Breaking Videogames
For those who can't play a video game without dissecting it
Project maintained by banyaszvonat Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
Happy new year. I’ve been making some incremental progress towards decoding fields in the save data. Here are some:
0x660: character level- Value is identical to the character’s level, 1 in unused slots, so this is an educated guess.
0x681: number of spells/skills the character has learned.- This was determined from the function at
0x08824b64^[1], which loads this value, then iterates over SkillLevels until the loop index reaches it.
- This was determined from the function at
0x689: Currently wielded weapon- Also an educated guess: the function checks this field against offset
0xA2of the skill definition struct later mentioned in the post. Skills belonging to different weapon types (Fist, Sword, Spear, Bow, Gun, Axe) have values0x1-0x6, whereas spells and specials have0x0at this offset in the skill definition struct. Staves don’t seem to have a corresponding value, because they are not needed to cast spells, they merely boost spells’ range if the character has one equipped.
- Also an educated guess: the function checks this field against offset
0x68D: Dark Assembly rank- Found through a read breakpoint on the address when opening the assembly screen, confirmed with memory editing.
Moreover, I found some sort of skill definition structure in memory. I’m not sure if they always get loaded at the same address, but 0x89ca9ac at runtime holds a pointer to it. The array of structs has 0x11c (284) members, and each struct is 0xAC bytes long. This revealed a few skillIDs not covered in the guide:
0x0354: Slumber0x0357: Charm0x0BCD: Soaring Fire0x0BCE: Vulcan Blaze0x0BD7: Rose Thorns0x0BD8: Rose Liberation0x0BE1: Zetta Beam0x0BE2: BadAss Overdrive
With the exception of Slumber and Charm, these are the skills of the DLC guest characters from later games. Since the PS2 version didn’t have them, they weren’t included in the guide.
The structure also contains skill descriptions, which gives away the 2-byte encodings of some symbols and punctuation characters that weren’t included in the last post about it. But that requires some more effort to fully document.
^[1] European version of Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, address in RAM at runtime.
Bonus:
