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Author Topic: My Smash Attacks Notes  (Read 2075 times)
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Illimvra
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« on: March 22, 2012, 10:52:38 AM »


I figured I'd make a post containing my notes/observations/common problems for PSA/OpenSA/Tabuu and have them in one place. A lot of this is obvious stuff, but it would've saved me a lot of time if I had known this beforehand. I figured this would help any newer hackers. Feel free to add to this list.

  • Use OpenSA/Tabuu 3 to edit articles-
    The reason I put this here is that when I was researching about OpenSA/Tabuu and articles, a lot of people still seemed pretty confused.
    A few things:

    OpenSA/Tabuu 3 cannot edit PSA editted files. What you use it for is finding offsets, for instance, if you want to edit the hitbox of an article, find the article first (Sections>Data>Articles) and whenever you select any element, it'll always provide a file offset (if it's not FFFFFFF) you can use a Hex Editor (I use HxD) and edit it. (there's also the alternative of editing in OpenSA/Tabuu but it crashes whenever you save which is a lot slower =/).

    The offsets are sometimes a few lines off in the hex editor (something about Tabuu not including the top few lines of the .pac file), just look in the general vicinity for familiar values and you should find exactly what you're looking for.

    Also, there's a Floating Point Editor that was released a long time ago. Use that for editing the attributes of an article (whenever you open a new file it saves, and if you want to lock in all changed values, you have to change the value and press enter. Also, from what I've observed, most of the values are Single-type values. If you edit them as integers you're giong to get some crazy results, and possibly crashing.)
  • Leaving the ground in a grounded animation-
    If you google around, you'll find people often saying that "Set Air/Ground(10)" or "Set Edge Sticky/08000100" effects this. In every scenario that I've encountered the problem of not being able to leave the ground, it -DOESN'T WORK-.

    Set Air/ground occasionally works, but there's so many unknown  values for it no one ever knows exactly what each one does. A few things I've tried that appear to worked in my scenario (not tested, but it's worth a shot):
    • Using the lower unused subactions.
      I gave a character (The Ice Climbers) a Special Hi that moves them via animation. As you know, their special hi doesn't move them via animation by default, so there were bound to be problems. I copied and pasted all the code I had for their Special Hi and placed it on subaction 4. Worked perfectly for some reason. Also, it worked perfectly when I placed another movement via animation attack on Subaction 3. Not sure why.
    • Using Change subaction... inside of a subaction.
      When I was messing with the Ice Climbers, I noticed that when I used a certain move, my animation didn't move me, but when Nana did it, it moved her.

      Well, the only thing I could think of that was different between Popo and Nana (which is also the reason you can't edit Nana in PSA alone) is that most of Nana's attacks redirect to Popo's (probably also responsible for the slight delay between some of Nana's attacks and Popos, like in their AA combo).

      So, what I did was I used Change Subaction to another unused subaction (didn't necessarily matter if it was a low numbered one as before) and lo and behold it worked perfectly. Not sure if it works in any situation, but again, it is worth a shot.
  • Utilize all of your resources (duh)
    Some people are probably wondering (probably less than I think...) how I made Petey Piranha's Final Smash. To put it simply, I really just looked at a bunch of "button interaction" final smashes and put together what knowledge I had gained from them (plus I used Dantarion's notes on his wiki website and the Big PSA thread on the Smashboards, google it). It doesn't take long to google stuff. :|, plus remember, you can download and study pretty much every character's moveset. If your move is similar to another character's, just download their pac and look at the move

PSA vs. OpenSA vs. Tabuu vs. HxD:

First of all, OpenSA and Tabuu are the SAME THING. Tabuu Alpha 3 = OpenSA 3. And you need a Hex Editor in order to actually edit what you find in OpenSA/Tabuu, so technically this section is "PSA vs. OpenSA/Tabuu + HxD"

The reason I am stating this is because for about 30 minutes I thought they were separate things and I was frantically looking for a download for OpenSA 3. A lot of the notes and documentation you'll find about all this stuff is very vague and open to interpretation. So whenever I add notes, I'll try to be as precise as necessary (not as possible, because come on, you have to help yourself SOMETIMES). It'll save you trial and error.

PSA-
The biggest advantage of PSA is that it is the most polished and straightforward program of them all. It makes things very simple and easy to understand. My only gripe (other than the obvious reasons it's not as great as OpenSA/Tabuu) is that PSA 1.3 can corrupt your files, but it makes everything even -SIMPLER- to understand than before. Scalar's are no longer multiples of 60000 (for instance, if you wanted it to wait one frame in PSA v0.2, you would place in 60000 as the value, not 1, one is 1/60000th of 1/60th of a second if I'm not mistaken). Also, a lot more Attributes are defined (though you could add the attributes to the attributes .txt file manually), and the Attributes are straight floating point value (you don't have to be afraid of how much you're changing the values anymore).

The obvious disadvantage of PSA is that it can't view nearly as much as OpenSA (a majority of the hidden offsets have "invalid event lists" and can't even be accessed.

OpenSA/Tabuu-

OpenSA/Tabuu is great in that you can edit practically anything with enough exploring and testing. The disadvantage is it isn't nearly as polished as PSA, and it has a lot of bugs (And it crashes a lot). Editing hardly works, and saving is just as bad.)

It's good for finding File Offsets though. Once you have the file offset just edit what you want changed in a hex editor (first use Goto to go to the line, CTRL+G, then find what you're trying to change), save, and voila, you can do anything your little heart desires..)

Thanks for reading, remember to post any of your own observations if you have any.[/list]
Logged

On my Brawl Modding Agenda:

Update Petey Piranha PSA
Update Ninja Mario PSA
Baby Mario Bros over Ice Climbers

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