I haven't posted here in ages! Goodness!
Anyway, I have a lot of catching up to do with FFXIII it looks like, wish I'd been on board with this sooner, as some of these discoveries are really fascinating.. But I digress I fear. Though not directly related to XIII itself, I recently picked up XIII-2 for the PC and have been prodding at it the last couple of days.. I thought given the interest in this thread, and since both games are essentially running on the same engine, why not share some of my findings?
Since it's only been two days, I've only gotten to do a bit of mucking around, but eh..
For those interested in seeing, I made an album of some of the stuff I've been looking into:
http://imgur.com/a/UaYPm
Primarily at the moment, I'm trying to understand how the game handles the party system.. It's really bizarre actually, since it seems like the game handles Mog as a third party member or something..? I haven't come to grips with that one yet, but he seems to be handled as the third PC of your party, and if you remove him you completely lose all access to Mog functions. (Some other weirdness can result from this too..)
Also apparently the entire original XIII cast have full fledged PC profiles for learning magic, equipment, levels, etc.. This isn't exactly news I don't think, as this was a thing I think some save hackers found out on the consoles ages back, but it's interesting because I discovered something different about the PC version.. on the console versions, I found profiles for Lebreau and Gadot, which seemed like nothing more than remnants of the original game, where they were temporary party members.. trying to force them into your party also crashed the game on consoles, unsurprisingly. What's really interesting though is that you CAN add them to your party on the PC version without it causing a crash..! They show up and sort of function even, and strangely enough it looks like they even have mini-portraits in battle! (At least Lebreau did when I tested)
It's worth adding that a few things of what's seen in the album above is just me modifying how the "costume" function of the game works. (Such as Stria and Adult Hope) I noticed it's possible to load virtually any model in the game by passing it off as a "costume", though animations are a messier matter (those are possible too though, with some tweaking).. Still, if we could figure out a proper hard-modding solution, we could probably do a lot of fun things with this game.. |