N7Kopper wrote: ↑10 Apr 2024, 22:15
Don't worry, your 50 character version has the Voice addresses properly mapped out. Just for future reference.
By the way, thanks for that! I in fact needed to edit some hirelings to inject myself a new party for when I tackle MM7. Well, three of them. I want to keep character 0 and some random beggar peasant recruit I grew a soft spot for. (She just wanted food! XD) And then I got adventurous and decided to go poking in RAM to inject some character bios - hey, I needed to RENAME them too! That went surprisingly well. Did you know that MMMerge pads out the bio section of recruits with a string of Blahs after the terminator (00 in hex)? Your starter party get the "Renowned Hero of Jadame" string overwritten with the MMMerge default bio for custom PCs and then a bunch of null bytes. Best to use a recruit for string length reference lest you clobber data.
Yeah... What I meant was that... at some point when I was giving in CE to a Playable Character, for example, a Portrait 113 and a Voice 113 (unrealistic values in this example of course, but the important part is that they'd be matching), I believe I've seen at least one unmatching setup (if it wasn't just some wrong editing manipulation I did on a running game CE-editing). Though, if you're stating that you had/have means of verification, that all those Portrait<->Voice data are structurally matching already by default, without one having to check one by one, than this is interesting. I don't know how to reach that conclusion, without direct testing though.
Welcome. As a curiosity instance, although it wasn't easy to achieve that, but it wasn't also something too complicated. Some previous introductory Numeric Calculus concepts helped in that regard: better insight into the problematic; but it wouldn't be absolutely required. Basically, I was expecting there would exist a 'counting pattern', for all of the interesting attributes of game's 50 Playable Character addresses. I started with just the 5 Starting Party Playable
Characters, but the 1st on (Character 0) was isolated from the 4 other
Characters (Character 38-41); so by looking at the numerical, integer spacing/gap (translating between hexadecimals and decimals), between certain sample attributes between those 4
Characters, it was possible to reveal a counting pattern (even though there'd be attributes that were counted that I had no idea what would be about, so just counted them while ignoring their purpose completely); then, the biggest question was: is that same revealed pattern, consistent, between Character 0 to Character 38? And beyond, Character 41 to Character 49 (the last one, 50th Character)? It turned out to be true (logically, but yet, fortunately). It was perfectly regular and organized over 50 Playable
Characters (why wouldn't it be, right?). Then, it turned out just to be a question of... replicating the Character editing setup (from the original CE file of just 5 Character, to the new CE file with 50
Characters). At that point, CE was particular good because, there existed an 'automation technique'; so I didn't have to individually specify, for each one of the other 45
Characters, their attributes-addressesses; it was mostly a copy-paste CE Character 'folder' thing (which was already existing in the original CE file); I believe it just copy-pasted the same original Character's template 'folder', into the remaining addresses, and since the whole pattern was apparently regular, filling perfectly the gaps (even though many, many unknown attributes to me are not readily editable from that folder template).
I still hold the addresses'
list in hexadecimals which revealed for me the counting pattern for a single attribute of several
Characters, but it's probably not useful anymore.
Oh yeh... For me as well, nothing beats oldschool 'Role-Playing'...... even in CRPGs. Creating special situations or even special gameplay rules, is often invaluable! Regarding Hirelings, I've been working with a few rules, but they go more into challenges than Role-playing, although one doesn't necessarily invalidate the other. It's like I have one Month in the game my Party will have inevitably to Hire a "Peasant" and keep it for that whole time! Every Day-1 of each Month, the Party must Dismiss all Hirelings (it's a Monthly Job right?), and then find new ones. House Hirelings can only be Hired once! And there is "Hirelings Fame": must achieve Unique Acormage Victories, in order to be able to Hire more costy Hirelings (e.g., must Win 20 Unique Arcomage Victories, just in order to be able to Hire a single 2K Gold Hireling and nothing else... until the end of that current Month).
I cannot use CE to Rename
Characters, nor to change their biographies. If you or anyone here in the forums knows if this is possible and how, that would be great information!
But I know how to cheese that with a combination of mm8che and CE.
Basically:
1) Open game, open mm8che, Edit the Character in mm8che first (change it's Name and Biography; ignore any possible blank Portrait and/or bank/wronged Class), apply;
1a) Meanwhile, avoid looking at that Character's Inventory data (can cause game crash);
1b) Save game, close mm8che, Load game;
2) Open CE (with 'linked' game and proper CE file), Re-Edit that same Character in CE (fix the Portrait and/or Class in the process, in the case they've got corrupted by mm8che! This will happens whenever they are not MM8 instances).
It's certainly not a very funny procedure. But it gets the job done! Would be like to have the ultimate "mmmergeche"
Yes! I knew about the 'BlahBlah!' thing, but I don't really understand what you mean by some other ideas, like terminator 00-hex, etc. Also, 'the Renowned Hero of Jadame' Biography was... displaced to the "clone" (Character 37). We can easily swap that Character (or actually any Character) into Party with... a more primordial technique in mm8che, that doesn't require any CE fixes! as the previous annoying editing cases.
What I'm doing, for Role-playing purposes, is I get innaccessible by default (yet Playable)
Characters (like Character 36 and 37) into my Party at game start (as if they were free
Characters or an extension of the 5 Party Creation
Characters; so 7 instead of 5!), and then place them in the Adventurer's Inn for later. Then, in the future, depending on which sides I've chosen in Jadame's Alliances Main Quests (30-Level Recruits: Lich/Priest of the Light, Champion/Great Wyrm), I still insist on getting the inevitable prohibited ones into my game.
Full House!
) so I used Cheat Engine to set the Birth Year. By the way, Character 0's Birth Year is found at MM8.exe+72347C. Maybe later I'll offset through all character slots and update the address