Modding?

[ṔU̡И͞ISHE̵D ̧S̀И̡AK͏E]

Are these games moddable? I wouldn't mind putting in the soundtrack from Final Fantasy IV Celtic Moon in some parts of the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX2vIjZgxuY

Lovely violin work from Ireland.

[chris100185]

Probably not. Apparently it's just the android/IOS version running on top of an emulator.

[ṔU̡И͞ISHE̵D ̧S̀И̡AK͏E]

Well dammit. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lazy ass coders. C'mon Japan, don't be the stereotypical xenophobic ♥♥♥♥♥ that your ancestors were. We deserve fair and equal treatment as well.

[Aletheia]

BGM are in .akb format. I don't know if a program can read this kind of file (I'm assuming it's for "Authority Knowledge Base"). That's different from FF3 which has BGM in .ogg format, but other data files are AKB.

[Smoker]

I was hoping someone could update these textures.

[Smoker]

FOV / Camera zoom out too.

[Lord Quinton]

can we just mod in a whole new game? maybe run it on the skyrim engine or something? Why do we have to endure 10 year old graphics on a port of a port? Or does squemix think people are stupid enough to think this is a 'new' thing?

[KadMac]

Well, you can actually read the .akb format with Audacity. We can play the songs just fine and of course, we can edit or add music in Audacity. The problem is trying to export it. Exporting in .akb is not an option.

.akb is actually a format that is stored in Square Enix's mobile games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy on Android and iOS. Since this seems to be a port from the mobile versions, that format just carried over.

I've tried looking into what software can be used to create .akb files and it looks like it is associated with Oracle Siebel 8.0. My understanding is that the software from Oracle is a type of Customer Relationship Management program with a Knowledge Base System. Large companies use this to manage their data, customer accounts, and documentation. In using Siebel, it allows administrators to create a database and export it as .akb

If anyone else is familiar with .akb, I am all ears. For now, it seems that getting a hold of this type of software would be difficult and expensive. I tried exporting the songs from Audacity to a .ogg, .wav, and .mp3 to see if the game would pick up on these types. I even renamed them to be the same as the .akb file but of course, it didn't work.

So that is where we are at. It is pretty difficult to get any modding done with these formats. It sucks because I wish Square just left the music in .ogg like Final Fantasy 3. I really dislike the DS type music in this version of FF4. I much rather add my own Overclocked Remixes or even the SNES music versions.

[2ndsights]

Smoker님이 먼저 게시:

I was hoping someone could update these textures.

Amen. Unfortunately I think most of the palettes and textures are behind ncap.lz files which I can't for the life of me open. I'd be in a massive amount of debt to anyone that could extract these for me, I'd love to sit down and hand-paint some of them.

[Fli]

Mr. Brown님이 먼저 게시:

Well dammit. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lazy ass coders. C'mon Japan, don't be the stereotypical xenophobic ♥♥♥♥♥ that your ancestors were. We deserve fair and equal treatment as well.

What? Japanese players can't mod their game either.

[Wesker]

chris100185님이 먼저 게시:

Probably not. Apparently it's just the android/IOS version running on top of an emulator.

If that's so, then it shouldn't be very complicated to get the Japanese voices from the Japanese Android/iOS version and making them work in this version.

[KadMac]

Yeah, it seems like it should be easy but I've been running into issues. I've looked over the files in the FF4 iOS app and I thought I found the sound and language files. I believe I located the Japanese voice files but when I tried to see if it would work in the PC version, the game crashed. I also renamed the Japanese files to be named exactly as the english version.

I then tried reviewing some of the background music in my FF6 iOS app which contain the .akb file type. I copied that over to the FF4 PC folder and I was able to get it to work. The FF6 intro music was playing successfully on the FF4 PC title screen. So, not sure where I am going wrong with the Japanese voice files.

[KadMac]

By the way, speaking of the .akb file type...

FF6 mobile app is filled with them. So if Square Enix ever ports that to PC, we will be running into the same issues for that game in trying to mod the music or sound.

[mLegion]

check the http://steamcommunity.com/app/312750/discussions/0/613936673336049726/?tscn=1411253388 music modding thread, replacing the music even with other ogg files works just fine.

For the voices try comparing the 204 byte AKB header of the japanese and english versions, are they identical? If not try copying the english header over the japanese voice files and see if it still crashes.

[Xyphis]

I'm sorry for reviving this old thread and probably not following the OP's topic fully, but I have looked into the various filetypes that are in the EXTRACTED_DATA\files folder, and found that many of them are inhabited from the original NDS version of this game. I found a NDS rom hacking program called 'Tinke' allows me to decompress NDS Roms and most of those pesky LZ files, but not all all of them. From there I looked into various forums which, to my surprise, had documented a lot of this stuff for the sake of NDS rom hacking.

This far, this is what I have found:

• NANR may be Nintendo Animation Resource
  
• NCER may be Nintendo CEII Resource
  
• LZ is a file compression that is used in NDS games. May be LZSS or LZ77, though some of these files appear to use neither algorithms.
  
• NCGR can be opened as .PNG files
  
• NCAP, NAMP , NMDP, NTXP I don't know about these yet, But they are also in the NDS rom.

I'm sure many of these files have changes to accommodate for higher res rendering (less sloppy textures) and no second screen, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the MD5s for some files match those of the iOS/Android port.

Resources

Here is the directory tree form the NDS version of the game if anyone wants to compare.
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5acc86b80cda2e3f178a

And here is some documentation on various DS specific file formats:
http://www.romhacking.net/documents/%5B469%5Dnds_formats.htm#NANR

[Stalker ZHS]

Could someone please post a download link to these mods when or if they get finished?