We’ve created a true Shiranui mod
My partner and I have been working on mods for Okami, including a true Shiranui form. We finally got it with the light effects and everything! We’ve also added a ton of other cool stuff.
-auto skip unnecessary hints
-disable the auto speed up feature (I personally like the regular run cycle in towns)
-skip dialogue boxes whenever you loot chests
And much more!
We do plan to release this publicly. I just wanted to see how interested the community would be in this mod package we are working on :) also I know a Shiranui mod has been something we’ve all wanted since the beginning!! I’m super pumped that we’ve gotten this to work.
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Edit: The silence from her has been due to the scrutiny she received from the "Reverse Engineering" community on a game she adores. Some people do not like being berated for not knowing what you may consider 'basic concepts'.
So This is the "Partner" responding to some of the comments below. This may be my only response as I really do not care for drama, validation or being in the light. This is just meant to clarify some things as the community of her favorite game has been rather harsh to her. I thought she was joking until I read the comments. I am glad she created a new account seeing the response she received. If she does decide to continue messaging here then that is up to her. I do not care for social media for the same reasons shown here. The last time I was really active on social media was when I was younger during my Something Awful days.
The idea originally came from her messing with mods from the community and not knowing how to add or use them on her game. She mentioned things she wished people had made. I figured it would be a nice present to make at least one of those come true if even possible. This project was meant for her as a present and was not supposed to be something large or public. To be honest, I knew about okami but have never played okami before I met her. I still have not beaten the game from start to finish given the amount of hours I have spent in it. Though she has beaten it countless times. It is a nice game but I do not share the same love for it as she and you guys obviously do. But, it has been fun to work on over the months with her. She asked a while ago if she can make it public to the okami community and initially I didn't care to do the extra work but she persisted. I was ignorant to how passionate everyone was about this stuff for such an old game.
To start, I am not going into specifics of what I do for work. But, I work in Coding/Security and do not call myself a game developer. I started to learn programming in high school. Back in the day I used to do some minor mod work on RO, doom/quake, and others for fun. Mostly memory manipulation. I also do not play games that much anymore.
--How, why didn't it take years--
I call myself a lazy coder. If someone already invented a wheel, why would I start making a new one? I take the same approach in work or modding, to get results. To verify and reuse what is already there. I would have never taken this on if all the foundational work was not already progressed. I researched and used many quality resources that were already available primarily on GitHub. Some of which may have been the people here. Some of these included the loader, archive reader, and decomps. Most of the research and the structure took a while to get down. Old games like these always store and run things in such a way to cut down on cost. As it was intended to run on limited hardware.
--Many asked about ai--
Yea I use AI for some things. AI has become an indispensable tool in the workspace. All the people I have talked to in my industry use it to some extent. As well as others such as the game development space all use it to some extent to increase productivity and reduce redundant or mundane work. I dislike ai as much as the next person if not more. but not adopting it in the workspace is going to get you left behind. At the end of the day its a tool like any other, except more like comparing a shovel to an excavator. I never suggest trusting code, work or results you do not read, understand and verify yourself. What have I used it for in this? Mostly decomp and mapping memory; otherwise, this would have taken far far longer to do by hand. It was necessary to follow calls to track down many of the changes to make some of this happen. Was the output always right? not at all, but it got me 90% of the way there rather than performing it by hand.
--Some asked about the final form/shiranui and were skeptical regarding it--
I always called these (three emitted) chain/ribbon effects "tentacles" haha. You guys are also a little unfair that she should know what any of that is, She just loves and plays the game. Many people do not realize when something is actually a shader or a particle effect. Let alone many of the other things it could have been. For example: Some people probably thought the effect came with or was attached to the shiranui model... Anyways, I first found some flags that triggered conditionals for other calls/functions/effects. I figure others have seen this and it could not be that easy, which was true. its been a while but I remember the flag caused a lot of issues like hidden ammy model, which the game does to present the shiranui model on-top for the final fights transitions. I received a crash on one map and so I gave up on that and started looking for alternative solutions. I then looked at all the calls happening after the flag and found the scene/area file had some effects which were called. attempting to use it worked in the area but would not work outside the area due to it only being loaded in memory during that fights scene/area but it was the right effect. solution was loading the file/effect into memory at scene/area load before calling the effect.
--What I have been working on--
Mod Loader; simplify installation, I do not like overwriting game files. She complained about the difficulty, so I worked on that a bit. I was able to get enemy spawns working easily enough so I was thinking of a simple tower or wave concept where you beat each floor/wave. The script for an incremental wave is easy enough. The real problem is what area to use for this, what will break etc. Is loading the required files to load the enemies too much for the game? will loading those cause other issues? I have had crashes loading enemy characters and never really investigated, it could be a simple fix. there is a chance this is just not doable in which case if its too difficult or too much work I will just drop it.
Hopefully that answers some questions, again I am not looking for anything in return as this was just for her. She wanted to share the final form mod with everyone, so be a bit professional whether you care for it or not. Rather than throwing hate, just ignore it exists. This was not meant to "upset the community" or invalidate other peoples work. Figuring this stuff out is supposed to be fun, not work. If you are enjoying yourself working on an issue then continue working at it whether someone else has solved it or not. She had asked me if I could just give the shiranui mane effect to the community. Based on the responses, I get the feeling some people would like to figure it out themselves. I may write out a version of the shiranui mane so others can choose to add it to their own project if they want and make it their own. If I do, I will add it as an edit below on this post.