AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Agrajag » Thu May 10, 2012 7:17 am

ZethN64 wrote:Now for supplemental data are you talking about adding like all the missions, clothing, shops, Weapons, etc?
I know it would be cool to play through some of the PSP2 levels/missions like Ohtori Castle, Crodog, El-Bals Mountain, Seabed relics, etc.
Image
(And now you know what I've been doing the past few days. Still needs a bit of work, a few don't work quite right, and the effect list is hardcoded so I need to change that.)

ZethN64 wrote:And has any NPC's from PSP2 been found in the Jap PSU data?

They have not added any new NPCs. It may be possible to create them (using the new clothing, hairstyles, and faces), but it would be a bit awkward since partner characters ignore things like character height. For the time being, I have no plans to do this (pending change, depending on a few other things).

Rikku wrote:Doesn't Viv already have her own partner card and everything? :l
Viv(-ian in the offline list, -ienne online and in PSP1/2/i) is among a rather large list of characters who technically have partner cards, but they're blank.

She's also in the group that's got the wrong appearance. The standard list of card-able partner characters is as follows.
KEY:
+ Damaged card
# Blank card
& Wrong character

Ethan Waber +
Hyuga Ryght
Karen Erra
Leogini Berafort
Lucaim Nav
Maya Shidow
Tonnio Rhima
Lou
Mirei Mikuna & (Hatless Lou)
Hiru Vol
No Vol
Do Vol
Liina Sukaya
Alfort Tylor
Obel Dallgun
Ethan Waber +
Lumia Waber (civilian) +
Remlia Norphe
Clamp Maniel #
Kanal Tomrain #
Mina #
Hal
Fulyen Curtz (no helmet) #
Karen Erra (maiden)
"Mirei Mikuna" (Karen) #
"Obel" (from e3ch4) #& (beat-up CAST from e3ch1--see note at end)
Maira Klein #
Orson Waber
Fulyen Curtz (damaged) #
Bruce Boyde
Ethan Waber (rogue)
"Vivian" #& (Armed Servant (Taguba))
Helga Neumann #& (Armed Servant (Ozuna))
Hakana Kutanami #
Liche Baratse #
Howzer
Rutsu
Lumia Waber (Guardian)
Laia Martinez (President)

A note about "Obel": The beat-up CAST in e3ch1 ("Despair and Hope" ohi) is using a standard character appearance, see here (couldn't find a screenshot real quick). On the other hand, Obel looks like this; notice the scuff marks and the broken helmet. Not sure why they elected to not use that version, unless they were worried about it being too graphic or something.

Hakana Kutanami and Liche Baratse are two different arbitrary characters from episode 2 ("Tyle", whose hideout you raid in e2ch2/Desert's End, and "Taams Mushrow, the head of the GRM facility in e2ch7/Rescuing Hyuga). Neither is really named right, but they're not really notable characters anyway, so they avoided a & tag.

I fully intend to flesh out or replace several of those characters, heh heh heh. Fortunately there's a way to change how characters look for only certain missions, so there's a lot of flexibility with the characters that never fight alongside you.
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Agrajag » Sun May 13, 2012 2:10 am

Double-posting (sinful!). There's been a bit of a breakthrough.

It's possible to coerce a post-supplement online client to behave like an offline client. Don't worry, I've disabled the "do you have a valid account" check, too.

What does this mean for the end user?
The final download's going to be ~50mb smaller. I still plan to isolate the weapon and character appearance data from those used by the online game, purely so that Sega won't patch the game a week later and break everything while I'm not looking (add a new sword, all the 3rd update weapons stop working; add a new male top, most appearance data will crash the game), so it's going to be rather hefty, regardless.


What does it mean for me?
The bad: all of the .exe work I've done so far got invalidated (snif). A few bugs have cropped up, primarily around new features ("lock item" took its name from the server and is therefore blank; the vision phone is totally broken).
The good: a lot of what I've been trying to accomplish is unnecessary anyway. Want the new PAs? Just add them to the list, they'll function perfectly (compare to before, where activating a switch with twin sabers equipped would make you do the second Blade Destruction animation). Broken weapon animations (believe me, there were a _lot_ of these)? Not a problem!

This also means various things I had no idea how to accomplish are done already. You can use page up/page down to scroll through menus. Elemental-colored non-photon weapons (see: Ambicion) are properly colored. The cape-style RCSMs are located properly. Several formerly-crashing pieces of clothing work properly.

Will this fix party flags? Probably not, sigh. Makes adapting boss/story/event/etc missions for offline annoying.
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Macman » Sun May 13, 2012 4:37 am

Agrajag wrote:I still plan to isolate the weapon and character appearance data from those used by the online game, purely so that Sega won't patch the game a week later and break everything while I'm not looking (add a new sword, all the 3rd update weapons stop working; add a new male top, most appearance data will crash the game), so it's going to be rather hefty, regardless.

Wait wait wait. Is this for the JP PSU client? I only have the US one...
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Agrajag » Sun May 13, 2012 4:57 am

It'll work on either one, everyone will have to download most of the required data anyway (on unique filenames; I won't be interfering with your standard install), just to prevent that particular situation.

Stock JP files that aren't likely to be deprecated will be in a separate download, so the people who have an up-to-date install won't need to redownload. That'll be the new maps, music, and probably a few other things that I don't remember.

The goal is that, regardless of which version you may start with, you'll be able to play the same. (Unfortunately, French/German speakers will still be using an English release, as I can't speak either language and the logged quests are as far as I know only in english.)
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Evan » Sun May 13, 2012 3:52 pm

will you be remaking the drop tables for the new weapons or will they be as they are online
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Mewn » Mon May 14, 2012 2:27 pm

Evan wrote:will you be remaking the drop tables for the new weapons or will they be as they are online

Drop tables will be redone. I don't think this has been looked into much yet (unless Agra or others have done some thinking) but I think I can fairly confidently state that there will be a number of changes from online. Particularly stuff like:

* Reduction or removal of weapons dropping as synthesis boards instead of made weapons.
* Redoing heinously bad enemy drop level tiers (LV150-174 in particular, as that is terrible, but they'll all be looked at).
* Rebalancing enemy drops with clear/boss box drops so both are worthwhile.
* Removing the 50 million trade in items that drop in JP PSU currently in favour of a simpler system. I think Photon Drops/Crystals/Spheres + enemy parts?

Agra and co feel free to jump in and correct me if I'm jumping the gun, but I think that's what's loosely been suggested or agreed so far.
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Evan » Wed May 16, 2012 8:00 pm

nice cant wait
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby ZethN64 » Thu May 17, 2012 4:26 pm

Really looking forward to this! :3
Are you going to translate the Japanese text from the supplemental?(like for weapons, clothing, PA's, etc)
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Agrajag » Mon May 21, 2012 3:02 am

Who's that guy who can't focus on one thing at a time?

...Oh, right, it's me. Let's see, in order...

Mewn wrote:Agra and co feel free to jump in and correct me if I'm jumping the gun, but I think that's what's loosely been suggested or agreed so far.

Largely accurate. Part of it depends on what I can coerce the game into doing (if I can get it to randomize drop element/% in a sane way, I can entirely remove dropped weapon boards, for instance).
The current goal (whenever I go through and do the tedious "fill in the drop tables" step) is something resembling the following:
1. Remove most synthmat drops from the area drop lists.
2. Add standard 1-9* (maybe 1-8*, haven't decided) weapons to the area drop tables, manufacturer selected by planet (so if you go to Moatoob, you'll find Tenora stuff; HIVE will be considered "Parum", Rykros and Linear Line will be a random selection of everything). This will open up a huge number of monster drops for more interesting things (as of right now, there are 865 post-supplemental update weapons, and that's not even including the various armor/units/pre-supplemental weapons that don't drop offline).
3. Rework all the monster drops. If you want an example of what I'd like, look at Booma's offline drops (standard drop charts here), just obviously with the higher tiers differentiated. Going to add a couple more drop tiers (probably 125, 150, 175, 190, 200, to let me be lazy about converting the online free missions).

Synthesis would be constrained to changing weapon elements (this is one of those things I _really_ need to test) and certain item combinations (again pending testing; Sange + Yasha + Jou'un Soul + (desired elemental photon) = Sangeyasha, Flowen's Sword + Parasitic Gene:Flow + (desired elemental photon) = Dark Flow, etc). If it works out, they'll all be 100% success rate (because the triple-dice-roll thing was dumb; fail to get the board, fail to synthesize, get shitty percent), so the production values will just be used to determine which PM you get (I'll probably lower the requirements for those, too).

If you haven't played on JP online recently, bosses will have similar drops to what you've experienced--one or two status resist units (mainly just two for the bosses that have two innate SEs--Ragnus and Alteraz are the most obvious-- or two forms), any item that's obviously directly associated with them (quick! guess which boss Brain Spiral belongs to!), and probably a couple other rare weapons/armor/(units?) from a tier above where they were fought, so your level 100 De Ragan will drop a better sword than your level 100 Go Vahra, in addition to the obvious Ragan Head, Dragon Slayer, etc.

A few items will be given by partner characters. Generally these will be ones that are thematically appropriately (e.g Kireek would give out Soul Eater) and preferably are the weaker one in a given set (Soul Eater vs Soul Banisher, maybe a couple of the Ice Swords, etc). I'll do what I can to make the actual partner characters useful, so you won't be gimping yourself by taking them in your party.

ZethN64 wrote:Really looking forward to this! :3
Are you going to translate the Japanese text from the supplemental?(like for weapons, clothing, PA's, etc)

Items and PAs will be translated; item descriptions may be a bit later than everything else, on the grounds "holy shit so tedious". Side story missions (...and by that, I mean Door to Subspace because everything else was available on US) will, as well. Free missions... may or may not be, depending on motivation. Having "Block 1" or "Block 3" still be in Japanese never killed anyone, although I'll still try to get (read: shamelessly steal from psupedia THANKS ESPIOKAOS) the name/description so people know what's going on.


Most recent things done:
* Tracked down where level tiers are handled. There are 10 of them, but consecutive ones are combined for monster/box drops, as follows: 1-9 - 10-24, 25-35 - 36-49, 50-60 - 61-74, 75-85 - 86-100, 100-124 - 125-200.
* Figured out most of the unknown data in weapons. Turns out they do natively support variable attack ranges offline (like how online, Crea Doubles has a longer range than Sweet Death), but none are configured to actually use it. Still two 16-bit values unaccounted for (ATP modifier, DFP modifier, ATA modifier, EVP modifier, ?, ?, MST modifier); I checked, none of them seem to affect technic or RCSM damage, so I'm not sure what they are (STA would be a pain to confirm experimentally, and I didn't notice a difference in terms of critical hit rate on either). It's worth noting that all TCSMs and RCSMs have the first ? value set to 1, so it may be a "fires independently" thing.
* Fixed a few text bugs in the JP client that... none of you would probably know about because as far as I know I'm the first to do this.
* It turns out that the JP client will natively support the new slot unit appearance values if they're added to units (this isn't a surprise, but confirmation is nice). They did something to how extra units in general work (all of a sudden all the B and S rank extra units aren't equippable by humans...?), so more effort is needed.
* A couple of the new PAs: still bugged, annoying. Seems restricted to those that don't attach their hitbox to the weapon (Cyclone Dance, Vivi Dezza, Grand Crusher don't do damage, the ranged hits on Bogga Ranpa don't work), so I'm going to need to do... something. They work online (which, reminder, this is an online client forced into offline mode), so I guess that's a lead on figuring out what's wrong.

Wrote up a small thing explaining how the monster drops work, it's available here, if anyone's interested.


...That was a longer post than I intended, whoops.
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Re: AotI Offline (Unofficial) Expansion: Despair and Hope

Postby Macman » Mon May 21, 2012 8:14 am

Agrajag wrote:...That was a longer post than I intended, whoops.

At least it was informative and interesting. Your progress reports keep my spirits up since PSO2 news has grinded to a halt.
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