEL.BIN attacks and make those static within the scenes that contain them?

Monday, June 14, 2010

Enemy editing....

So long ago I decided that I didn't want to make too many tools obsolete with WM/PrC. So far, with the additions I've made I've done just that to no fewer than five existing tools.

  • Scenester

  • Scene Reader

  • SceneEdit

  • Teioh (though some people find this has an easier interface to use for simple edits)

  • ff7dec (a KERNEL.BIN separation tool)



There are at least three different authors to these, but I don't remember who made ff7dec so it may be four. Anyway, I didn't want to take any fame/glory from anyone else so PrC doesn't edit the enemy stats like Hojo does. Well, it feels a little foolish now to allow editing of 7256/7808 bytes even though the remaining 552 bytes are known. So I think I'm going to have to byte the bullet and just say I'm going to allow editing of these now. That feature is still in progress so it might take some time to get it to look good.

I'm also still working on being able to copy/paste whole enemies between scenes. I'm getting closer. Still some errors occurring, but it's getting closer to working.