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Here are some things about Phantasy Star 4 that I thought I had posted but apparently that is not the case.
1.) First off I realized in my old map labels post that I never included the ROM addresses for those strings.
0x66b02: name of motavia for map
0x66b08: name of dezolis for the map
These are both 6 bytes long but the labels only have space for 4 English characters.
2.) Secondly, a quick note to say that no you cannot ever skip or change the outcome of the first battle against Zio. I hacked Perolymates to automatically insta-gib enemies when used and tried it on Zio. It worked, "killing" Zio but the game just skipped straight to the cutscene afterwards as if nothing had changed. (Causality? What's that?)
In related news Demi does not actually use a charge of her Medic Power when she heals the entire party right before that very scene. Yes, I used the party select hack to level her up enough to check. Now why can't she do that after the party kills Zio for good and prevent a potential arrive at the overworld with a dead party situation? Aargh!
Copy-pasting from my debug notes file...
3.) The translucent Xe-A-Thoul barriers in the Air Castle are impassable sprites, not tiles.
4.) The enemy encounters switch is forced ON in the top section of Garuberk Tower unless you walk close enough to DF2 to trigger his sprite to spawn. The game seems to have some memory problems keeping his big sprite on screen. If half of it is scrolled off the bottom/sides the whole thing poofs.
5.) (It is also difficult to see but DF is actually animated here. His tiny little mouth opens and shuts over and over again.)
6.) No-clip lets you walk around his trigger region and there is an impassable sprite tile constituting the left side of his head you can talk to! However there is no dialogue scripted for that pointer and the game tries to play a sprite animation but can't find the right one. DF2's sprite will then glitch up depending on which way you were facing when you tried to interact with the tile. Talking to it from behind resets DF2's sprite.
This seems to be the default behavoir for sprites who don't have any dialogue programmed for them like shopkeepers you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach.
However... the shopkeepers in Jut's weapon store, who you can't reach without no clip DO have dialogue. They say the same thing: "Welcome to the town of Jut. Actually this is no time for niceties. Look at this weather."
Another example: Ryuon innkeeper/shopkeepers: "This is Ryuon. If you want to have fun this is the town!"
[shared by town greeter]
7.) There's definitely something buggy going on with Hakenlefts. Gryz's Crash skill always failed on them and I noted that Rika wasn't seeing her Genocyclaw's death effect fire on them. Looking at the Hakenleft's hexadecimal entry in the enemy stats file from Fresh Feeling's site isn't offering any explanation. Hakenlefts aren't immune to Factor 14 and they've demonstrated no immunity to other various instant-death skills and techniques.
8.) The Control Key and the Canceller are both required to progress in the story. I won't go into details here but suffice it to say having to pick up the Canceller grinds my gears in solo play because it locks up a precious item slot for an otherwise-useless item right when I could definitely use that space for another healing item.
9.) Via a combination of the game's debug menu, savestates, GSavestate, and Photoshop I assembled pixel-accurate maps of a few areas with things that interested me going on out of bounds. All the black, seemingly-superfluous space was actually part of these maps as they had been loaded by the game (which appears to love generating areas that end up 1024 x 1024 pixels?). I didn't add it to them. Click through to see them full size.
Air Castle Southern Exterior
Air Castle Northern Exterior
Air Castle room $176 interior (this is the restoration room just north of the entrance)
Piata Dormitory
Soldier's Temple Interior (sorry about the water not all matching up but it is animated in-game which I didn't take into account until after I was already well into compositing)
Tyler Item Shop
1.) First off I realized in my old map labels post that I never included the ROM addresses for those strings.
0x66b02: name of motavia for map
0x66b08: name of dezolis for the map
These are both 6 bytes long but the labels only have space for 4 English characters.
2.) Secondly, a quick note to say that no you cannot ever skip or change the outcome of the first battle against Zio. I hacked Perolymates to automatically insta-gib enemies when used and tried it on Zio. It worked, "killing" Zio but the game just skipped straight to the cutscene afterwards as if nothing had changed. (Causality? What's that?)
In related news Demi does not actually use a charge of her Medic Power when she heals the entire party right before that very scene. Yes, I used the party select hack to level her up enough to check. Now why can't she do that after the party kills Zio for good and prevent a potential arrive at the overworld with a dead party situation? Aargh!
Copy-pasting from my debug notes file...
3.) The translucent Xe-A-Thoul barriers in the Air Castle are impassable sprites, not tiles.
4.) The enemy encounters switch is forced ON in the top section of Garuberk Tower unless you walk close enough to DF2 to trigger his sprite to spawn. The game seems to have some memory problems keeping his big sprite on screen. If half of it is scrolled off the bottom/sides the whole thing poofs.
5.) (It is also difficult to see but DF is actually animated here. His tiny little mouth opens and shuts over and over again.)
6.) No-clip lets you walk around his trigger region and there is an impassable sprite tile constituting the left side of his head you can talk to! However there is no dialogue scripted for that pointer and the game tries to play a sprite animation but can't find the right one. DF2's sprite will then glitch up depending on which way you were facing when you tried to interact with the tile. Talking to it from behind resets DF2's sprite.
This seems to be the default behavoir for sprites who don't have any dialogue programmed for them like shopkeepers you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach.
However... the shopkeepers in Jut's weapon store, who you can't reach without no clip DO have dialogue. They say the same thing: "Welcome to the town of Jut. Actually this is no time for niceties. Look at this weather."
Another example: Ryuon innkeeper/shopkeepers: "This is Ryuon. If you want to have fun this is the town!"
[shared by town greeter]
7.) There's definitely something buggy going on with Hakenlefts. Gryz's Crash skill always failed on them and I noted that Rika wasn't seeing her Genocyclaw's death effect fire on them. Looking at the Hakenleft's hexadecimal entry in the enemy stats file from Fresh Feeling's site isn't offering any explanation. Hakenlefts aren't immune to Factor 14 and they've demonstrated no immunity to other various instant-death skills and techniques.
Crash 22 2A9E30 02 81 11 30 01 0E 00 00
--death, strength as modifier (requires weapon), targets 1 enemy, power $30, save = strength
element = $0e (factor 14/death/destroy)
Hakenleft 2826DC 00 F6 01 00 A4 2D 30 32 00 AB 0C 09 02 02 02 02 02 03 01
02 01 02 02 00 03 02 00 00 0E 0E 0E 0E 3B 3B 3B 3B 00 00
00 00 00 33 33 33 09 38 00 F9
--246 hp, strength = $2d (45), factor 14 resistance = $02
8.) The Control Key and the Canceller are both required to progress in the story. I won't go into details here but suffice it to say having to pick up the Canceller grinds my gears in solo play because it locks up a precious item slot for an otherwise-useless item right when I could definitely use that space for another healing item.
9.) Via a combination of the game's debug menu, savestates, GSavestate, and Photoshop I assembled pixel-accurate maps of a few areas with things that interested me going on out of bounds. All the black, seemingly-superfluous space was actually part of these maps as they had been loaded by the game (which appears to love generating areas that end up 1024 x 1024 pixels?). I didn't add it to them. Click through to see them full size.
Air Castle Southern Exterior
Air Castle Northern Exterior
Air Castle room $176 interior (this is the restoration room just north of the entrance)
Piata Dormitory
Soldier's Temple Interior (sorry about the water not all matching up but it is animated in-game which I didn't take into account until after I was already well into compositing)
Tyler Item Shop
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