dothackers.net

If you're getting a FILE NONE screen when trying to load the town npcs or enemies as party members, it's because of the virtual folders (categories) of the data.bin. If I'm right about how the code for the categories works, I think I can write a work around for it. if I could get to my computer long enough. every time I sit down lately, I get dragged back out of my chair for the rest of the day for something stupid. I haven't even gotten to set up my new computer...

If I ever get to take a vacation from work, I swear I'm going to run away, turn my phone off, lock myself in a motel room, and just spend an entire week coding.

NCDyson wrote:If you're getting a FILE NONE screen when trying to load the town npcs or enemies as party members, it's because of the virtual folders (categories) of the data.bin. If I'm right about how the code for the categories works, I think I can write a work around for it. if I could get to my computer long enough. every time I sit down lately, I get dragged back out of my chair for the rest of the day for something stupid. I haven't even gotten to set up my new computer...

If I ever get to take a vacation from work, I swear I'm going to run away, turn my phone off, lock myself in a motel room, and just spend an entire week coding.

Sounds like you have quite the busy life. I am pretty much the opposite for the moment. I have classes I need to attend every day, but that's it.

Now what you mentioned about a virtual folder is a very interesting idea. This would be my first thought on it. I do find it ironic though that some enemies have just as much, if not more animations then normal PC's. (also who wouldn't want to fly around as Skeith, haha!) It would make sense though since all files of a given type are sequential. I thought that was used just for clarity purposes. I'll try and see if I can't find the reference point then, since that may be the exact reason it won't load.

If the game uses the blank entry at the end of the categories file listing then that would mean that all you'd need to do is get fill the filename in the blank entry with anything, and it should run through to the next category. However, I believe that the categorie file lists are aligned to 0x10 in the elf/memory, so you might have to rebuild the entire set of lists. Implementing this into my data.bin unpacker/repacker would only take an extra if statement or two.

Hmm, that is an interesting theory. I did not know that there was a blank entry at the end of categories, hmm, here's a possibility I hadn't thought of but it may be better to bounce this off of you before trying it as it may be way off base. Could it be that the letter designator may have something to do with it? For instance changing all instance of cbu1 into ebu1, would that possibly in turn allow Mia for instance to be an enemy model?

I don't think so. I think the names are just letter-coded like that to make it easier for them to keep track of the files during development.

While the names of things are kind of important, I don't believe they're important in that way. I could be wrong though.

Which debugger are you using NCDyson?

Edit Oct.15th: On another note. I took a look back at Xu's notes, and revisited his Dungeon Editing adventures. I noticed a rather... unusual way of decided which room to load into memory.


In the above diagram of the map, the room "1" has been moved upwards 1 tile. Let's presume room "0" is where you start. If you go north to the door, and get transported, the game will crash. I believe this is due to the fact the player is Not in a room in that position, therefore the game cannot decide which room to load.

Ok, now let's say you're in Room #1. Going north will merely teleport you back a few feet where you were in the same room. This may be caused by the overlapping position of Room #1 and Room #2. Also, approaching this door, once you get into the overlapped position of both of the rooms, no room is rendered anymore (leaving a green background in the place of it.)

Ok, now let's say you're in Room #2. Going south will merely teleport you back a few feet, this may be because the room you're in is Prioritized over the other rooms when there is an overlapping problem.

A black screen will only appear if you're not in the room's model box (it's a cube that spans the size of the room in all X,Y,Z dimensions.)

If you do get a black screen from modification, it can crash your emulator, so be ready for annoying restarts.

Yeah, map editing is really strange, though note that when you leave a room and end up in the Green screen, or black void you can use a Fairy's Orb and the rooms suddenly appear. I have No idea why this is. I have a feeling it was used as a quick debug tool when they were testing out their Edit Dungeon program. Though that's odd, I never had the game crash while map editing, at least as I recall.

Black Void means you are currently not within the boundaries of a room, so nothing should render even in the case of a fariy's orb. The green screen (Or dungeon fog of war that blurs the background of long dungeon halls) means you are within the boundaries of a rendered room. Some rooms will automatically fix upon getting within the boundaries. I believe the Fairy's Orb reads through the addresses of the dungeon, forcing it to go through a very similar process to the Loading Screen upon entering a dungeon. The emulator *can* crash if you leave it running for too long upon entering room in which your character doesn't even render (no resource found while loading / error.)

I've also began writing a small program for testing dungeon editing on a more "precise" level. It would appear that all rooms within dungeons are made up of tiles of a specific size, sort of like a tilemap, meaning they can be positioned very carefully to make connections.

I've also began looking at each room type (and documenting them via screenshots.) It's kind of annoying due to overlapping rooms causing problems with the fairy's orb (yes, even the fairy's orb cannot overcome an overlapped room.) So it'll take me some time to document *every* room type by number.

Also, it would appear that your note about room identifiers would be correct, except... it's the starting point of the very next room. Before Room 0 starts (according to your notes at: 0x2065CD28), there is a 4 byte integer that behaves exactly the same way that value above does.
These addresses are accessed many times: Read Condition: Enter Dungeon Scene (3000CF41)
Read Condition: Finish Loading Dungeon Scene (Once) (3022CA00)
Read Condition: Finish Loading Dungeon Scene (Once) (3022D943)
Read Condition: Enter New Room (Including Change Floors) (301696EF)

They're probably read during Fairy's Orbs as well, though I didn't watch for that.

What an interesting setup, yes Dungeon Editing was one of the main parts where I just threw up my hands and took my best guesses. I am glad to see that for the most part it seems to be accurate enough. Creating a program to make it all work and be put together seems much more efficient than looking at it in a basic manner..

Well it has been a very long time without an update. I think I've basically hit all of the places I wanted to but my efforts didn't bear much fruit. No modder came around to create tools to open my work to the wider public... so if you want something done you have to do it yourself. The news of .hack//G.U. RECODE really inspired me to get back into .hack, so I wanted to ask around to see if maybe there was some GUI template that I could use to create my own editor and lo and behold there turned out to be one! It is called Nightmare, it was made for Fire Emblem, but it's such a convenient tool that can easily be molded towards anything. Unfortunately it does not lead PS2 ISO's but it will load the individual files that make up the ISOs. It would be a very short tutorial but all you would need in the end is WinRar and a hex editor (HxD preferably) so you can easily extract the necessary files and use the hex editor to insert the file with your changes.

http://imgur.com/yWqOzfV

http://imgur.com/v13TcsI

You will notice that the large portion missing is weapons... well weapons are based on class and unfortunately the editor has no way to tell what class you are before pulling up the Weapons menu so I will need to create six separate modules that will allow you to easily switch a character's weapon to whatever class you desire. That is probably the cleanest way to go about it. I'll hopefully have more updates soon with a usable beta for those that are interested.

Hi all, the links to the saves are dead in the 1st post, please update or something, because i really want to start a game without kite being a Twin-Blade! I would prefer a PS2 Memory Card Save so i can import it to my PS2/PS3/PCSX2, i may be able to convert the other two types, i'm not sure, thanks in advance, really awesome work! Or if there's a way to edit a save file, i may be able to do that using HxD or something...

Xu Yuan wrote: ↑Tue Jun 20, 2017 1:23 am --

You will notice that the large portion missing is weapons... well weapons are based on class and unfortunately the editor has no way to tell what class you are before pulling up the Weapons menu so I will need to create six separate modules that will allow you to easily switch a character's weapon to whatever class you desire. That is probably the cleanest way to go about it. I'll hopefully have more updates soon with a usable beta for those that are interested.

If you're still around I'd be interested in working on something like this as well. Sorry I'm 4 years late to reply, didn't even know this forum was still here.

I don't know if it'd have any audience at all, but I like projects like this. Maybe it'll be 4 more years before you reply heh.
I'm on the Dothack Network discord if you see this.

Haha, by coincidence I was just starting to get back into researching the games. It is interesting how these things happen. (I'm currently playing through the American beta of //Infection which seems to just be Japanese 1.0 in terms of content and some... questionably bad skills (or no skills) on rare equipment).

Unfortunately when my PC died I lost all my Nightmare files, admittedly it's just a lot of busy work to set back up and I would like an actual better tool to build, but if nothing else Nightmare will make for an easy to set up editor.

Xu Yuan wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 8:17 pm Haha, by coincidence I was just starting to get back into researching the games. It is interesting how these things happen. (I'm currently playing through the American beta of //Infection which seems to just be Japanese 1.0 in terms of content and some... questionably bad skills (or no skills) on rare equipment).

Unfortunately when my PC died I lost all my Nightmare files, admittedly it's just a lot of busy work to set back up and I would like an actual better tool to build, but if nothing else Nightmare will make for an easy to set up editor.

I can set things up with C#.NET WinForms or UFP forms or something (if Linux support is needed, I'll need to use a different method). Not sure how to use Nightmare but if you need it to be created in that I could look into learning that. c:

We could setup a Github project or something so we can keep the files hosted somewhere without worrying about something breaking and load directly from the game ISO or what not to avoid hosting copyrighted material in the src.

Edit: I also sent you a friend request on Discord.

What I'm lacking is information and a good way to contact you quickly. You replying so soon is a surprise!

Today I spent about 7 hours brushing up on Cheat Engine and the PCSX2 debugger by just playing around with the Options Menu lol.

Rereading this topic is always a blast, and to see how much progress we made always warms my heart, but it does have a dour note that we weren't able to do much with it. (Though NCDyson did figure out models, but I never quite fully understood that.)

Oh! You know how to actually make GUI's? Wonderful! Forget about Nightmare then, it's probably best to work from a self-made GUI if that's up your alley.

Xu Yuan wrote: ↑Sat Aug 21, 2021 3:06 am Rereading this topic is always a blast, and to see how much progress we made always warms my heart, but it does have a dour note that we weren't able to do much with it. (Though NCDyson did figure out models, but I never quite fully understood that.)

Oh! You know how to actually make GUI's? Wonderful! Forget about Nightmare then, it's probably best to work from a self-made GUI if that's up your alley.

Yeah, great times. Can't believe it's been 6 years since I did something like that.
I really want to make an event editor and a dungeon editor sometime. I think it should be possible based on things I've read.

Slip wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 11:35 pm

Xu Yuan wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 8:17 pm Haha, by coincidence I was just starting to get back into researching the games. It is interesting how these things happen. (I'm currently playing through the American beta of //Infection which seems to just be Japanese 1.0 in terms of content and some... questionably bad skills (or no skills) on rare equipment).

Unfortunately when my PC died I lost all my Nightmare files, admittedly it's just a lot of busy work to set back up and I would like an actual better tool to build, but if nothing else Nightmare will make for an easy to set up editor.

I can set things up with C#.NET WinForms or UFP forms or something (if Linux support is needed, I'll need to use a different method). Not sure how to use Nightmare but if you need it to be created in that I could look into learning that. c:

We could setup a Github project or something so we can keep the files hosted somewhere without worrying about something breaking and load directly from the game ISO or what not to avoid hosting copyrighted material in the src.

Edit: I also sent you a friend request on Discord.

What I'm lacking is information and a good way to contact you quickly. You replying so soon is a surprise!

Today I spent about 7 hours brushing up on Cheat Engine and the PCSX2 debugger by just playing around with the Options Menu lol.

Pm me your discord. I'm interested in knowing more about all of this and have been learning to decompile C++ from MIPS, which has been a very fun headache so far.

i remember browsing this thread yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeears ago! i love .hack


i'm playing thru the fragment fan-translation and i'm wondering if anyone has a means of helping me with something?

i'm wondering if anyone can help making a PCSX2 cheat pnach (i'm only playing in offline mode) to double EXP gain (since fragment lowered the EXP drops from enemies) but i'm still enjoying the game... even if i accidentally forgot to do the proper log out sequence once and lost all my items once ^^;

if you're curious i'm playing thru as a heavy blade samurai blue guy avatar

also, just saying, i wish someone could make a mod that forces Matsu to let you make him use a broadsword in GU xD

dang i showed up too late, all the links were removed..... does anyone still have a premade save download they could send? or instructions to make the edit myself on cheat engine? i tried to just input the numbers above with my limited knowledge but nada, i'm hoping i'm just missing out on some crucial info that was in those screenshots or something but lemme know please; i'd really like to do a wave master only run

basic wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2024 10:39 pm dang i showed up too late, all the links were removed..... does anyone still have a premade save download they could send? or instructions to make the edit myself on cheat engine? i tried to just input the numbers above with my limited knowledge but nada, i'm hoping i'm just missing out on some crucial info that was in those screenshots or something but lemme know please; i'd really like to do a wave master only run

Hello Basic, I'm sorry I missed this post and your PM. If you're looking to change Kite's class this is very easy with PCSX2's built-in debugger, whereas Cheat Engine can be a little... temperamental with addresses.

00A46F30 - Kite's Class
00 - Twin Blade
01 - Blademaster
02 - Heavy Blade
03 - Long Arm
04 - Heavy Axeman
05 - Wavemaster

If you need any further assistance, do let me know.