Blast from the past

I dug out the FEIDIAN codebase this week and am working on optimizing the code. So far, I’ve reduced the size from 210KB to 100KB, but I’ve been stuck on the custom tile definitions. That code is a total mess, and I really don’t understand what I was thinking when I wrote it.

Maybe with some luck, I’ll find a way to clean it up. Everything else is looking good, and I hope to release version 0.96 in the next few weeks. I’d like to put out a version 1.0 this year and finally put the codebase to rest.

This version should have an EXE version, so you won’t need a local PHP installation anymore.

Update to FEIDIAN

I updated FEIDIAN, and this one actually matters.

Remember the bug MadMalkav turned up in v0.8b that caused bitmaps to corrupt when using his Final Fantasy Tactics tile definition? We couldn’t figure out why, so I told him to just dump 16 columns since that always works. I also added a FORCE_PROPER_WIDTH variable that apparently did absolutely nothing.

Today when Nightwolve was trying to dump 15 columns of 8×8 from Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys, the same thing happened again. After scratching my head for an hour I finally figured out what was wrong — the arse who wrote the bitmap document I’ve been following for all these years failed to mention all data has to be in DWORDs, not BYTEs.

It took 10 extra lines in every bitmap read or write instance, but now FEIDIAN has zero problems regardless of how many columns you’re using or what size the tiles are. It will always properly pad everything so it ends up in DWORDs. I’d like to give a friendly finger to whoever wrote that s–tty format spec for all the trouble it’s caused me.

You suck.

Another infection

While I could be referring to the cough I woke up with today, I’m not.

I updated FEIDIAN to version 0.89 today. The update was made after a very handy idea that popped up while helping Henaki learn how to use it. Palettes.

Since custom tiles were introduced in 0.60, the only way to change your colours has been to edit the tile definition, which could be really annoying. Now FEIDIAN can import colour palettes from Tile Layer Pro by SnowBro. I don’t know if Tile Molester, his new project, handles palettes the same way, but if it does, maybe those would work too.

This means you can now view sprites in Tile Layer Pro, drag around the bars to get colours you like, then zap those out to a .TPL file. This can then be used to specify colours for FEIDIAN to use.

Hope this helps some people out. I know this has been a major annoyance with FEIDIAN thus far.

FEIDIAN has moved

FEIDIAN has been relocated to SourceForge.

Edit: Nope, it’s back here.

FEIDIAN is a cooler acronym, right?

I spent all day working on FEIDIAN. SARS has been renamed because byuu wanted to keep it open for our SNES tool, besides, I came up with a better acronym for FEIDIAN.

Massive optimizations have been done, even the most mangled custom tile definitions rarely take more than 3 seconds to dump now.

Yes, I know that’s slower than C, but this doesn’t require a massive development environment and complex coding knowledge to make your own definitions.

A few people have asked me why I’m working on this, and what exactly it could be useful for. I think this screenshot says everything:

It can dump fonts and cause death

I fixed a very important feature in SARS today, namely the ability to dump non-*8 width fonts. It now correctly dumps true 12×12, 12×18, 7×8 and all other monochrome bitplane data.

For the sake of speed, the multiple of 8 width and non-multiple routines are separate, because it would be an unnecessary hit to speed of *8 width fonts to force them to bit-based reading.

I still need to finish the reinsertion routine before a new release. I’m also considering an extension format that would allow you to define tiles by a pattern of As Bs Cs and Ds to show the bit arrangement of the tile. This could be handy for dumping odd tile formats like in Der Langrisser.

In other news, I caught a translation error in one of The Crest of Gaia’s Easter Eggs. It’s fixed now. Work on the instruction manual is about 20 percent done and going smooth, but tedious. One problem is the game’s credits–it has none.

What little is known of the NCS staff is found in one of the Easter Eggs. No credit to what they did, or even full names. If anyone has ideas on where I can get the credits, I’d really like to add them to the instruction manual.

ROM hacking totally fails to evolve

I hate how much of a pain using any tile editor is. But more than poor function, I hate how none let me edit anything but 8×8 tiles.

I haven’t seen an 8×8 only game since the NES days, and visualizing an 8×16 or 16×16 sprawled across many tiles is too complicated for my weak mind to handle.

As a solution, I have infected my computer with SARS.

SARS is nice, because unlike every other tool I’ve seen, it allows me to painlessly rip. The can be edited in Photoshop, then injected back into the game. The tarball includes a samples.txt, which has some command strings to dump the fonts from the FM-TOWNS and 68k BIOS files, Heroine Anthem and some other junk.

I really don’t care if you use it or not, but don’t email me about it. I may or may not add 2 and 4 bitplane support in the future–it depends on if I work on something that requires it.