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[Mod] Final Fantasy V-e

Final Fantasy V-e

I'm going to be writing about my hacking process for Final Fantasy V's PC release. My plan is to extract the resources and rebuild them with improved character sprites and fixes to some of the errors on the field sprites.

The name "FFV-e" is a reference to RPGe; the collaboration group who translated the SNES version of FFV into English, the version that arguably has the best script-translation of all versions of the game.

Plan

Sprites
Waifu2x with the original SNES sprites could be a good, quick method to bring back the classic character sprites. First task would be replacing Bartz's sprites; if that is successful then we know this mod is possible.

World tiles
The mobile releases have very bad seems on some of the tiles and connectivity is entirely off (Meteorite external tiles). The majority of the world tiles are very good quality and retain the style of the SNES release, so I expect no major changes to be needed here.

Script
This is an ambitious one, but it's something I'd really like to do. There are many, many artistic liberties taken in the mobile FFV script which adds a lot of comic flair. I'd like to bring dialogue that has gone this way back down to be closer to the original Japanese dialogue, even if that means Japanese culture references being used.

Window Skin
This is a matter of taste, but the modern window-skin adds some nice border-detail, however I feel that going back to a standard white-border blue-background would give a clear visual indication that this mod is being used.

Previous Investigations

The Android release has an encrypted content archive (standard for Android content extensions). This does not indicate that the PC version will use content encryption, but there's a good chance that there will be some kind of content protection/data format.

Encrypted content could be a problem and may cause this mod to never get off the ground.

FFVI?

Yeah sure if things go well with modding FFV and VI with the same content format gets a PC release. More people care about FFVI - even though FFV is way better - so it would be worth investigating FFV modding as FFVI could make a good modding community.

First Contact

Straight away, looks like things are good! The image format is PNG and accessing a corrupt form of the image is very easy.

Here's a corrupt frog field-sprite;
YRAZCZ4.png


Faces seem to work easy;
LEU1B8s.png


In the string resources there also seems to be a LOT of references to Final Fantasy VIII???
As an example, these strings exist;
  • Great Plains of Galbadia
  • Unlock Guardian Force Carbuncle
  • White SeeD Ship- Cabin
In fact, it looks like an entire block is dedicated to FFVIII strings.

Also looks like changing the window skin frame is very easy to achieve. In this image I changed the frame to be tinted a teal colour in GIMP: http://i.imgur.com/e33G3FF.jpg
Means we can style it quite easily.
 
First road block - What is up with these images?

QZPMmYT.png


These images all share the same 3 byte header "ICP" before 9 bytes of extra information, then the PNG format begins.

Here's 4 examples;
Code:
 

0x02 0x94 0x02 0x28 0x03 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x04

0x02 0x94 0x02 0x80 0x02 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x04

0x02 0x98 0x02 0x28 0x03 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x04

0x02 0x94 0x02 0xC0 0x01 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x02

 
And the 4 images these belong to (in order)
  • http://i.imgur.com/QZPMmYT.png
  • http://i.imgur.com/Ja6mZiD.png
  • http://i.imgur.com/YdNrqHj.png
  • http://i.imgur.com/osYIUcB.png

If someone wants to take a look at these images and inspect their headers then PM me.

EDIT2: Looks like this is the same format used in the iOS version, which has already been investigated; http://www.vg-resource.com/thread-26815.html

EDIT3: Success!
Here's a red Bartz:
http://i.imgur.com/n1N7P7T.jpg

So I guess I can start on this mod now :D

EDIT4: Small update - I made a tool that will automatically convert my sprites into the resource format required, so I can setup a project directory and get to spriting pretty easily
 

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