Destiny of an Editor
This is a project I started over at Lord Yuan Shu’s forums.
Destiny of an Emperor has long been among my favorite NES games. Once I even thought of changing around officer stats, I knew I wanted to give making an editor a try. The most complicated thing it allows is changing lengths of officer names (since this requires updating pointers).
For right now, Destiny of an Editor is in beta test. You can download beta 0.94 here, but I make no guarantees about how well it will work. It has been tested pretty thoroughly, and so should be stable. You’ll need the .NET framework to use it.
Changelog (since 0.90)
0.94
-Added color previews of sprites and portraits
-Fixed manual entry of portrait hex
0.93
-Added toggle for an officer’s immunity to An Sha
-Added toggle for an officer’s inability to be billeted
0.91
-Added ability to sort by officer names or appearance order in ROM
-Added hex of officer (used in battle references, etc)
-Switched portrait values to comboboxes; now no reload is necessary to see the new portrait (customizing portraits is MUCH easier)
-Added About message box
-General UI tweaks (size, placement)
-Better handling of a “reload” (loading a rom without restarting the app)
Also, a newer project, Destiny of a Text Editor, has been in progress over the course of the last several months.
Here is the latest release, 0.04. Though it’s relatively stable (James has been using it a considerable amount) it is still unrefined.
As always, save early and often, and be sure to back-up things too.
Following are a few screenshots of the officer editor and some test results.
Cao Cao is a character who you never got to see except in sprite form. I generated this portrait from a few of the generic-looking strategists.
Likewise, his followers here are the generals who likely followed him against the Yellow Turban rebellion. This test involved changing a few stats around here and there, and names, but did not change any name lengths.
For those interested in a more complex Wei mod, James is currently working on one.
Above: The editor in action. The list of officers to the left sorts; a color sprite and portrait preview feature was added more recently thanks to a considerable amount of work on the part of James, who has also created the most complex set of changes to DOAE yet – involving manual text tweaks (something too ambitious for me), pointer updates, and semi-historical officer locations and stats.
The weirdest issue I ran into was probably the set of pointers for the townspeople. By updating officer info and pointers, but not updating townsperson pointers, I ended up with some very odd-looking sprites – in one case, Song Yong and Song Ren turned invisible.
In another case, everyone in town turned into a rather bizarre red scholar-type sprite. Kind of creepy.
That’s it for now. Later on, this page may become a repository for arcane DOAE hacking knowledge. For now, if you want that, you’ll have to stop by LYS’ forum.