First off, I’d like to start by saying I’ve asked this question to Serenes Forest, and have asked a few people directly with no luck. I have also recently posted this to Reddit as well.
tl;dr at the bottom.
Hi, I have struggled with a certain problem with hacking Radiant Dawn, which is changing the models of weapons in battle.
Here is essentially what I posted on Serenes Forest forever ago:
I have been hacking Radiant Dawn recently, and have understood editing weapon/unit stats and text in general. However I have been having trouble editing the animation for weapons in battle. My exact problem is that essentially I want to make Leonardo’s bow into a spear. However, the weapon keeps the animation of the original weapon even if you switch it, i.e. changing Ragnell into an axe and giving it the Urvan icon, it still looks like Ragnell in battle, but has Ike’s “axe” model on the map.
I have tried a few things as follows: In FE10Data.cms, that file really only affects the stats of a weapon, I basically know what each pointer and byte does in the item stats, as explained in the FE10 hacking notes. The only thing that affects the model of the weapon in any way is the ID, the first 4 bytes of the weapon. For example, changing Ragnell’s ID into Caladbolg’s ID removes Ragnell from Ike’s inventory and replaces Caladbolg in the convoy. Its name is still Ragnell, it’s still Ike only, and everything else, however the weapon model in battle is Caladbolg. However, this replaces a weapon which I do not want to do.
Since I figured that the Data file did not have to do with weapon animations, I went to FE10Battle.cms and looked there. I sort of have an idea of how this is broken down (as its not in the FE10 notes I believe), which I can post if necessary, but changing the pointers there did not really do anything. The only change that worked was essentially changing the EID pointer of a weapon, which changes the “hit” effect when hitting an enemy.
Then I just decided to look through the rest of the game on WiiScrubber, and found toward the end files labelled under “xwp.” This seemed to have every weapon in the game, including ones not used. I tried replacing Urvan with the Ragnell file to see if that would change the model, but instead just caused it to crash only when using it with animations on.
In short, I’ve tried all I know and don’t know what else to try. I feel like changing the model of a weapon in battle should be easy. I understand pointers/offsets/etc in HxD and understand how to use WiiScrubber to extract and replace, so feel free to explain how in any way.
tl;dr I have tried everything I can think of trying via editing in a hex editor and WiiScrubber, but can not figure out how to change weapon models (besides one method that deletes the replaced weapon from the game) and am not sure where to go from here. I am familiar with terms such as pointers and offsets as well, so fell free to use any lingo you would like.
I am hoping that anyone here is able to help, as any bit of info is really appreciated!! If you could help in literally any way, or point to me to someone who might be able to help in different media (reddit, discord, serenes, twitter, email, are easy for me), it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading! Again, literally any info could be helpful to me!