creating an encounter map of Larvin (or any city per map)

[Rangerous the Second]

Caveat: these memory locations have only been verified with Fate v1.6 (English version) running Psygore's WHDLoad under WinUAE.

The attached spreadsheet displays a map of Larvin.
Once the UAEtranslate tab is updated from WinUAE debugger information, the map of Larvin is populated with current encounter groups at the correct location.

This tool revealed an interesting fact: Fate maintains a list of about 100 encounters that it dynamically moves about the map. As soon as you enter an area, all the encounters are generated. Periodically these encounters are flushed and new ones are generated.

I also found it interesting that encounter (x,y) position are encoded with only a pair of bytes. This is true inside cities and dungeons, but it is also true outdoors in the wilderness. That's interesting because an unsigned byte cannot hold coordinatse larger than (x,y)=(255,255), yet the maximum coordinates needed to unambiguously chart position in the outdoor map is (xmax,ymax)=(639,399). It seems that Fate only tracks nearby encounters, and relates the encounter coordinates against some reference that it holds, somewhere, in memory. Until I find that reference, my outdoor map won't be able to unambiguously chart outdoor encounters.

So, although I also have one of these for the outdoor world, it's only reliable when I exit a city, because that is the only time that I know what (x,y) position the encounters are referenced to.

This tool has been helpful on occasion when I wanted to complete my party with a specific class. I can search the map for the class of interest, then refer to the Encounters tab. If columns Q,R,S,&T contain FF for that encounter group, that person would not consider joining your team. However, if those columns contain 00 for that encounter group, then that person would be willing to join your team, if suitably encouraged. In that event, it would be worthwhile to navigate your team across the map to meet and recruit this person of interest.

I think some of the columns are not right, and I haven't broken the code on quite a bit of the data. Lately this hasn't been as much of a priority as I've been focusing more on decrypting data files.

One could imagine someone with real programming skill actively reading WinUAE memory to (truly!) dynamically update an encounter map. This would likely be done only for fun, because encounter information isn't terribly helpful once you have got your party composition set up the way you would like it to be.

*** update ***
The file was about 400 kB, but it would seem that I have reached my upload limit of 2 MB. Perhaps this is a lifetime limit? So it may have to wait for another lifetime. :)

*** update ***
I've finally figured out how to host downloads at www.fategatesofdawn.com
The Larvin map is available for download.
This live encounter tracker can generalize to other cities and dungeons simply by copying the relevant city or dungeon map onto the map tab, which will replace the Larvin map with any other map. This works for every other location in the game except Wilderness, which is so much larger that encounters will not register correctly. The source data all comes from the same place in memory, but Wilderness registers it differently.

[Rangerous the Second]

Hi. I've finally figured out how to share a Google drive file, so the spreadsheet-based Larvin encounter map is now available at:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nNo5H ... FJtkAeCEME

Open the spreadsheet, which is named MapLarvin. The UAEtranslate tab explains how to copy the memory from WinUAE and paste it into the UAEtranslate tab.

Once UAEtranslate is updated, the Map tab automatically updates to display the location and type of currently pending encounters.

With the UAEtranslate updated from WinUAE debugger memory, the Encounters tab also lists pending encounters. The list contains valid entries between rows 3 and 102, inclusive. Encounters that have FF in columns Q,R,S,&T will never join your party.

These encounters move around the map dynamically, so they may not be in the same place after you take the time to cross the map to meet them. Simply update by again copying WinUAE memory into the UAEtranslate tab to refresh the pending Larvin encounters at any time.

[Rangerous the Second]

...at this location:
viewtopic.php?p=405487#405487