Dantarion from Robot Alchemic Drive

Hi, all. Just wanted to bring this up in case anyone was interested. It's the intro scene to one of Robot Alchemic Drive's tutorials, but l hacked it so the fleeing crowd stays in place. It's got cheap blood particle effects, which I somehow think look quite nice. So, um, enjoy, if you're into that.

I reconstructed the audio with sounds recorded from Earth Defense Force 2. PCSX didn't record the audio, but l didn't want the music and siren to distract from the scene anyway.

Extra Behind-the-Scenes Information

Oddly enough, the emulator saves its own PC memory with its save states, which allowed me to use Cheat Engine to get into the game's memory at a fixed point. From there, l went looking for individual coordinate values, but even more oddly, l instead found the parent coordinates the cutscene uses for the entire crowd! Better yet, the individuals are programmed by the game to release from the parent when they're stomped, adding to the "authenticity" of the hacked scene. Thus, I can lock the crowd's coordinates in place while the game will un-lock individuals as they're stepped on. It was one of those times where things lined up quite nicely, though it was a challenge to realize what was going on at first.

But being the perfectionist l am, I went through about fifteen re-records to find the perfect time to lock the coordinates. This let the crowd disperse a bit and not be bunched up too close together.

I made another one of the other good stompy scene, but l changed it to have Dantarion.

Wow, really nice work there!  I'm not familiar with the source material or the hacking of said, I'll have to look into it.

Don't get too excited about it. That scene is as good as it gets for a scaly kaiju. Though, there is a very similar scene featuring a robot instead (mission 07's intro). RAD works best as a robot-fighting simulation… With current methods, it takes a lot of tedious work to change it into something else (to change every building's hitpoints to 0 is a slog). Then again, l can only do these things the hard way. Someone smarter would be using pointers or taking a shot at the file compression.

But, um, yeah, for those more interested in a giant robot, mission 07's intro scene has the same stuff as this.

Y'know what, l'll post it. l have an update.

To make a long story short…Earth Defense Force 4.1 (from the more successful series on this game's engine) became moddable, and all the enemies are playable, even the most massive ones. Since playing as giant monsters worked for EDF4.1, l tried poking around in the PS2 games they made. Turns out it's just as possible.

Building up to two days ago, l've learned how to hijack the tutorial this video takes place in, as well as how to easily set every building's health to 1. Any map can be played on as a rampaging giant monster, with tiny civilians running about in places, and without music in the way.

l've made PCSX2 savestates of them for my own easy access, but they're simple enough to share on here. All you need to do is find a way to run Robot Alchemic Drive (NTSC-U) on PCSX2 v1.4.0 (or hopefully later versions) and load one of the savestates. A readme is included to explain the file directory, which slots are which, and the game's controls.

The files don't compress well, so l only stored them in a .7z file. I'm sorry to use MediaFire, but it is the only hosting service l have for bigger files.

Dantarion Rampage v2

EDIT: While trying my hardest to get the PS2 "Tetsujin 28-Gou" hacked in the same way, l wound up finding an array of floats that control map boundaries. l immediately went back to RAD and found the same pattern in a similar spot. Since it worked, l went back through my savestates and expanded the boundaries so all the roads can be reached. Really glad to have the rest of Senjo Port and Rome to stomp!

And, if you're wondering about T28G… The short story is that it's based off EDF2's engine, which is too set in its ways to allow directly spawning as a non-player. Unless there's a mission that seemlessly changes who the camera follows (entering a tank?), it's not going to be an easy method of play. Also, l can't control the camera's rotation…

As a small update to anyone who sees this, l did figure out how to get the camera to follow the robo in T28G. It involves searching for the player's ID and changing the camera to use the robo's ID. A bit of manual work, but doable.