I've decided that my first really big modding project is going to be reconstructing what SaGa Frontier could have looked like on March 25th, 1997, AKA around when the FFTactics demo was completed. To my knowledge, this is the first time that this kind of project has been attempted for SaGa Frontier.
The gist of my plan is to move everything from the demo into release, get that T260 cutscene stuff fully operational, get the Diva fight looking like what it could've been (minus fighting Joker, of course), and get all the prototype tables, names, etc. from demo into release (executable, BTL_DATA.BIN, EVENT.BIN, BATTLE.OUT, etc.). I do plan on making a patch file for this once I get everything imported and working. It'll take a while, though, as I'm doing things I've never done before and I'm modifying the size of the ROM itself with this project, which is a whole different beast that I've avoided up until now.
You can view a public log of everything I'm doing here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/158cluxQh8GrsMg8B9yk4_2RBT9PF0ts8/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103929640379420088539&rtpof=true&sd=true
This post will also act as a log of sorts as well as a feedback form, so be sure to share this around with everyone who might be even a little bit interested in a project like this. Also, share this with people who could be willing to help; this will take me quite a while to do on my own, so having people to help figure things out with me would be a huge help. For example, how to change the idle coordinates of the camera in a battle arena.
Oh and in case you're wondering, I currently have no plans on porting this to remaster. Too much work to be done to get it even moderately functional there
Started messing with BATTLE.OUT cuz I thought that'd be a fun little project. Turns out is anything but fun or little. I'll have to mess with it later; something about demo's BATTLE.OUT is making everything not work, whether that be something with the file itself or the file only loading EVENT.BIN instead of that and EVENT2.BIN. Anyway, I'm gonna put it on the back burner for now. If I can get it working, cool. If not, that's whatever.
For the time being, I'm gonna shift my focus to moving EVENT.BIN scripts from the demo to where they go in release. That should be much easier; just copy/paste scripts, change them as needed to load the correct arena, and change the header as needed.
Got a start on EVENT.BIN. So far I've just started moving scripts over to release. I decided to isolate the scripts separately in a text file thanks to MysticLord's ScriptHelper app. It's gonna be another couple of days until I even have EVENT.BIN working cuz this is extremely tedious and I want to die
Got further into EVENT.BIN, but I'm nowhere near close and it's too tedious for my ADHD brain to focus on for much longer than 30 min. I'm now at Pointer 40, so around 1/3 of the way done with just EVENT.BIN. I still have to test all of these scripts, modify them to function as if they're final scripts, and so on.
So instead of doing that boring shit, I decided to map out which files I can delete from the disc image to cut down on size because I know these demo files are going to do stuff to the final size of the disc image. I want to be extra sure I can keep the disc image file size the same so, when it comes time to making a patch, I don't have to use shenanigans with the base file's size to get the patch to apply correctly. During my investigation, I figured out that palettes for IMF*.TEX files are stored at the bottom of subsection 10 of their associated IMF*.IMG file, thanks to MysticLord's documentation of the IMG files. They're 0x200 bytes in length, meaning they have 256 colors. The images are formatted as 8bpp linear and are 2D.
In other news, I figured out that the image of Victoria on water is, in fact, in the original game.
