Chapter 29: Sound Room Editing

There is a nightmare module that can edit the songs in the sound room. Open that up in Nightmare and we’ll get started.

This is going to be a very quick chapter. The song is which song plays in that entry. The song length is for when you use random mode and there is a sort of music player. It has a time limit of sorts to play the song, and it needs to know how long the song is. As mentioned, 0x3B is about 1 second. 0x3B = 59 in decimal. What we have to do is take how many seconds our song is (let’s say it’s 74 seconds) and multiply it by 59. 74x59 = 4,366. In hex that is 110E (hint: I’m not a genius, I just use a calc by Microsoft). If I’m right about how this works, then that’s what you put for the time.

The ASM pointer is something used for the songs toward the end—possibly something to do with unlocking the songs without actually listening to them (IIRC they require some Mario bonus disk thing). It’s nothing to worry about.

The text pointer is just the index for the text. You can edit the song name in FEditor Adv by just typing in said text ID/pointer/index/whatever you want to call it.

Chapter done!

Chapter 30: Chapter Unit Editing with Nightmare

There are two main ways to edit units. The first way is to use Nightmare. The second is using the Event Assembler. The latter is mainly for people who want to use custom events or want to add more units. I’m going to cover the first way here in this chapter.

To start, in unit data, you will find some empty slots. Don’t edit these—they are separators. The point of them is to separate different groups of units. Allies and enemies of normal/hard mode are separated, as are “event units”—units that only appear in events (NPCs and the like)—and reinforcement units (units that show up mid-chapter as opposed to the beginning).

The character and class are obvious. The character’s leader just specifies who is the boss/leader of that allegiance of units. Not really important.

The starting level is kinda obvious too. Note that there are two options for each level/allegiance though—the 2^nd one is the autolevel feature which adds stats based off of ‘automatic level-ups’. It’s mainly used for enemies so that a level 1 enemy doesn’t have the same stats as a level 10 enemy, even if they use the same character data.

The loading coordinates is where they start on the map. They will then move to the starting X-coordinates. Sometimes this can just be the same, other times (during cutscenes) you may want to actually have them move to wherever they are gonna be stationed. Note that coordinates start from the top left (0,0) and X is to the right while Y is to the left. If you are using a custom map, it is sometimes useful to use Mappy to figure out which tile is what co-ordinate.

There are only 4 spots for items, unfortunately. It’s kinda obvious what to do here as well.

AI is sort of tricky, if only a little. AI stands for ‘Artificial Intelligence’ IIRC. There are 3 main AIs I use. 00000000 – default attack anything. 00030900 – attack anything within range. 03030920 – attack only if a unit can be attacked without moving. The first is for main enemies, the second is for guarding enemies, and the third is for bosses who guard a gate or throne or something. There are also dropdown lists that have some other options though, so you’re free to play around with those things.

Notes on How the Game Loads Units:

Once a unit is marked as an ally and you play as them for a chapter, their data is in the save data, so all you need to do to is load their character with their character #. Everything else is insignificant (allies don’t use AI). However, if that unit is killed, that’s a different thing—you have to reload their data again, from ‘scratch’.

Battle preps work similarly, however, if a unit is killed OR their allegiance is changed, they will no longer be considered an ally and will not show up in battle preps. How many units are allowed in battle preps is dependent on how many characters you add. It doesn’t matter which characters you add or where you add them because the player gets to choose which characters he/she wants to use in the battle as well as reposition them. However, if you put in 10 character slots, that means the player can only choose 10 characters, and the characters can only be at the spots that you designated with the starting co-ordinates.

Also, units will NOT show up in battle preps unless they joined the chapter BEFORE. That means you can’t just add a new unit to the unit data and expect them to show up in the battle preps. They have to A) be secretly loaded the chapter before at the end cutscene, so the game recognizes they are a part of the ally team, or B) loaded separately from the battle preps through events. This is important-just adding a new unit to the unit data when battle preps is on doesn’t do anything. As said, if battle preps are off, that’s different.

Chapter unit editing in Nightmare can get tedious and may sometimes be limiting or confusing, but that’s Nightmare and hacking in general for you. If you don’t like it, learn how to use the Event Assembler! :P