Hex F: The Final ( ? ) Positioning, Scaling, Rotating, Etc.

So here we are ; ; The end of the line for me :(

My departure from FFXI has been pretty sad (yet easy since this is like my 50th time to quit :p ) so I will miss teaching you all stuff! Originally it was never my intention to quit modding, because I enjoy modding more than the game itself! However soon after I quit FFXI I decided I needed to reformat my computer because it was becoming bogged down with porn and whatnot. (Just kidding! ...just kidding :B)

Modding for me was always I guess like my Aegis shield. I always wanted to be the top modder in our little linkshell of modders, but I couldnt ever get to that point without you guys! Without your continuing support and interest in my projects, you gave me the motivation to continue on even if the road looked endless!

So I just want to say thank you to everyone who enjoyed Goobbue Racer (Made it to the header of the BG spam forums! Talk about honor!) and all my other mods! You all have been great and I hope to keep in touch until FFXIV!

I am sticking to my guns though, and will return to dat modding, only if the Samurai Papercraft face is removed from FFXIDats.com front page. :p

Ok so this guide will be short, and not have pictures because... well I dont have any means of making any xD but it will be pretty self explanatory.


Click for full picture

Some of you might remember this picture from earlier, I used to have it as my signature on FFXIDats. This explains how to change everything. At the time the picture was made I was very excited (as always when I figure something new out) so its kinda sloppy but I'll explain it to ya.

So first off it says PROPELLER, ignore this, it just signifies that I was using the little propeller effect from the model airship. (I used it to make a propeller hat for my galka :p )

One thing you should take from that though is that this all takes place in the "sub-schedule" of the effect.

The line where the model data is called (says ......pro1) signifies the "Halfway point" of a sub-schedule. Below this is all the positioning and scale etc.

The line directly below the Halfway point is always the positioning of the effect. So in the picture it says

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

That means its in the default position. If you would want to move it you would follow the general format of Y Z X in the picture.

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 Green is Y, Blue is Z, and Red is X

You can take this example and place it onto the rest of the examples listed in the picture.

0904 0000 F48B CC3F 0000 0000 0000 0000

as you can see here the 0904 at the beginning of the line represents that this line controls the rotation of the effect. Since the propeller is constantly spinning on its Y axis, only the Y axis has numbers.

Generally you want to enter in numbers close to or around CC3F to start with even with positioning etc, because that will move it to a pretty far off spot, then you can work it up or down from there by increasing or decreasing from CC3F

(for example if you want to position an effect specifically on the head you would put in CC3F for the Y value, then move it down if its too high to something like CC2F or CC1F, its pretty random sometimes so work at it)

Now sometimes these lines will not start at the beginning of a line. You will need to keep a keen eye out for these values that represent the start of a line.

If you want to find the scale of an effect look in the bottom half of the sub schedule for 0F04, once you find that you know thats where the "Scale line" starts, then you count over and start replacing values where the X Y Z coordinates would need to be.

There are many many values I never had time to find, but you probably shouldnt need anything aside from knowing 0F04 = SCALE and the first line below the half-way point is POSITION.

Im posting it again so you dont have to scroll up :P (or at least I dont have to to write this hah) Anyways the last thing I can teach you is the COLOR part. Some effects are colored, however the textures are black and white, an example would be Stinging Pummel (? the pup thing i think, its yellow and sparkly) if you check out the textures for that, it will be black and white. So wtf is coloring it right?

Well that is where 1602 comes in.

1602 0000 8080 8080

I dont know if many of you have read my Avatar glow guide (ancient... ah the good ol days) but this is kind of the same thing for changing color. If you type in 808080 into your favorite graphics editing program it will come up with a grayish color, that represents the color of the propeller.

So for stinging pummel it will be something completely different from 808080, but the point is, you find out the hex value of what color you want it to be, then plug it in where 808080 is in the picture that follows 1602.

Oh one last thing. When Pixel made the flaming staff there was a problem that the effect would pop, however it would not attach to his staff. This is true for some effects like the weird seed things baby aldo had in Qufim Island.

If you check them out in AV while your character is running, it will activate the effect wherever you weight it, however it will not follow what you attached it to.

The way to cure this is open up the sub schedule of an effect that DOES follow the weapon and copy the line RIGHT ABOVE the half-way point, then paste this over the line right above the half-way point of the effect that does not follow.

Once that is done it should follow fine.

Lots of stuff is still unknown, and I hope you guys continue to try to figure stuff out! I'll still be around, so feel free to ask me questions in PM or something (Although my brain is fading so I might not know as much as I did!)

Thanks guys! Seeya!

Hex 3: Effect on Weapons

Ok so another day another guide! Not really, but this one is pretty exciting (granted people actually catch on and aren’t afraid of hex editing).

This will be a multi-part guide and will be worked in the normal series of Hex editing guides (so be sure to read the previous ones). Since this is somewhat technical, I have decided the best way to teach something like this is to give you specific files to work on, that way we can walk through it step by step without working on different things, which naturally causes confusion.

In this guide I’m going to tell you how to permanently attach the sparkly part of the firework “Sparkling hand” to the Dagger Carnwenhan for Mithra, and also explain how to make it repeat indefinitely. Why Carnwenhan? Cause I think its purdy. Why Mithra? Because I think they’re purdy.

In this package I will include a few files to help you along your way to sparkly doom.
First I will give you a semi-isolated sparkly effect (I can’t do everything for you or you wont learn anything!) this will be the main file we will be working on. Then I will also include all of the skeleton files that have been edited to have weights for every type of weapon in the game.

!Get the Pack here!

(Everyone say Thank you Pixel! He edited them all but Galka cause I was lazy :B )

So first off we need to install the skeleton files, place them all in their designated places and be sure sure sure to back them all up before you replace them. They are, after all, your skeleton! Without that you’re a blob on the floor (literally!). Here is a list of their dat numbers in case you need a reminder.

Now we need to do something with the sparkle dat. What I do (And have recently forced Pixel to do) is replace ROM/10/8.DAT. This is what I call the ‘gimp’ dat because its like one of those freaky sex gimps that get whipped around and stuff… yeah whatever.


Anyways the reason why I replace this file is that in AltanaViewer it is the first effect on the list in the “Effect” folder called “miss”. Nobody seems to know what it is, nobody has seen it in game, that must mean it’s not very important, so it can always just be used to your advantage without messing stuff up in game with tests.

Ok so once you have both the skeleton dats replaced, and the sparkle dat in, check it out in Altanaviewer. You should see your basic sparkle hand effect happen on your hand without any item use motion or anything (I have taken out some effects, motion, and sound before to shorten the guide). This is pretty cool right? But… whats that?

Does anyone else see this little sonic boom wave flash kick or something aside from the sparkles? I don’t want that on my weapon all the time! You don’t either! Let’s take that off… how do I do that?

What are you looking at me for?

Fine. Well first we need to figure out which ‘sub schedule’ is calling this sonic boom type effect. How we do this is pretty simple. Open up the sparkle dat in the hex editor and do a search for “main”. This will take us to our main schedule where you can see it is calling 3 sub schedules: pk00, kr00, and rn00. Now the way I go about figuring which one we don’t want is, in the main schedule, highlight a name and erase it by filling it with 0’s on the HEX SIDE. So for this example, lets start off with pk00. Highlight pk00, right click, and go to “fill...” then enter 00 as the fill number and click ok.

Save, no backup needed, then close AltanaViewer (if it was already open) and open it again. Then play the effect and see which part of the effect was killed off. Hmm… well… I guess it wasn’t pk00 because the sonic waves are still there ><; Back in the hex, type back in pk00 where it was (by this I mean highlight the 4 spots where pk00 would be and type it in so it will replace the 00s you filled in back to normal pk00, remember we don’t want to change the block size), and try killing off kr00. Ugh… not kr00 either, that has to mean its rn00. So go back type back in kr00 and kill off rn00 just to make sure.

Yup that was the sub schedule that was the sonic boom thing. So what do we do now? Well we need to remove rn00’s sub schedule and data from the dat file (This is so we can condense the size of the file, that way Jamesy wont be like “That looks like it will lag me, I hate it.”).
So these effects are made up of the 3 parts Pixel covered in the last guide. There is the Sub schedule, the effect modifiers, the model data, and the texture… oh that’s 4… shut up. Anyways how do we know what to delete?

Well first the most obvious is the sub schedule, but lets not kill that off yet, because that has all the triggers to the other things we need to delete (it will tell us all we need to know). So do a search for rn00, it should only bring up 1 result (2 if you put it back in your main after deleting it). Go there and that will take you to its sub schedule.


I don’t know if Pixel covered the structure of these sections or not, but this will be a lesson of that. In every single sub schedule it has the same structure. In this example you can see there is an “rn “ (r n space space) This is the sub schedule calling the model data titled “rn “ then below that is some random jibbajab (covered in next guide) and you can see rna0. Rna0 is the effect modifier being called. These are in the same general area in every sub schedule, so if you scroll up a bit you will see pk00’s sub schedule and it has the same type of stuff, calls for the model data “pk “ and the effect modifier pkx0 2 times.

Anyways back to rn00 we know we need to find the effect modifier rna0 and delete that. So do a search for rna0, this will bring up 2 results, one will be the one you are already looking at, and the other will be the effect modifier section (these are always under the main schedules, and above the effect model data). Its just a tiny 3 line section above pkx0 so highlight that and delete it to oblivion.


So that’s gone, now we need to find “rn “ model data. Do a search for “rn “ (r n space space), this time 5 instances will come up! One will be the one in the sub schedule of course, the next 2 will be the header of the model data, and the name of the texture that the model data is using, then the last 2 will be the texture header and title of texture. So click on the 2nd instance and highlight from “rn “ down to where the next model data starts, in this case its “pk “ then delete that section, then go down to the texture titled “rn “ and highlight that whole section and delete it.


Finally do a search for rn00, go back up to the sub schedule, and bid it adeu while you delete it. After that is done, you have successfully rid the effect of the sonic waves. Rejoice! (relocating to toilet to write next part, I need to poop)

Ok so now what should we do, we have gotten rid of that, we could attach it to the dagger now, but.. if we do that then it will only do a sparkle cycle and then stop… we’d have to keep re-equipping just to see the effect! That will not do, so lets figure out how to make it so it will repeat forever and ever. This next part might not make sense because… well it just doesn’t, but look at this picture.


The ‘upper section’ of sub schedules always generally look the same with the 2 lines of 803F …. And 2 lines below the 2nd line of 803F inbetween where the 2nd and 3rd 803F would be is where you need to change 00 (or whatever is there in the case of other dats) to 10. Why? I don’t know. How did I figure this out? O M G weeks and weeks and weeks of “wtf WTF”. I suppose we could think of this as binary where 1 = on and 0 = off. Lets just say that single byte needs to be turned ‘on’ and by turning it on, it makes it so it repeats forever and auto-boots the code upon entry in the game.

So anyways apply this 10 to the pk00 and kr00 sub schedules to turn them on and we’ll move on.
So now we have isolated sparkles that auto-boot, everything seems pretty sweet, but its still on your hand! So now we need to weight them to the dagger.

To do this we need to use this chart of weights that I made. These are kinda like in VRS where skeleton 7=head or something, think of it like that except these are weights Pixel and I made where Skeleton-3903 =Dagger Main. We made sure these weights were shared across the races so when you port your weapons you wont have to re-weight the effect, just copy paste.

So since we are weighting to dagger, we need to look at the chart and see that 3903 is the Main Dagger. Where do we put this? Well if you go back to the sub schedule of pk00 you can see right below the “pk” in pk00 on the hex side it says “A100”, now A100 represents the right hand, and that is what its weighted to currently. So we need to replace the A100 with the 3903. Do this for pk00 and also kr00. Once that is done you are essentially done!


You have successfully:
Got an effect
Found what was not needed
Sought out what was not needed and destroyed (condensed to lower file size)
Triggered the effect to always be on and repeat
Weighted the effect to the main dagger

Good job! Now this might seem weird, but now that all that is done, the effects will auto trigger, thus having the main schedule is not needed now, so go ahead and highlight all of the main schedule and kill that off just to save a few more bytes in file size, then basically add it like I explained previously in the hit effect guide.

Copy the whole dat, paste it in the Mithra Carnwenhan dagger dat (Rom\205\57) in front of infoE or end…… (At the bottom of the dat) after that is done, test her out in game and see how it goes! Did it crash? Did you fail? I hope not!


Remember all this can take a long time to get used to and it has taken me months and months just to figure this much out so don’t get discouraged if you didn’t get it right the first time. Just be sure to read carefully and do it step by step, before you know it you’ll be making this stuff easy peasy!

I will make a thread for problems and stuff on FFXIDats because it will be easier for you to comment/etc there since you already have a login and stuff. So good luck and I’ll see you on FFXIDats! -Mooshy

(Next guide will cover positioning/rotation/size of effects)

Hex structure recognizations.

HAI CHILLRENS! Pixel here.... (click images for them to be more clear)

Today we are going to learn about the structure of a hex. The schedules, sub schedules, and textures!
These are the most important parts of a hex that we will be using for now.
As for the two main sections of a hex window, they are

HEX and DECIMAL

First off, the schedules in Altana Viewer are shown for each effect as shown here:->






Now, schedule names are always 4 digits long, either letters, numbers, or both.
Searching for the desired schedule using its four digit name in hex will bring up the schedule's "hex block" (the entire data of that particular schedule) as shown here.




Within some schedules such as this "main" schedule contain sub-schedules, which are the basic data of another schedule that your desired schedule triggers or calls upon.
Here the examples of sub-schedules whithin our example "main" schedule: -->

Now, the block is the entire data of the schedule, so how do you know how big the block for each schedule is???

WELL! by this number
<---Those two digits determine how large the block is. The sequence goes like this: 123456789ABCDEF etc. The letters represent a two digit number such as 10,11,12,13 etc. Sometimes you might want to change the size of the block to accomodate adding or subtracting sub-schedules for added or less effects (but thats another guide). Just remember that the size of the block has to always be an even number of lines, so add 2 lines or subtract 2 lines. Also, within some schedules are sub schedules for things such as sound effects, the speed an effect happens (like no delay in the effect happening or a long delay, depends on the digits you enter in that sub-schedule) and so on. Sound effects are pretty often 4 numbers but sometimes are not, and are then sometimes listed in Altana viewer as its own schedule for which you can search for using that 4 digit name if for some reason you need it. Also, alot of things in hex are relative to the individule .dat and are not always the same. (there are alot of differences in older .dats and newer .dats) but alot of the more basic things tend to stay consistant.

Tired yet?

(yeah me too)

OK NOW TIME FOR TEXTURES.
Textures can be located using Changetex, you can do a search much like you would for a schedule in Hex for texture locations too.

<--You'll notice that textures are usually filled with ?s and @s in the decimal area such as this: (remember the image of sides at the top) This is important because later on you will learn to find and extract the desired textures as well as their animation schedules so you can import only those sections into another hex for a much cleaner and refined mod. Sometimes textures share similar names in hex but will ultimately be named differently (because the hex will clash with itself otherwise). So if the name is similar, search for the similarity and highlight all of that block until you run into the next texture. Remember that textures are usually quite large in size in hex form.

Now for sound effects.

Sound effects are quite easy. they are always under all of the textures toward the bottom and usually have the letters sesep in the block, sometimes repeated.

Remember, alot of what is done in Hex is triggering. Find a schedule, find the trigger you want to change in that schedule (which is what the sub-schedule is), and change the name of that trigger to corrospond to your desired trigger.
Make sure sure what you are trying to trigger is where its supposed to be, example. Hit effects are all in 1-0-0.dat. So in a weapon you search for hit1, change it to whichever other schedule name you want within 0.dat, and voila!
Any questions? just ask and ill post with some claryfication.

Current Drama and Findings!

Ok so its been a few days, busy ones for me, and I dont know wut days for Pixel. Maybe you've heard he wants to stop his role in the dat editing community! Well it is a sad thing, and I wish I could shed some light as to why for you people, but I dunno. He's just been acting weird and emo lately, maybe its that time of the month.

But anyways, he was supposed to do his first post and Hex Tutorial #2 for you, which haven't come around so I figured I would just make an update post on what I have been up to lately and what I have found recently.

So first I'd like to talk about my current projects! As you might know (hopefully... please know! Oh god you hate me..) I recently released the Erniegangs upon the world!

This was a huge huge project that spanned multiple months for me! It started out as just one of those ideas I had when I saw Cruel Riposte. It could be compared to "Wouldnt that be cool if my cape was on fire while I was in town while my ass exploded with rainbows and unicorns?". But after a long bit of work, I figured out how to attach it to the engage/disengage schedules for attacks.

This was fine and all but always in the back of my head I wished more than anything that I could just attach effects to weapons. Some of you may remember me saying "It will never happen, its not possible"etc etc, but this is one of the few times that I am glad to eat my own words.


In my earlier post I showed you guys a comparison picture of Mithra and Galka on an Alexander effect. The effect would light up behind the Mithra hand, however the Galka was all in front of the hand. This got me thinking... The way I had always imagined it is that some core file that's structure is unfathomable is controlling the positions of these effects, but if this were true... 1 position would be the same for all races. (i.e. "Front of hand" should be the front of the hand regardless of Galka or Mithra)

So as I was fishing, the lightbulb upstairs turned on and I remembered something. Tenzen and Hume Male have the same exact skeleton (reason for Hume M having sheathe motions), however I remember one of the effects would follow Tenzens katana specifically instead of just his hand.

So I used the compare feature in HexWorkshop to compare the skeleton section of Tenzen and Hume M. This resulted in a paltry 3 differences. These differences were the key to the world. I copied and pasted these differences in the corresponding spots from Tenzen to Hume M skeletons and tested it out. Low and behold the effect followed the Katana of a normal Hume M. The mystery had almost been solved!

Quickly I opened my messenger to Dycro and asked him "Hurry what is the skeleton weight for GKT on Hume M? If you actually remember that, I will be scared" and then I opened up VRS figuring he'd be like "Shut up loser Im exping" He said Skeleton-7, which was correct in the end, and then he said shut up im exping... so we were both right in a sense.

Either way upon further investigation of the hex I noticed the section of hex that I copied over started with an 07, which in my mind instantly triggered "This is the weight". So I got the number for normal sword, changed it from decimal to hex, and plugged it in to see what would happen.

It worked! Finally after what... 4 years of modding this game, I figured it out. Some of you probably think 'meh' but this is really a huge thing for me! Discovering HQ textures was fine, Fabric was ok but didnt really go anywhere, some basic hex tricks meh, but this is a really exciting thing for me!

There are a few things that cant be changed however, the races Galka and Elvaan might face a hardship in this area because there are a limited amount of slots for effect positions. Think of it as 0123456789ABCDEF, Galka and Elvaan already use 012345678 for basic effects already in the game (Animated Flourish etc) so if you go and change them, some of your normal effects will start messing up and appearing in odd areas! The rest I actually had to add MORE spots into their skeletal files so they could go up to F, which is a good thing, the more empty spots the merrier.

Anyways enough of that. What I am working on now (Or will be after I take a breakybreak) will be more effect-on-weapons (Cant just release 1 and call it good!) and of course that darned Tachi:Yukikaze that I cant figure out why people want! Yukikaze shouldnt take long, just some copy pasting in hex of the motions and it should be done.


Also I have recently started leveling Beastmaster in game, and I would like to make this Axe pictured above from The Last Remnant. I guess because the blade goes all the way down around the handle makes me think its really cool! Also now that Effects are less troublesome I would like to try to recreate some of my favorite weapons in RF Online (That game was great fun!)


I was always so happy when I got to the point when I could use these weapons, they look so yummy, I want to eat the photons they are made out of!

But yeah, that's whats going on in my mind, if Pixel doesn't do it soon I'll probably just give up and write a guide on putting effects on weapons for Deo~ :p Anyways thanks for reading (or at least looking!) seeya!

-Mooshy

Hex1: Grudge Staff

Ok so to start off with learning hex I think we should start with... well, basically start where I did. This was one of the first things I ever learned to edit with effects. That is Hit Effects. Some of you may have seen an example of this kind of edit with my BLACK katanas.

The BLACK Katanas are made in a different way however, they are made with the effects being called from 0.DAT. I will teach you to make weapons with the effects stored on the weapons themselves, thus eliminating the need for 0.DAT. The reason I made BLACK Katanas with 0.DAT is because when I made them, I had been testing with effects on the weapon itself.

It would work fine 'in game' however if you had the weapon equipped on the select character screen the game would explode. I tried this method I will teach you earlier today, and it seems to work, however I would love to see your results after you try it out! People seem to love effect edits because they are very flashy, so be sure to share your effect edits with everyone!

We'll start a whole new thing together! (I pray it doesn't turn out like my HQ discovery ;; )

Ok First things first we need to know what programs you'll need.

Firstly you'll need Altanaviewer : Download Here (Mortama Rocks!)

Next you'll need a Hex Editor : Pixel and I use Hex Workshop but some people use PSPad... I find that to be horrible in comparison so avoid that if you can. (I dont know controls or anything for PSPad, and some things are different)

I think that's about it for this guide, so I guess we'll get started.

Firstly you would start off cruisin the Altanaviewer Effects tab finding an effect you want to attach to your weapon for a hit effect. For the sake of this guide I will be adding the "Everyones Grudge" or whatever its called Tonberry attack hit effect to my "Grudge Staff" (Edited Trick staff, you can use Trick Staff for this if you want to follow along exactly)

As you can see here, even though I have my staff edited to look like an awesome tonberry ghost thing, it will still hit like a normal boring everyday weapon. This is fine and all, however I want my staff to be super special! I want to blow some pants off with my ghost attack!

So to start off we'll need to simply open both the Tonberry Effect dat (ROM2/23/88.DAT) and the weapon dat (For Galka ROM/128/1.DAT) in the Hex Editor. I know this will look really daunting with all these numbers and letters staring at you, but after a while you will get used to the looks and begin to understand it like its a picture.

The first thing to do when you are editing something in hex is to quickly just press CTRL+S (Save command) to prompt a window that will ask you if you want to create a backup of the dat before you save. Select Yes, then remember everytime after this you will need to select No when it asks you to create a backup (you want the .BAK to remain crisp and clean in case of messup)

The next step is to get the Tonberry Hit Effect into the weapon dat, so naturally there will be some copy pasting here.

You will need to click on the 88.DAT tab at the bottom of the hex screen to switch to the Tonberry dat's hex. Press CTRL+A (universal 'select all command') to select everything, and then CTRL+C (universal 'copy' command) to copy the dat onto your computers clipboard.

Once you have this all copied, you need to go to your weapon dat tab at the bottom of the screen.

In this dat you need to go to the very very bottom of the dat, you will see end......... (Possibly 1, possibly more than 1) and above it will be infoE..... (possibly not, depending on the dat) You need to put the cursor right in FRONT of infoE...... (or the first end..... if the dat has no infoE) and paste all of the Tonberry attack dat there. (Edit> Paste Special> Hex Workshop Binary Data)

Once this is done you are essentially done! Just a few things we need to do to get it fully working. The Tonberry attack DAT and the Weapon dat are now fused together, however the weapon is still looking to call the normal boring hit1 effect from 0.DAT (Check this guide if you want more info on hit1) Therefore we have to change this so it will call tgt0 from the Tonberry attack DAT. I say tgt0 because in Altanaview you can see that the Tonberry Attack is split up into pieces, or "Schedules". If you look in AV you can see that tgt0 is the schedule of the 'hit' effect on the effect. This will usually be true in most other effects as well, they are usually called 'tgt0' or 'tar1' or something along those lines. Here is a pic showing you where it shows this in AV.

Now do a search for "hit1" in the hex editor. To do this you need to press CTRL+F (Find) to bring up a screen of search options. Change "Type" to Text String and search "hit1".

In this case it should come up with 3 different results of "hit1" because some of the tonberry attack uses hit1 as well. However the first "hit1" in the results is the one we want, it should be towards the top of the dat, around it should be the word shit, thats when you know you're in the right place.

Change this hit1 into tgt0, now save and open up AltanaViewer again. In Altanaviewer equip the weapon you edited on your character, and select "chit" in the (Basic) actions section.

If everything went right, it should show the Tonberry attack on your character. Now you can go in game and test it out. If it freezes the game you likely posted the Tonberry dat in the wrong position of the dat >0<;


This is a sloppy way of doing this, however for a first guide, I believe it should be kept simple so not to discourage you! If it worked, congrats! If it didnt, try again! This same thing can be applied to other effects, that arent necessarily Tonberry attack. For example you could make the FLARE HAMMAR, or even a BAN HAMMAR with one of the text effects, in the end its all up to your imagination!

On the next guide I will try to teach you more in depth details about effect dats and how to take out parts of an effect you dont want. As always, any questions you have you can feel free to post here or PM me on FFXIDats! Thanks for reading and be sure to tell us about your success/failure! I'm interested in seeing how you guys do! Seeya!

-Mooshywooshy

Hex, as I know it.

Hello from Mooshywooshy@FFXIDats! I guess this is the first post in this co-op blog between Pixelpop@FFXIdats and myself! We made the idea for this blog to post our findings in hex and whatnot, but eventually we became too engrossed in the game and almost forgot about it! Pixel made this blog design, its really awesome isnt it? I am represented by the gargoyle, and he is that freakish penguin duck!

But lately I have been getting back into the groove of things (Kupowers gone, boring again) and I have got a few requests that I would like to talk about and what their current status is.

In this post I will talk about:
1)What happened to the Erniegang sword?
2)Tachi: Yukikaze remake?
3)How can I make it so weapons do not disappear when I cast spells?
4)Current Projects/Thoughts


1) Ok so First Off the Erniegang. This was created from the Elvaan M NPC Only weaponskill "Cruel Riposte". When I first figured out how to start/kill effects through schedules, I really wanted to show people what was possible. Glowing weapons was always a thing high on my priority list of "What to figure out next", so this was kinda a big thing for me.
The thing about glowing weapons is that effects can not be 'weighted' (wont follow) weapons themselves. I guess effects run on a different weight system, so it can only be put on both hands, both eyes, head, body, and some variations in position on the hands. So in order to have glowing weapons it was essential that I figure out how to Start and Kill effects.

The problems with these swords and the reason I never released them is actually a few things. I am not an end game person (not because I dont want to be, just never been to 75) but after playing Samurai I know there is a lot of equipment switching going on mid-battle. When equipment is changed, effects stop. So essentially when you switch equipment to weaponskill, the effect will go away, and when you blink back to normal, you will just have a normal sword.

This could in theory be fixed by triggering the effects when the weapon is pulled out AND when the weapon is used to attack, thus it will trigger the effect every time you swing, however I do not know if prolonged battles with constant hitting will cause the effect to stack over and over on itself until it lags you into oblivion. I will be testing this in the near future however because there have been some requests to see this dat coming back to life.

Another problem I had with it, is making it work with the sub-hand. If I release it, of course it needs a sub-hand counterpart. But as I said before, weighting the effects to a weapon is not possible, and in fact the main&sub placements do not have matching positions. Thus the effects of the sub-hand will start lower down on the sword than on the main hand. It may not be noticeable or delay-worthy to some people, but for me it bugs me to no end. Also the weighting for Galka and Elvaan M is equal, however I will need to make even more effects for it to work with other races.


Above is a picture of an Alexander move on Galka. As you can see all the lightning takes place in front of his hand on the 'main' sword weight.


This one shows the same exact effect working on Mithra. Just by looking at it you can tell what is main sword for one race, is not for another. Thus, to truly finish Erniegang, a few more things need to be made.



2) Ok for Tachi:Yukikaze I would like to release this as it does work fine in game, however I do find that it crashes the game in Campaign if there is a spam of people. I don't know if this is just my computer or what, but if you would like to test it for me on your super computer of doom, send me a PM on FFXIDats. That's really the only reason why I havent released it.

3) This one I just recently figured out when working with dances. I noticed that dancing had 2 schedules inside of it called "Hide" and "Show". These had no visible effects so I deduced they must be.. hiding and showing something. Taking them out and testing in game, sure enough it did not hide my weapons while dancing. (Would work great with my dancer fans amirite?!) So I checked in 0.DAT for the same hex and found it in hwmg which I recognized from editing casting effects. Changing this did in fact make it so the weapons wouldn't disappear, however tarutarus weapons flip upside down, so its kinda odd.


It can be done on a race to race basis, but doing an edit of 0.dat will make it quick and easy for all races. I will write about HOW to do this in my next entry (probably).

4) Lastly what I'm currently working on. Although I have been busy fishing in the game, I have been working on a couple things. Recently I released 2 different 'dance' packs.


This one changes Hume M dances into Blue mage spells. It was on request, was kinda a weird request, but you know... yeah, you know.


This one branched off of my dance effects that some of you may have seen in one of my random mishmash videos. Basically it still shows the effects of dances, however it does not trigger a motion, thus you can continue to run away from a monster/whatever you do, saves a lot of time.

Anyways, I have been working more with glows and whatnot, hopefully I will have more interesting things to post about here soon. I am still looking for a way to get transparency to work, so hopefully sometime I can figure that out.

I have been promising a hex guide for a long time now, and so I will likely start that guide here in a couple of posts. Then after it is complete I will condense it and post it on FFXIDats. I will do my best to make it as easy as possible. Before starting on hex I knew nothing about it, so don't think that you have to be some kind of rocket scientist in order to figure it out, just have to keep at it and read what I say carefully.

I'll try to give examples so you can follow along instead of just 'explaining'.

Anyways, thanks for reading (If you actually read the whole thing o. O) I will try to get Pixel to post whatever he wants to post soon. The first post is always the longest I suppose! Seeya soon!

-Mooshy