Mega Man ZX Editor – Unleashing Creative Potential In Game Modding

Dive into the world of game modding with the Mega Man ZX Editor, a pioneering tool designed to simplify the process of editing and customizing Mega Man ZX and Mega Man ZX Advent.

This article explores the capabilities of the editor, from tweaking dialogue files to introducing new game mechanics, aimed at both novice and experienced modders seeking to explore their creative potential.

What This Is

This is an attempt at creating a tool that will make editing Mega Man ZX much easier.

If you need to know where specific assets, values, or code sections are in the game, please see the(unfinished) wiki page, as it contains documentation I accumulated on the game.

Progress

Currently, I am focusing on the USA version of Mega Man ZX.

This means that the editor’s (full) compatibility with other versions of the game is not guarenteed at the moment(although, it’s worth noting that MMZXA has the same dialogue system as MMZX, and as such, the dialogue editor works for both games).

The editor can edit, export and import english dialogue files and save them to the ROM. Other files can be viewed but I have not yet implemented the code to view and/or edit them in their converted format.

For now, I’m messing around with the game to find useful tweaks. I’m also making the graphics viewer(and eventually editor).

Done

• Dialogue text converter(for dialogue “talk_” and message “m_” files)
• Functional User Interface
• File export with options for converted file formats(except graphics)
• File import with support for converted file formats(except graphics)
• Converter for binary to pyqt widget(image)
• Togglable patches system
• Test button
• Graphics Viewer(WIP)

To Do

• (Dialogue text converter)Find use of special values 0xF4, 0xF5, 0xF7, and 0xF9
• Graphics Editor(saving, exporting, and importing)
• Find actual patches for the game to add to the editor’s “patches” tab
• Find patches and tweaks that are helpful for testing purposes
• OAM Editor*
• Sound/Music Editor*
• Movie Editor*
• Tweaks/Physics Editor*
• Level Editor*
• Game Logic Editor*

*This feature may not be implemented/is not currently prioritized since I haven’t looked into it and it looks hard to do at first glance.

Setup For Usage

Currently, there are no releases and I’m not sure how to include the dependencies in my project, so:

• Download&Install Python v3.10 or higher (made with 3.11.4)
• Now that you have Python, you can use pip(Package Installer for Python) to install the two following modules:
• Download&Install NDS Py (made with 4.1.0)
• Download&Install PyQt6 (made with 6.5.2)

• This project > Code > Download ZIP
• Extract the contents of the .zip file wherever you want
• That’s it! Now you can run RunEditor.bat (or run MME_NDS.py directly, from command line)

Credits

• Rom extracting/saving
• GUI(PyQt6)
• Icons
• icon_biometals-creation.png: Mega Man ZX devs, taken from here and truncated by me using GIMP
• Dark theme:(modified by me)

Some parts of code I copied(and modified) from answers to other people who asked for help(for example, on stack overflow) on topics I myself needed help on.