Fortune Street Board Editor

You know, his last login was pretty far back now...

that sounds great but can you email me about it? I can't discuss downloading activity's here

HE'S GONAA KILL THE TOPIC! He's clearly a topic murderer.

Well I feel sorry for saying that, but I'm still busy with studying stuff.
And starting next month, I'll be busy with my thesis. :/
I feel like I've chosen the wrong time to start working on something like this.

That said, if anyone else is interested in working on an editor and needs help figuring out the fileformat, feel free to mail me as I've figured out pretty much everything.

Sorry for doubleposting, not sure if it's possible to edit messages.
Here's the Board Viewer I've worked on while figuring out the file format for Fortune Street Boards back in January:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5306988/Misc/FSViewer.rar

Included in the archive are all the board files from the game and the viewer itself.

That's pretty neat, and I notice that these files aren't very big. The map for Yoshi's Island is only 1568 bytes. Some of the more complex boards may stretch across multiple files; I notice volcano0.frb and volcano1.frb both exist, and I assume those represent the two states of Mt. Magmageddon.

I don't think anyone here has your e-mail address Xanares, but I'll ask you a few questions while you're still around (hopefully).

Do you know the directory structure of Fortune Street? In particular, is "Boards" in the root, or is it buried in some other folder? Making new or altered boards won't be useful without the ability to boot them in-game, and Riivolution requires me to know this. I don't know of any way to find out without doing things I'm not allowed to discuss on gamefaqs and that would be quite a bother in any case.

I don't think I'll be able to make an editor myself, but what you already have given us should be enough for me to do some things with my trusty hex editor. After all, a hex editor and a viewer is basically the same thing as a manual editor, right? The first question I already asked is the only thing I really, really need to know, but I would like to know some other things if you have the intel:

1. Anything you can share about the file structure would be helpful. I should be able to trial and error figure most of this out on my own, but if you've already done the work, you could save time particular with things like hex values for each type of square (particularly the special square types your viewer can't display well), explanations for how square linking works (which your viewer doesn't display), etc..

2. What are the file size limits? I'm guessing it's not completely static and that these boards probably have additional files from another folder, similar to the module files that Brawl uses, and similarly to Brawl, the total permissable file size is probably some static value so any board's permissable size will be related to the size of the associated files (like in Brawl, Pit and Zero Suit Samus were very restricted due to very large associated files whereas most characters could get away with a lot of added code). Similarly, is there anything that is checking for the file size to be right? If I just start adding extra data to a file, nothing is going to freak out and crash because of some missed checksum, right?

3. Are the associated other details about a board included in these files? By that I mean default stock values, default target amount, the maximum allowed dice roll, which venture cards to allow to appear (this may be automatic?), etc.?

I've been working on cracking these files as the first step in my goal to customize these boards. I'll share what I've figured out as I figure the people around here are likely to find some of this interesting.

A square's data extends for two "lines" (0x20 long).

The first four bytes are used to indicate the square type. It seems to always take the form:

00xx

with xx being:

00: shop
01: bank
02: venture card square
03: spade suit square
04: heart suit square
05: diamond suit square
06: club suit square
07: spade change of suit square
08: heart change of suit square
09: diamond change of suit square
0a: club change of suit square
0b: taking a break square
0c: small commission square
0d: large commission square
0e: stockbroker square
0f: ??? (unused?)
10: roll again square
11: arcade
12: action button (Observatory/Collossi/Mt. Magmageddon)
13: cannon
14: "blue" warp square
15: "red" warp square
16: "green" warp square
17: "yellow" warp square
18: "purple" warp square
19: ??? (unused?)
1a: ??? (unused?)
1b: ??? (unused?)
1c: "blue" Robbin Hood Ruins warp/Bowser's Castle warp door
1d: "red" Robbin Hood Ruins warp
1e: "yellow" Robbin Hood Ruins warp
1f: "green" Robbin Hood Ruins warp
20: Yoshi's Island moving platform starting square (also used on Mt. Magmageddon)
21: Part of Mt. Magmageddon's movement network
22: Layered over every Robbin Hood Ruins warp square (exit point?)/Bowser's Castle warp door exit
23: Yoshi's Island moving platform ending square
24-2f: unknown
30: vacant plot

I'm sure somewhere in here is the various vacant plot properties, but I'd need the ability to go in-game to find those. The non-spade change of suit squares were something I didn't expect to exist, but those could be fun tools! I also want to test how the special squares work on boards that don't include them by default. This implies to me that there are really only two special squares actually. One is the moving platform on Mt. Magmageddon and Yoshi's Island, and the ending square (either 0x21 or 0x23) determines whether the platform remains at the ending destination or moves back to the starting point. There are one way warps found on Bowser's Castle and the Robbin Hood Ruins, and the Robbin Hood Ruins simply use the one way warps in pairs to create an illusion of a two-way network. I'm very interested in seeing if these squares work on other boards. I note that pipes versus warp tiles is just graphic and that the same tile type is used regardless (probably dictated by some setting that tells it whether it's a Mario or DQ board); if these special squares are the same way, that could allow for great flexibility. I'd hope so anyway because out of the four boards with special squares, only Yoshi's Island is a bad board to begin with.

For shops I've worked out that the 7th word (bytes 49-56) contains the data for the shop's district and price:

xxffvvvv

xx: Shop district number
ff: appears to always be 0xff
vvvv: Shop price

This appears to usually be ffffffff for non-shop squares (which implies to me that it's unused), but for warps it appears to have:

xx000000

Wherein xx is used to tell it where to warp. I haven't worked out the exact numbering scheme that holds this together, but I would feel pretty good about that guess that that's how it works.

Some of the special per-board squares use the 7th word as well (both of the special tiles on Yoshi's Island do), and I suspect they're used for similar purposes (figuring out destination).

I haven't yet worked out the second half of the first word or anything involving the 2-6th or 8th words, but I'm just getting started and wanting to share what I've done so far. I need to get my own copy sometime soon to speed this up as well; so far I'm doing everything with the viewer and a hex editor which is much faster than going ingame but has real limits. I also worked out the file names for all the boards which should be useful going forward:

Board names:

2-07-hidari.frb: Peach's Castle
alephgard.frb: Alefgard
angel*.frb: Observatory (* ranges 0-3, indicates transformation state)
circuit.frb: Mario Circuit
colony.frb: Good Egg Galaxy
dahma.frb: Alltredas Abbey
dolpic.frb: Delfino Plaza
kandata.frb: Robbin Hood Ruins
koopa.frb: Bowser's Castle
majinzo*.frb: Collossi (* ranges 0-1, indicates transformation state)
mario.frb: Super Mario Bros.
mooncity.frb: Starship Mario
slabakkatou.frb : Slimenia
studium.frb: Mario Stadium
torodeen.frb: Castle Troidan
volcano*.frb: Mt. Magmageddon (* ranges 0-1, indicates transformation state)
yosshi.frb: Yoshi's Island
yuureisen.frb: Ghost Ship

o_ before a name indicates the simple mode board. Strangely, o_peach.frb is the name of the simple mode Peach's Castle and o_2-07-hidari.frb is quite similar to the normal mode board but apparently unused (with a few differences to cut it down a bit, seems like it would work as a simple mode version of Peach's Castle). It's very strange that peach.frb simply does not exist. There are a great number of unused boards that have previously not been mentioned, including but not limited to a star shaped board, a mushroom shaped board, and a slightly different version of Alefgard (that uses square 0f that isn't used on any normal board).

Just a few more things before I go to bed for the night.

The header appears to only cover the first four lines, and the entire rest of the files seem to be tile data (starting at 0x40). That means all board specific information must be in those four lines.

0x20 appears to be the default starting cash, and then 0x22 appears to be the default target amount. This makes the 9th word pretty useful.

0x29 appears to be the maximum allowed dice roll. This seems to be the only thing of use in the 11th word (the entire rest of the word is always 0s).

The 16th word seems to tell us how many squares on on each board, specifically at 0x3c.

Checking across six boards with little in common (Yoshi's Island, Castle Troidan, Alltredas Abbey, Bowser's Castle, Mt. Magmageddon second form in simple mode, Super Mario Bros.), the following of the 16 words that comprise the header were always the same: 1, 3-8, 12, 13, 15. Many of these words seem to always be 00000000 which suggests to me that they may be unused. A few (1, 5, 13) seem to have some very particular random value that they keep using, and the 6th word is a mostly empty but not quite value every time (00000020).

This leaves the only words of mystery being 2, 10, and 14. Three hex words that must contain every remaining relevant parameter for squares isn't really very many! Even though they always have two unique values when comparing different boards, they appear to usually be the same when comparing different forms of the same board. Interestingly, the form of the observatory that has the "island" completely separate from the rest of the board has different values from the others for word 10 but it also has a different starting cash amount (1500 instead of 2000) that should be completely irrelevant since you'll never start on that form. The 10th word seems to generally include two values that in decimal are divisible by 50 with the one at 0x24 seeming to always be bigger than the one at 0x26. I suspect these numbers may be used in salary calculations though I haven't looked into the mechanics. I can't make any headway at deciphering the remaining two words by inspection other than that neither of them are the same between a board and its simple counterpart so clearly they aren't used to pick a background or anything like that.

In terms of deciphering the rest of the tile data, I notice that the 7th word is used for bank tiles as well as shops and warps though I'm unsure of why that would be (it's not even the same between different banks!). It also appears to sometimes be used for no clear reason (like for the spade square on Robbin Hood Ruins). This may just be garbage data that is never read; I'm not sure. I'm also pretty sure that the second half of the first word is used to indicate the x-position of the tile while the first half of the second word indicates the y-position. The second half of the 2nd word appears to always be 0000. The 5th and 6th words appear to always be ffffffff for all tiles so they are either unused completely or used very seldom. I suspect therefore that the 3rd and 4th words contain the data for how the tiles connect. The 8th word appears to usually contain limited data so it's probably tile specific data much like the 7th word. There doesn't appear to be any indexing system to number the tiles so the game must keep track of tile numbers simply by their position in the file.

Yes, all or most of it is correct.
If you're interested in the work I've done 'til January, here's the source of my work:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5306988/Misc/FortuneStreetEditor.rar

Some of the code is pretty dirty, but should still be readable.
Maybe you can use it to base an editor on and as soon as I have some spare time I can contribute again.