Originally posted by Snorenado:

https://discord.gg/h6yeja4k Try here, it's the biggest active group of modders for the FF Steam games that I know. Help with the UI is sorely needed!

Would you mind re-sharing the invite for that? it seems to be expired

Originally posted by RanceJustice (Kyo):

After so many years with nothing from SquareEnix, as of the 5th of November 2020 there has been another update for Final Fantasy IV on PC (via Steam)! . Text of the patch notes follows...

I've just inspected the new patch - from the looks of it, the so called "UI enhancements" are minimal at best.

As for the undub, if you set the game language to Japanese, the Japanese Audio will play, but will also display subtitles in Japanese. If however, you want to be able to play the game in English with Japanese audio, my undub patch still works without any modifications needed.
The steps to replace files are the same.

If you want to go ahead and create a guide or anything, you have my blessing - I have 2 YT videos showcasing cutscenes from the game, you can find them in the github page: github dot com/Enfyve/Final-Fantasy-4-PC-Undub

Originally posted by Dan Lel:

I think it's nice that you're doing this, however much is to be desired from this game. If you can't replace the 3d models itself it will always be a mediocre "remake".

The models themselves aren't in any particular fancy format - they do match the format of other NDS games. The reason why there aren't tons of 3d or texture mods is simply because the amount of work required to mod them all is a hassle.

I might look into it in the future, but for now, my focus remains on aspects of the game engine itself (I am looking into a possibility of a 60 fps mod, one that's not just a game speedup)

I come with an update, one with both good news and bad news - The good news is that I've identified how to mod the menus!
Example[imgur.com]

The bad news however, is that none of the files actually determine the menu sizes. Rather, they are hard-coded into the game's .exe meaning like with the menu colors - any mods will involve replacing the .exe file itself.

So far I've only identified the windows on the Abilities menu, but now that I know what to look for, finding the remaining windows should be a simple task.

Poking in for an update.

A recent discovery made me take a second look at the menu layout format. While I may not be able to change the menu background I might've found a way to alter the menu sizes for a less mobile-y feel.

I'm still studying this, and I'll update as I figure out more. Meanwhile, I'll include my findings:

Edit --
I've figured out the file structure, all that's left is understand the data to modify.

I've done some extensive research in my spare time, and I've come to the conclusion that a UI overhaul simply isn't possible in any meaningful fashion. The problem is how they handled the menus in this game - normally images would be used for the different menu parts that would then be used to create a menu. For the most part, that's what is done here - however, one of the more crucial elements, the menu background is just a gradient that's been hard-coded into the .exe file.

Imgur[imgur.com]

In the included image you can see a normal functioning menu layout on the left, followed by all of the images that make up a menu in the middle. On the right side however, is what the menu looks like with almost all of those images removed from the game. All that remains are these bland gradients, which I've found to be hard-coded into the program itself. This means that UI modifications would be limited to the images in the center, and adjusting the hard-coded gradients.

As for the actual layout and sizings, it's true that they are the same format (.XBN) used in FF3 which were modified by IcePenguin. However - I have not been able to reach him and in my searching, I have not figured out how to parse the .XBN file. Since I cannot understand the .XBN file, I cannot modify it, and at this point in time any meaningful UI mod is not an option.

Sorry.

Originally posted by Moli_Malone:

First of all, thank you very much, this it's amazing!

Second, in the first scene of the game, there is a soldier that can't end his line and another soldier line rewrite that. You can see here in the 0:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QNm8uuom6U I did leave a message in the video already but i don't know if you did watch it, if you do, sorry.

Thanks again for your amazing work!

Hey, glad you're enjoying the mod. I am aware of the jitter there in the demo video, the soldier does actually finish his line.

It's just that due to the game's timing I had to squash some lines together so that their voice lines wouldn't be overlapping.

In some cases this meant having to trim silence, reduce vowel length, or slightly increase the tempo (though that one was a last ditch effort because increasing it would result in a voice pitch higher than that of the other lines)

Originally posted by Aegis Runestone:

Cool! Dude, Enfyve, do it! :D I would LOVE A UI fix to this, and Yukari just gave you the way!

Unfortunately I only have so much free time. But don't worry - I do plan releasing a mod in 3 stages.

First a UI mod, followed by a layout mod, and if all goes well, I'll try to package it all together as a easy to use modding tool.

Originally posted by Ｙｕｋａｒｉ:

I've tried editing and saving .ncgr files in MENU_Common.dat as .png files, but my game is crashing with it. Not really tried anything more than that.
Also, in MENU_LAYOUT.dat there is .xbn files with same structure as the one .xbn file in IcePenguin's mod. So if he will wish to mod FF4, he can absolutely do it.

In the header it specifies the offset and size of each file, if the filesize changes, you'll need to recalculate the offsets to prevent crashes

Some components are stored in the base folder, such as window, button_on and button_off.

The battle icon-set is stored under extracted_data in the language folder (en.lproj in this case) as unknown.png as for the remaining elements, they're probably stored in winsample.NCGR and NSCR.

wallpaper3d are the different UI backgrounds available from the settings menu

MENU_Common.dat should contain the remaining resources, packaged together, though not compressed. it contains multiple PNG files, their offsets and names can be found in the header, and knowing the size doesn't really matter because PNG files end with a specific series of bytres
49 45 4E 44 AE 42 60 82 (IEND + some extra non-ascii characters)

All files ending with .lz are actually already uncompressed, but common NDS file readers can't seem to access them, it seems that they're different formats than in the more common/older NDS games.

Hope that helps.