Chapter 31: Death Quotes

This will not teach how to edit death quote text. Death quote text works the same as other text (even though I haven’t actually taught how to edit text yet). This just edits the stuff in the Nightmare modules.

We’ll start with death quote editor part 1-2. If I’m right, this is Lyn’s mode death quotes and… something else. Part 2 starts after the 0x00 entry near the middle. It *probably* should be 2 different modules, except the data is right next to each other, so it’s kind of confusing.

Anyhow, character and chapter is obvious-use 0x43 for most characters unless they have a special death quote in a specific chapter (in which case specify the chapter, of course).

The pointer to the death event is a pointer to a very short event that usually just contains a text event. For example, if you go to CC0808 in a hex editor (for Lyn’s death quote, the first entry) you’ll see “0D000000 A8070000 09000000 0A000000 00000000”.

The 0D part is the command for normal text. A807 is the text pointer, but reversed due to little endian, so it’s actually 7A8. This is what you go to in FEditor Adv to edit her death quote text. The ‘09’ command clears the text and ‘0A’ ends the event. The 00s are just insignificant nullifiers for the most part (but don’t edit them anyhow). The main part to worry about is the A8070000 since that’s the text pointer/ID/reference (from now on I’m calling it text ID for simplicity’s sake) that you might want to change.

Now, later on, you may want to write your own custom death quote event using the Event Assembler; if you don’t know about this, then don’t worry about it, but if you want to know how, simply do something like this:

ORG 0xD20400

DeathQuoteEvent: *insert events here* ENDA

Then link to the event using the death quote module by updating the pointer in the module (and be sure to add 0x08000000 to the offset or it won’t work).

On a side note, if you’re going to repoint death quotes, note that part 1 and 2 BOTH need to be repointed… so yeah.

[Back to the main topic] The trigger ID is something that will take a bit of learning to understand. It’s like a number that references an event. I call it an event ID. In this case, Lyn’s death quote has event ID 0x65 attached to it. This is important because when event 0x65 is triggered, the game over scene occurs. Yes—if you want a game over scene after the death quote, just give the character a ‘Trigger ID’ of 0x65. As long as the game’s events are coded to react to this death quote, this should work properly.

The Trigger ID can also be used in conjunction with other events though. You could set it to say, 0x0B, and then make an event that happens when 0x0B is triggered. So you could make it so that if you kill a unit, the chapter ends right after… Just like a boss. Yes, bosses typically have a Trigger ID of 0x02 (although their data is in death quote editor part 2, for whatever reason). Similarly Trigger IDs 0x01 and 0x03 are also reserved, so it’s better not to touch 0x01-0x03 and 0x65. Managing them is kinda hard but it’s feasible. I’ll cover more about this in the next chapter.

Anyway, let’s continue to part 2 of the death quote editors. This one is a bit better. It’s the same except it gives us the option to just put a text ID instead of ALWAYS having to have an event. But still, there is an option for an event if you want (if not, it’s 00). The Trigger ID works the same (I will cover more about it in the next chapter).