CHRONO CROSS MODEL PROJECT THREAD

[HyperGeek]

Slightly better video up.  This one was recording on my desktop, so there's sound and it's faster.  I also threw in Dario's element casting animation, which I managed to forget in the last one.  Since I recorded that one, I've fixed the problem with the background and menus being destroyed.  Turns out that I slipped up when I was putting together Dario's texture header.  Whoops.

Naturally, nothing's ever TOO easy.  Using Dario with anyone else in the party can have some...interesting results: (Click for larger image.)



Well, heck, I'D wear a cape with Kid's face on it!

[utunnels]

Hehe, cool cape anyway.

[FaustWolf]

Oh, shit. I wonder if Dario's dual texture is at fault; maybe there isn't enough space allocated in VRAM for Dario's texture and the textures of other party members, causing overlap.

However, the ability of Sprigg to doppelgang into Dario without a hitch goes against that logic, so hopefully we'll get this figured out.

Once I do some things to help out the Crimson Echoes team, I'll take a look at this stuff with you Hyper.

[HyperGeek]

I figured it had to be the dual texture taking up too much memory and being overwritten that was causing it.  Maybe doppelgang loads the texture differently somehow?  I don't know how much sense THAT would make, but it's all I can come up with.

[FaustWolf]

What we'll do, then, is make VRAM dumps when Dario is manually inserted through repointering and when he's in the party due to doppelganging. That will shed some serious light on the situation.

[HyperGeek]

Unfortunately, I'm not much good for VRAM dumps at this point.  I've been doing all my modifications in 2048 byte/sector isos, and I can't get anything but pSX to run them.  ePSXe and PCSX (as well as the debugger based on it) seem to choke and die even if I mount the iso on a virtual drive.  They run the 2352 byte/sector dump I made just fine, but I haven't been tinkering with that one. 

Naturally, if there's a way to make pSX cough up the VRAM, I've never managed to find it.  I hate to be unhelpful, but there's not a lot I can do right now.  I'll keep fiddling with it and see if I can make anything happen, but I can't do much more than hex edit and run the game for the moment.

[FaustWolf]

Yup yup, you can cough up VRAM dumps in pSX! Just do the following:

*Debug > Monitor > r3000
*Debug > Break (to freeze the game's processes at the point you want stuff to stop moving in memory)
*GPU > Save VRAM

Voila!

There's a program called PVV3 made by my favorite German, Creaothceann over at Romhacking.net, that's the downright best PSX VRAM viewing utility out there. I think it's still in some kind of non-public beta phase, so I'll have to dig up the download link Creaothceann gave me in some long-forgotten Romhacking.net thread sometime. For now, if you can post zipped VRAM files, I'd be more than happy to take a look at them.

[utunnels]

Or you can hack a savestate directly.
Just rename the save file with a .zip extension and unzip it.
You don't have to re-compress since the emulators support un-compressed format.

About the offsets:
pcsx ram 9020 vram 2996c0
epsxe ram 1ba vram 2733df

[HyperGeek]

utunnels, I actually tried that, but it seems that pSX's savestates don't decompress nicely like ePSXe's and PCSX's do.  It would be the frustrating emulator that works for me, wouldn't it?

Faust, I've attached a zip with a pair of VRAM dumps in it, one with Dario alone and one with Kid in the party.  I don't have a save far enough along to even have Sprigg at this point, so I'm going to go hunting around online and see what I can dig up.  What I've got right now should at least verify or discredit the theory that Dario's texture is taking up space that's normally used for the second party member's.

Come to think of it, is there a trick to making Dario doppelgang-able?  He doesn't show up on any of the lists I've looked at, although it's possible they're incomplete.

[utunnels]

It seems Dario model uses more than just a 256x256 texture. His cape and sword takes another texture, and I believe each normal PC uses only a 256x256 texture area and their weapons are counted separately
So when another PC's texture is loaded, it will override Dario's.
 


Sorry, it is 128*256 _ _

[FaustWolf]

Thanks Hyper. Man, this is like the overlap we have in Chrono Trigger when we try to insert a Size 1 character sprite into the party.

It'll be interesting to see how Doppelganged Dario is handled though. I'll see if I can make a VRAM dump of that today.

[FaustWolf]

Well, son of a --

Get a load of these everybody. Four tests, with the following specs:

Test 1: Dario doppelganged, third party slot


Test 2: Dario doppelganged, second party slot


Test 3: Two texture enemy reference


Test 4: Two texture enemy reference with Dario doppelganged


Looks like there's room for up to five full 128x256 textures in VRAM. The first three slots are allocated to the player's party, the last two to the enemy party. When Dario is placed in the third party slot, his texture erases the enemy's texture. When he's placed elsewhere in the party, his cape annihilates a team member's texture.

I think there's hope here -- as I illustrate in the fourth test pic, there may be a sixth texture slot that can be written to in battle, with some tweaking to whatever code tells the game engine where to read and write in VRAM. In Test 3 I didn't show it, but the Dream Devourer's texture overwrote some overworld stuff in VRAM. If the sixth slot is also overworld or otherwise non-battle stuff, it should be possible to move the read/write position for enemy textures over one slot, making four for the party and two for the enemy. The upshot is, it would probably be impossible to have more than one dual texture character in the player's party at any time once the game code were altered. For playable Dario, this type of alteration to the game code will be necessary unless it's just Dario on a solo mission (or possibly with one other character, haven't tested that yet).

Here's the actual VRAM dumps if anyone wants to examine them firsthand.

[utunnels]

Is Dario doppelgangable? Or you just hacked the skill?

I think there's hope here -- as I illustrate in the fourth test pic, there may be a sixth texture slot that can be written to in battle, with some tweaking to whatever code tells the game engine where to read and write in VRAM. In Test 3 I didn't show it, but the Dream Devourer's texture overwrote some overworld stuff in VRAM. If the sixth slot is also overworld or otherwise non-battle stuff, it should be possible to move the read/write position for enemy textures over one slot, making four for the party and two for the enemy. The upshot is, it would probably be impossible to have more than one dual texture character in the player's party at any time once the game code were altered. For playable Dario, this type of alteration to the game code will be necessary unless it's just Dario on a solo mission (or possibly with one other character, haven't tested that yet).

If there's any hope, the 6th slot is in the same line as the others (y<256).
The areas below that are used for battle stuff:

Left most: battle field texture
middle: the swirling effect buffer when entering the battle field
right most: font/dialogue/hit gfx, althought not all of them are used, but it is hard to hack out a usable area.

[FaustWolf]

Yeah, you can only doppel Dario with GameShark codes.

[utunnels]

Are those textures used by Doppelgang stored in memory?