golden-sun-encounter-notes-overlay

Golden Sun practice tool: BizHawk Lua script that reads a notes CSV file and displays directives for each party member during an encounter

Features

• Loads CSV files you can edit with your favorite spreadsheet program
• Automatically downloads notes you can use if you don't have any
• Allocates space for key words for each party member, as well as a general "extra" line of information
• Aligns notes to party member number whatever order they happen to be in (1 is always Isaac)
• Supports reverse encounters and adjusts targeting numbers appropriately
• Bugs

Usage

Load gs-encounter-notes-overlay.lua from BizHawk 2.8's Lua Console while playing Golden Sun.

The gs-encounter-notes.csv file in the same folder, will drive the information displayed on-screen. If the file does not exist, one will be downloaded automatically.

This has not been tested with any other emulator version.

This has not been tested with Golden Sun: The Lost Age, but support will come.

Demo

overlay-demo.mp4

Notes Format

Comma-separated-values. The first row, denoting the header, is key. It does not matter what order the columns are in, but the following columns should be defined:

• encounterKey - Stores a set of enemies based on name (without numbers), comma separated e.g. "Gnome,Gnome,Troll". The system automatically can associate the reverse encounter to the correct key and adjust accordingly.
• 1 - Isaac's action. The first word is anything (but should be relatively short, 10 characters is probably too many to fit in the space available). The second (optional) word is a targeting number denoting the 1-based enemy number from the left. e.g. 2 refers to the middle enemy in a group of 3.
• 2 - Garet's action, like above
• 3 - Ivan's action, like above
• 4 - Mia's action, like above
• extra - Any other stuff that doesn't fit but should be displayed on-screen
• fileDescription - Not actually associated with the encounter but will be text printed to the Lua console when the notes are loaded

Other columns are effectively ignored.

Example

area,encounterKey,4,1,2,3,extra,fileDescription
02 imil,"Gnome,Gnome,Gnome,Gnome",,ramses 2,atk 4,ray 2,T2:ray

Special Thanks

• Thanks to those who taught me, directly or indirectly, about the internals of Golden Sun and helped solve certain challenges here
  • Plexa
  • Raphi
  • Salanewt
  • Tea
  • zadeta656
• Thanks to ollie for putting together an amazing Golden Sun encounter notes spreadsheet resource that helped inform and inspire me

License

Copyright (C) 2023 Justin Schwartz, except where otherwise noted.

This code is licensed under the MIT License.