Persona Modding Content Posted Daily

Atlus is gonna create a reality where Persona 5 lasts forever... ADMINS: ltsophia ( She/Her ) || serial-experiments-lyn ( She/It )

[dailypersonamodding]

Saturday, April 15th, 2023

[ Sorry for the prolonged absence! Life got complicated for both of the admins and for the time being you'll need to deal with me! ]

ANYWAY, Goro Akechi Time

So, as is considered nearly common knowledge by now, data present in P5 and P5R points to the existence of a scrapped Akechi Palace for our ✨lovely pancake boy✨, but how much is known about it *really?* Here's a data breakdown of the scraps left over!

Every field in Persona 5 has a Major and Minor Field ID, and the game is programmed to assume Major ID's between 150 and 200 are Palaces. The final game uses IDs 150 to 162 for each Palace like so:

f150 - Prologue [ Casino Duplicate ]

f151 - Castle Pt.1

f152 - Castle Pt.2

f153 - Museum

f154 - Bank

f155 - Pyramid

f156 - Moon Base

f157 - Casino

f159 - Cruiseship

f160 - Holy Grail Path

f161 - Mementos Depths

f162 - Labratory

As you can see, there are missing Fields between 157 and 159, but how can we prove this is Akechi? We look at the dialogue for negotiating with Shadows!

When knocked down, Shadows occasionally mention whatever Palace Ruler is currently active. This data is stored in BATTLE\TALK in various .BF ( Binary Flowscript ) files that are run based on the enemy type.

Inside the BMD ( Binary Message Data ) chunk of these files, there's some unused dialogue:

Flee while you still can! Ahahaha! It is futile to oppose Lord Akechi! You would do well to tread carefully. Lord Akechi is a man possessed of immense desire. Hmph… I wonder if your power would even pose a threat to Lord Akechi… I give up… *sob* Lord Akechiii…

There are 27 lines in total from Shadows referencing "Lord Akechi", all of them localized! Normally, this is where most investigation ends. There was a planned Akechi Palace between Sae and Shido, but all data was scrapped and any attempts to load into the Palace by force fail due to an intense scrub of all related data.

( Generally this is a sign things are not going well )

This, however is not the end of things just yet—Atlus was not entirely diligent in the data wipe. One of the things left behind is a single .ENV ( Environment ) file. These files—among many other things—specify properties like texture color, color grading, light effects and so on for every field.

ENV\ENV0158_001_000.ENV is found in this folder, corresponding to the missing 158 Palace ID. However, since there's no meshes left over, we can only see ENV 158's effects by placing it on another field. Here is the front hall of the Bank Palace as seen in-game normally:

Here is what Akechi's Palace would have looked like, at least the ambiance, had development continued:

( I'm sure someone can make some kind of argument about how this represents Akechi thematically, lord knows I can. )

One other aspect still remaining is found in FIELD\FTD\FLDDNGPACK.FTD, a list that specifies what encounters can be found in any Palace, along with loot in Chests and Search Objects. Akechi's DNGPACK List is not entirely empty!

We can see by parsing this file that Akechi's Palace would have had around 21 different Fields, about the standard for every Palace in P5R, though this excludes Safe Rooms. While the Encounter Entries sadly lead only to default Kamoshida Castle battles, his list references a unique Random Loot Table 7! At the time of writing, it appears no other part of the game references Random Loot Table 7. While it lacks unique items found in other Palaces, the data is indicative of what could've been found inside Akechi's Palace Search Objects.

Jades and Garnets are placed at surprisingly high priority, along with the Marble Chessboard. Of note are the items such as the Marble Chessboard and Brass Pocket Watch, those specific Item IDs cannot be found in any other location in the ENTIRE Random Loot Table .FTD file.

Until more info about how Palaces function is uncovered, it seems like our Detective Prince will continue to elude us in his heavily fog-covered ways, this subject clearly needs more research to find any more remnants!

That’s all for now, see you soon!

[dailypersonamodding]

Friday, March 31, 2023

In Persona 5 Royal, just before New Year's, Joker has a strange dream in Shujin Academy as he transitions into Maruki's Cognitive Reality. But how does this scene work, on a technical level? Strictly speaking, like this. Gross.

Let's go step by step and cover what exactly is going on here. In P5R, every time slot of every day is controlled by a "Scheduler" BF File. BF, otherwise known as Binary Flowscript, is a low-level bytecode scripting format created by ATLUS back in 2004 that most Persona games use. The game loads a Scheduler function based on the current timeslot, and each function is named after the timeslot it occurs on, so we can determine this takes place on Year 1, December 31st in the Late Evening.

It's important this takes place on the Late Evening instead of next morning, as the shading and coloring data of Shujin Academy at night is much more moody and appropriate. Additionally, at night, all NPCs in Shujin are despawned.

After turning off the Date UI, the game loads Event ID 485_310, a sort of precursor where Joker wakes up confused in Maruki's Office.

Afterwards, the script sets COUNT values 18 and 22. COUNT values are special integers stored in the game's save data but often come with special properties. 18 and 22 set Joker's current field model ( .GMD ) and animation set ( .GAP ). 18 parses the integer as several arguments, in this case loading c0001_117_00.GMD, while 22 loads the requested field animations in BF0001_212.GAP. c0001_117_00.GMD is his Velvet Room Prisoner attire with GAP 212 being a slow, shambling walk.

After setting many flags in the game's memory linked to specific features like disabling the main Triangle menu, the game sets COUNT 0X10 ( A.K.A 16 ) and calls Keyfree Event 651_103. While a regular Event in the game is a regular cutscene, a Keyfree Event is a sequence where you're allowed to walk around. Take for example, any chase scenes or special sequences. Keyfree events work by essentially overriding every file associated with a specific field, whether it be trigger data, npc placement, script functions, etc, and replacing it with special curated Keyfree files.

Interestingly, this Keyfree chose specifically not to include a modified INIT script, so the scene where joker glances around and assumes he needs to go home is actually performed by the normal Shujin Academy INIT script every time you load into the field. This is why COUNT 16 is set before loading the Keyfree, the Shujin Academy INIT checks this value to determine which of several Keyfree story sequences it's in to pass onto MAIN_65110100_MidnightSchool_Ready()

After setting the Place Name from Shujin Academy to ??? - ??? and redundantly setting Joker's model and animations, EVT_CA_START() applies a wavy Chromatic Aberration to the screen, making it appear hazy.

The rest of the script is dedicated to making joker walk into the hallway and setting up the Blue Butterfly you chase, which is actually an NPC!

Set along the hallways are various invisible trigger boxes that activate the function EVT_CA_BUTTON_ANIME(), a special function created mostly just for this scene that temporarily paints the screen blood red while increasing the strength of the hazy Chromatic Aberration.

This is how the Keyfree event mostly plays out! Various invisible triggers exclusive to this Keyfree are hit that tell the game to move the butterfly farther away while playing specific voicelines and at the very end the last trigger plays a normal Event showing Joker rejecting the new reality before proceeding on with Year 2, January 1st! That's all for now, see you soon!

[dailypersonamodding]

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

alright class, the teacher is taking a personal day today, so we will be watching a video during class time...

BRING IN THE WHEELIE CART

[dailypersonamodding]

Monday, March 27, 2023

Hey guys, today we are going to be talking about ADXs, one of the most audio formats!!

CREATING ADXS

OR

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PROGRAMS TO MAKE THESE FILES AND WHY ARE THEY ALL DOGWATER????

So ignore all the suggestions from that image. The one and only tool you'll need is a tool named VGAudioCLI. Unzip it somewhere and to use it were gonna need to use the command line.

When you need to use the command line, an easy way to open the command line is to go to the address bar in the Windows Explorer window, and type in CMD. It will open up the command prompt window.

Once you have the command prompt open, type in:

VGAudioCLI.exe -i

and a space, then drag your file onto the command prompt window, and it will add the path to the file to the end of the prompt. Now type:

-o output.adx

and press enter, you should get a file called output.adx in your VGAudioCLI folder. You can use this file for any cool modding purposes.

[dailypersonamodding]

Monday, March 27, 2023

BONUS POST: =======

Warning! This post will be heavily in-depth and very technical!

So, to pose a question, why do Chests in Persona 5 Palaces provide multiple items while Mementos Chests only offer one?

The answer is, surprisingly, related to how the game loads Mementos Field data and search objects ( i.e Vases, Piggy Banks, etc ).

Every Palace field in the game points to one Entry in the data tabble FLDOBJFLAG.FTD, a file that specifies Chest ( or "TBOX" ) contents for one field. Every Entry has 10 Subentries for Chests, with each having 6 Item slots.

Additionally, most Palace field's binaries ( .FBN ) contain a chunk to set the position and appearance of each Chest in that field.

Critically, there is no I.D system in either of these files. The game strictly relies on numerical order to determine which FBN Entry is tied to which OBJFLAG Subentry, with FBN Chest #2 being tied to OBJFLAG Subentry #2 and so on.

This system, while functional in the small scale, immediately presents issues when you consider that Mementos is randomized by chunks!

Now the normal system requires a workaround to be able to function without having a definitive way to match chest #'s with OBJFLAG Subentries.

ATLUS's solution to supply items when the conditions and environment are randomized is to exploit their own previously-built systems that supply items at random. Namely, Search Objects.

While Chest contents in Palaces is entirely deterministic, Search Object contents ( or "TBOXRND" ) is only partially so.

Similar to Chests, every Palace field in the game points toward an entry in the data table DATTBOXRND.FTD, a file that specifies what item sets can be found in Search Objects on that field. Interestingly, every Entry has 4 Subentries with each Subentry containing 10 potential Items.

Every one of the 10 potential choices per Subentry comes with an Item ID and the Percentage Chance in that Subentry for that Item. So, in the screenshots above, any Field pointing to TBOXRND Entry #3 with any Search Object using Subentry #0 has a 60% of an Amethyst and 40% of an Aquamarine.

Every Search Object is manually assigned in scripting what Subentry out of the 4 to use.

Notably, however, the struct of TBOXRND entries means only one item can be obtained per Search Object.

And this is where ATLUS's solution and technical limitations come to play. Mementos Chests never reference OBJFLAG at any point! Mementos fields are, instead, assigned a TBOXRND Entry to utilize for both Search Objects AND Treasure Chests. ( Side Note: Search Objects in Mementos are these small diamond cages. )

Mementos therefore utilizes the Subentries as follows:

Subentry / Set #0 is used for Locked Chests

Subentry / Set #1 is used for Regular Chests

Subentry / Set #3 is used for Search Objects

And there it is! Mementos Chests only provide 1 Item due to a technical limitation with the Search Object system.

That concludes the Bonus Posty, plz give me internet points and I'll see you very soon.

[dailypersonamodding]

Sunday, March 26, 2023

Today lets talk about an easy and fun way to make mods, which is adding new videos to the game.

CREATING USMS

OR,

I DON'T HAVE ANYTHING WITTY TO SAY BUT THIS TOOL IS VERY HARD TO COME BY SO SAY THANK YOU

This one is pretty simple (somehow I managed to make it long).

This tutorial will work on all the recent releases of P3P, P4G, and P5R.

So first you gotta download the SDK from this link.

To unpack this file, your going to need 7zip, which is a great program you should already have.

Simply unpack the "Criware Stuff" file with 7zip and then unpack the "criware" folder inside of it. Run the "CRIWARE_SDK_v2_19_03_PC_Installer.exe" and install the SDK to your harddrive, and once thats complete, open the CRIWARE_crack.7z in 7zip, so that you see this screen:

Then go the the place where you installed your Criware SDK in the installer, mine was in the root of my C: drive, and drag the CRIWARE folder from the 7zip window into the place where you installed the SDK (so in my case the C: drive folder) so that the 7zip file OVERWRITE the files currently on the drive.

Now that thats all set up, you can run any of the programs from your Start Menu, it should look like this:

To make your own video for the game, open up the Sofdec2 Encoding Wizard. On the first screen, select the Standard option and press next.

Click Next, and then press the button underneath the Video Source part. then select what video you want to convert to the USM format, then select the type of encoding you want (VP9 is the best, but if you're doing anything for the new P3P you will need to use Sofdec.Prime and if your doing anything from before the recent releases you will need to use H.264) then press Next.

You shouldn't need to do anything here, if you're getting no audio in-game you might need two audio sources (I haven't looked too much into this, might be wrong) but this post is getting long so I wont go into it. Just click Next.

The next screen is very complicated if you don't skip past it. So skip it by pressing Next for now.

At this screen, you can choose how good the quality of your video will be, vs how small the filesize is. Depends on what you want out of the file. Use the preset for everything tho, the other options will not work the way you want them too.

When you're done with this screen press Next.

Just press Next on this screen too. and the one after that too.

NOW PRESS START AND YOU'RE GUCCI BABE

GET READY TO WAIT THO. IT WILL TAKE ABOUT 10 MINUTES OR MORE!

Alright tomorrow I will probably show you how to make and release a mod for Reloaded II, which is the mod loader of choice for P3P PC, P4G PC and P5R PC.

[dailypersonamodding]

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Lets continue from yesterday, and show you how to extract files from Persona Games!

CRI FILE SYSTEMS

OR,

I NEED HOW MUCH STORAGE?

Yeah you're gonna need an extra hard-drive if you want all the Persona games unpacked on your computer.

The process for unpacking these games has never been simpler. If you are trying to unpack any of the newer releases (P5R, P4G and P3P's Recent PC and Modern Console ports) than just follow this guide, this method will also work for older releases of Persona games such as P5, P5R PS4, P4G Vita, P3P PSP, basically all of them except P3FES and the older PC port of P4G (known as P4G32 as it used a 32-bit executable).

Ok so step one is to get the most recent version of CriFSLib.GUI.zip from this link. Once you have this file you will need to unpack the zip in a new folder wherever you please.

Now that you have CriFSLib on your computer, open the CriFsLib.GUI.exe file and you will be able to use the program.

The program should look like this:

And as the window says, you can drag any .CPK files onto this window to open them. If you are trying to extract the files from Persona 5 Royal PC, you can find the files by going to "{Your Steam Library Folder}\steamapps\common\P5R\CPK" and unpacking the files there. You can also use Steam and right-click on a game and select "Browse local files" under "Manage" and click on the CPK folder in the window that pops up.

Once you are in the CPK folder, select one of the files and drag them onto the "CriFSLib Extractor GUI" window, like so:

(ignore the anime girl desktop wallpaper)

Next, you can either select all the files you want by shift- or ctrl-clicking the files you want, then right-clicking the window and clicking "Extract Selected" , or extracting all the files by just right-clicking and selecting "Extract All".

A folder select screen should pop up next, I would recommend making a folder named the same thing as the file, so if you were unpacking BASE.CPK, make a folder wherever you want the files also called "BASE.CPK" or just "BASE".

Tip: If you don't want to dig through your files every time you want to extract a new CPK for your CriFSLib.GUI folder, you can set CriFsLib.GUI.exe as the default program to open CPKs. That way, when you need to extract a CPK, you can just double click on it and it will open an empty CriFSLib Extractor GUI window, that you can then drag the CPK onto!

Alright! Thats it for today everyone, see you again tomorrow!

[dailypersonamodding]

Friday, March 24, 2023

Today we are going to branch out and talk about a tool that will be useful for ALL modern Persona games (P3-P5).

ATLUS SCRIPT TOOLS

OR,

HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND EDIT TEXT IN PERSONA GAMES

THIS COULD BE YOU!!!

The first thing you're going to need to do is download the newest release from this page. Download the "Release.zip" file from the top most (and therefore newest) entry on this page.

The next thing you're gonna wanna do is grab the newest release off this page, although this time you want to grab either "AtlusScriptGUI.2.3.zip" or "AtlusScriptGUI.2.3.Dark.zip" (I'd recommend the dark version)

Now that you have those two files, unzip the Release.zip and your AtlisScriptGUI zip into the same folder, so that your files look something like this:

Now all you need to do click on your AtlusScriptCompilerGUI exe and you will see a window like this:

Now you can just set the "Game" dropdown to whatever game you are trying to extract the files from. Now you might be wondering what a .BF or a .BMD is... Well that will be learned another day when we start talking about unpacking the games!

But lets just say you had a spare .BMD on hand, all you would have to do is drag that file onto the Decompile square in the GUI, and it should give you two additional files, a .msg and a .msg.h

You can ignore the .msg.h file, idk what it even does. What you can do know is open up the .msg file with your text editor of choice, and you should be able to edit the text of the game!

There will be a lot of things in brackets that controls stuff like who it says is talking and what bustup to use, but that stuff is more advanced and wont be as easy to see for a first time modder.

Heres a small clip of the best way to edit the text.

Now that you've made your edits and SAVED YOUR CHANGES (don't forget this) you can re-encode the file back to the BMD format. Simply drag your edited msg file onto the Compile side of the program, and it should give you a new .BMD file in the same folder as the .msg.

Thats all for today guys, rememer to lik cmnt and subcrbe and rng that bel

[dailypersonamodding]

Thursday, March 23, 2023

Another P3FES one for today, we’re going to be talking about THE DEBUG MENU.

This fun tool is only accessible by using this cheat, which can be used by placing the file in your "cheats" folder of PCSX2 and enabling cheats in the emulator.

NOTE: The Debug Menu does not require hostFS to be set up to work, just that you have PCSX2 set up and a copy of the US version of Persona 3 FES.

Once you have the cheat installed, its time to boot up the game. Start a game (doesn't matter if it's a new game or a loaded save) and wait until you get to a "3D cutscene," which is a part of the game where their are 3D models on the screen but you can not move around the characters, and press the "Right Trigger" or "R2" button on your controller.

You should see a screen like this pop up over the game.

Once this screen pops up, you know that you have successfully set up the debug menu. If it does not pop up, check to make sure you have cheats enabled in the PCSX2 menu and try again.

There are a couple of things we can do in the debug menu. I will go over the buttons and what they do now.

[DEBUG MENU OPEN] + △ (Triangle) button:

THE EVENT EDITOR

We are not going to get into the Event Editor now as it will require MULTIPLE posts to get through all the things you can change in the game. Just know that you can bring it up by going into the Debug Menu and pressing Triangle and can leave it by pressing Circle.

[DEBUG MENU OPEN] + ○(Circle) button:

CLOSE DEBUG MENU

Pretty simple function, this button closes out the Debug Menu. You might not think this function is very important, but now that we've opened and closed the Debug Menu, we have a few new options at our disposal.

[DEBUG MENU CLOSED] + □(Square) button:

FREE CAMERA

This option brings up the free camera, basically a camera that can be moved around by the Analog Sticks to see anything on screen, its a great way to look around and see whats happening in hidden parts of the scene. One thing you will notice at this step though, is that the event seems to be paused, and there is a simple way to fix that!

[DEBUG MENU CLOSED] + START button:

PAUSE / UNPAUSE EVENT

When an event is paused, animations will still play, like in the GIF, but everyone will be locked in place. The game is always paused after closing the Debug Menu.

When the game is Paused, you can also time travel!

[EVENT PAUSED] + L1 / R1:

REWIND / FAST-FORWARD

This is what it looks like when you rewind all the way to the beginning. Slight FLASH WARNING for this screen. Rewinding to this screen is important when making changes to the Event Editor, as it resets all the characters and animations to their original states, and will help you see how the changes you made will look when watching the scene casually.

I have never used the Fast-Forward function in my life.

[EVENT PAUSED] + RIGHT on D-PAD:

STEP FORWARD

This button moves the event forward by one frame at a time. Useful if you want to go forward one frame at a time. Cant go backwards one frame at a time! IDK why.

I think that's it for today! This was a lot of info to dump so I'm not going to even try to talk about the Event Editor.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!

[dailypersonamodding]

Wednesday March 22, 2023

Ok let's start off simple.

In Persona 3 FES for the Playstation 2, you can use the emulator PCSX2 and a feature known as hostFS, or host filesystem, to make it so that you don't have to repack the ISO (the file that the game comes in) every time you want to install a mod.

To set up hostFS we are going to need a few things. First on that list is a version of PCSX2.

While the newer version of PCSX2 boasts cool features like texture replacement and stuff like that, they also practically removed the feature to use hostFS without some trickery, so if you want to play Persona 3 FES and don't really care about texture mods (or simply want to develop your own mods), I would recommend downloading the "Stable" version of PCSX2 (1.6.0) for the foreseeable future.

Now that we have our emulator, it's time to get a bios. There are two ways to do this, the first and easiest way is to go on archive.org and search for "PS2 Bios" and download one of those. The second method is to extract a PS2 bios from the PS3 bios you can download online, I won't go into it but there's a great video on YouTube all about it.

Once you've run PCSX2 and put the bios in the bios folder and selected it in PCSX2, close out PCSX2 completely and go into the "inis" folder of your PCSX2 folder and open the file "PCSX2_vm.ini" in a texteditor like Notepad and find the line where it says

HostFs=disabled

and change it to

HostFs=enabled

Next we need our ISO file of Persona 3 FES. The best way to get this is either archive.org again or another online source. Once you have the ISO open that bad boy in 7zip and extract the file named "SLUS_216.21" to the same folder as your ISO and rename it to "SLUS_216.21.ELF"

Now open PCSX2 and open the menu option that's called CDVD, go to where it says "ISO Selector" and click Browse and select your ISO file. Now go to the System option and click Run Elf... and select the elf file you set up in the same folder as your iso.

HostFS should work now!

For more information and info on how to set up everything legally and with mods and more, check out p3f.cep.one

EDIT: ALSO YOU NEED THIS PNACH FILE!

Place it in your cheats folder and make sure to enable cheats in PCSX2