Nice catch. My mind at 4 or 5 AM must have just auto-corrected to what I thought was the closest word. The thought of magic to drown ones enemies is evocative I think, but, as you say, has nothing to do with Pictmancers (Pictomancers is really much better English while we're at it). Your explanation makes much more sense. Thanks for the correction WIndedHero. Yet another stupid spelling error of theirs - there should really be a place to submit corrections to the devs.

October 30, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Nice catch. I missed updating that font tag when I copy/paste/updated as I added in the new entries. Thanks. It has been amended.

October 16, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

...admittedly hijacking client-side computation is foolish if you can just intercept the messages that the client sends back and from what I've seen, there are no meaningful client-side computations. Maybe useful in another facebook game?

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

So. the .dac did not come from Database. Most of the accessor classes reference the dat/DataController which has a data array set by setDownloadData. This is set by NetRealManager.getDownloadDataHandler which decrypts the byteArray using the Blowfish CBC library. The byteArray is originally passed from the calling NetRealManager.getDownloadData which gets it from a URLLoader and a request using a .dac path defined in comDefine.DATA_DOWNLOAD_PATH.

So the file is encrypted and we just need to use the Blowfish CBC library to decrypt the .dac and then we should be able to parse the data.

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Yes, but wouldn't that require the original encryption key?

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Or is that held in the Crypt class, in the array 'akey'?

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

You would likely need a key, yes. Given how the .swf should contain the body of the client and any key would need to be shared, I would assume the key to be found somewhere within. I haven't taken the time to investigate the cryptography in practice here so be my guest if you'd like and please share your findings. Thank you.

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

It's likewise for formation ID# 55 for (Black Mage, Time Mage, Geomancer). Both formations ain't showing in the list.

October 4, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

In both cases, for Meteor Strike and Ritual of Catastrophe, the Black Mage is clearly from the Ivalice Arena 2 because it is bronze. The non-Ivalice arena Black Mage is gold. There is no White Mage outside of the one from Ivalice Arena 2, so you shouldn't need to ask.

Did you try clicking the links? They link to the correct cards in the Classes page, which are all from the Ivalice Arena 2.

As WindedHero stated in a previous comment, mix'n match between non-special arena cards and special arena cards in Special Arena formations.

I'd like opinions on a clever and clear way to distinguish between the Ivalice Arena Card formations aside from the fact that every one of those formations includes a card whose name and quality exists only in the Ivalice Arena 2 section (Knight, Bronze Black Mage, Mystic, and Onion Knight). Changing the cell colours is one option, but seems somewhat arbitrary. Adding some section divisions into the table is another way to go - that way a link to the corresponding section could be inserted as well. Ideas are welcome.

Also, to be clear, what you've listed are not IDs. They are #'s (and one of them is wrong, but I digress) and they indicate formation positions in the current list, meaning that as more are added, these will change. ID's are in the far right column of the table and indicate the IDs by which the formations are referred to in the game's back-end and will likely never change. Only #'s up to 124 match the IDs.

October 4, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

• As WindedHero stated in a previous comment, mix'n match between non-special arena cards and special arena cards in Special Arena formations does not work.

October 4, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Thanks for adding back-end IDs anonymous, it looks superb :)

Any progress on developing a tool or did you get these formations via my process?

October 4, 2011 by WindedHero

No problem. I thought you'd appreciate it. No luck on a tool. Didn't have the time/skills. Had to use the Charles process.

For the interception approach, the tool would essentially need to act as a proxy like Charles and then intercept only the arena message, replacing the known formation with an array of 0-300 or something like that, but it wouldn't yield specific IDs and would essentially do what Charles does. This, unfortunately also would still require you to load through the game in order to view the results and why would it would be a waste to re-invent the existing tool.

For any other approach, I would essentially need to decipher the game data itself either by decompiling the .swf if it is stored there and I probably could have decompiled the .swf to see what I could do there, but that would be far from a simple tool/process and therefore wouldn't fit the purpose of making the tool in the first place. Alternatively, I could have tried deciphering the .dac (image or sound file?) if it is stored there, but I couldn't find sufficient documentation on the .dac format or even the header to really decipher it and I didn't have the time to try..

October 4, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

• ...and why when it would be a waste of time...

October 4, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

By decompiling the .swf, if there was a .dac reader in there, that could work that way, but that's only useful if the data in the .dac is actually the data we're looking for.

October 4, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Thanks for the information. Yes, I can confirm that the above findings referring to #155 (Meteor Strike) and #159 (Ritual of Catastrophe) do not work with the Ivalice Arena 2 cards. Ironically enough though, #157 (Ying-Yang Circle; Ninja, Samurai, Mystic) is listed in the formation list.

October 5, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

The data is definitely in that DAC. It is updated whenever there is a new class or formation or feature added to the game. That DAC file, if it could be deciphered, could be a treasure trove of information.

It's definitely some kind of database but I'm no database expert. It would save time to figure out how to retrieve information from it because the Charles process is extremely time consuming.

October 5, 2011 by WindedHero

@WindedHero. I don't doubt that decoding the .dac would be helpful. It is named something like data_ver... so it is likely meaningful data of some kind. I am confident that you are correct in it storing class-relevant information, but without concrete confirmation, we're still just speculating.

As far as decoding the .dac, Without knowing how to parse the header or what the structure for the records is, all I can read from it is gibberish. Any documentation on the data type in a DB context would be worlds of help. I only thought of decompiling the .swf to hijack their .dac parser about the time I posted that message and I haven't really had the time this week to try it.

The Charles process only took me 15 minutes to get all 18 new formations. Using your table, I counted all the gaps and ran the process once entering the formations at the ends of the gaps and at the end of the table to find where the new formations were inserted. Then I tried all the ones in the small gaps that were filled by new formations.and began incrementally searching the larger gaps by groups of 5 until I found something. Once I narrowed down the large gaps, I went through the five where I found something in reverse. I only had to run the process about 8 times to get them all and all that is needed is a page refresh, inserting the breakpoint once the characters show up in the app so you only have to intercept the one message.

October 6, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

I'm sure I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but if you use the about:cache feature in Firefox you can access main.swf. Decompile that with Sothink, and then have a look at the gsArenaFormationData class. It parses the .dac file you're talking about.

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Teaching one to suck eggs? I've not heard that phrase used in such a way. Perhaps you formed a mixed metaphor?

I'd already posted about the decompiled .swf, but thanks for that anyway. Rather than Sothink since it isn't free as I understand, I just used http://www.showmycode.com/ for free. It was never a question of how easy or difficult getting and decompiling the .swf would be. It is more about the amount of time it takes to trace through and building my own tool to parse the .dac

I appreciate your suggestion about gsArenaFormationData, but that is actually just an access class which calls upon DataController.getDownloadData which in turn references a data array of unspecific origin (because I wasn't going to trace that far) calling specifically for the arena data. We're not sure what exactly the .dac holds, but it seems to be more than just the arena formations. As I said in my other post (which you failed to read), I think it far more likely that the data is parsed somewhere closer to dat/database.

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

And it appears after a momentary glance just now that the data array being referenced is actually in DataBase (which is extended by several other classes). This should serve to further support my belief as plausible.

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

I think you may have been referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_grandmother_to_suck_eggs

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Moving to other thread...

October 7, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

I have added all the new formations.

What's bizarre is that they added the formations for Red Mage, but have yet to add in the Red Mage Special Merge Card.

October 2, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

The 13 to keep are:

• Knight
• Dragoon
• Dark Knight
• Black Mage
• Time Mage
• Geomancer
• Mystic
• Orator
• Mime
• Ninja
• Samurai
• Onion Knight
• White Mage

Anything else can be merged away.

October 2, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Three cheers, I've passed Mystic already but should wrap twice by the end anyhow. Thank you all :)

October 2, 2011 by Xcar

what's also bizarre is that street gang is not used in any formation at all-not even street gang x3

October 2, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Actually, nevemind about the Red Mage. They added it earlier in the job collection and I just missed it. They changed it from a merge card to a Job Box card.

October 2, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

I agree though. Strange about the Street Gang not having a formation. Also would have expected a Red Mage x3 too. Some cards don't get formations. Dark Huntress was introduced long before any formation actually used it so there's precedence for a delay. There's really no way to be sure if it will get one, but if it has a formation in the original GREE version, then it's likely that will get ported eventually.

October 2, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

How could you wrap twice?

• There are 30 floors.
• The Arena will have been open for at most 14 days.
• Assuming that you're available every 6 hours exactly, that's 4 chances a day.
• 4 x 14 = 56 and you probably won't get 1 because time is not that forgiving so more like 55.
• 55 / 30 = 1 5/6
• So you could only really get 1 time through and 25 floors into the arena, assuming you win every floor on the first attempt. You could only wrap once and not make it through completely..

October 3, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

The arena can be done as many times as warranted for the right price. You are assuming he is only using the free turns to enter.

October 4, 2011 by WindedHero

history

Too true. I did assume that.

October 4, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

You can't obtain any what? Your statement makes use of an assumed subject. You can't obtain any normal or bronze cards or you can't obtain any formations? I'll assume you meant formations.

There are no level requirements for arena formations. All you need to do is select the each of the 3 cards that make up one of the formations listed here for your arena team and use them in an arena battle. They can be any level, in any order and any gender (*Witch and Jack-o'-Lantern are not actually considered to be different genders of the same card as far as the game is concerned) .

I only see one of a few possibilities occurring here:

1. You are not actually using the formation in an arena battle. If you do not engage in an arena battle with the formation, it will not be added to your formation list.
2. You are not trying one of the correct formations listed above. Currently all 143 possible formations are listed. Any combination beyond those listed above will not create a formation.
3. You are getting the formation and you do not realize it. When a formation activates, you will see the formation name appear and then move above your arena team as they do battle. If you are seeing a formation for the first time, in the white text after the encounter, it will say that you have seen a new formation. If you check in your formation list, you will see the formations that you have previously seen. Normal and Bronze formations should currently be found on pages 8-11 and 17.

September 16, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Yeah it was referred to formations.

And now I know I need to use the formation in a battle. Thank you for that

September 16, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Hmm, I thought you had to win the battle also.

September 18, 2011 by WindedHero

history

Actually, no. You don't need to win an arena battle to unlock a formation or at least you never used to. I haven't seen a new formation in quite some time, but I recall often choosing arena fights I know I'd lose in order to add a formation to my list. That's how I got what few ultimate formations I have. I'd say roughly half of the arena formations I have in my list I got from arena matches that I lost.

September 18, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

It goes without saying that future releases would force IDs to change, but please read the response in my other reply.

September 14, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

I appreciate your concern, but IDs have not been guessed or assumed. Even worse than skipping far ahead and such, they have also added and changed several formations because of the various changed card types (Black mage being Gold in this version for example) and such and sometimes for no apparent reason. In my suggestions, I wasn't guessing at the IDs, but I was guessing at the formation based on the IDs (because I couldn't find True Catastrophe's makeup on the JP wiki site and Mastering Quasar in the JP version is actually Dancer, Master Thief, Master Monk which it is not in this version so I inferred possibilities for what they might have changed it to.

The only IDs that are in the table that are somewhat uncertain are 135 and 136 for Recall Dead and Magic Barrier respectively. Prior to the last update, they immediately preceded Great Blast and Deadly Chaos. Moreover to reinforce that their IDs may now permanently be 135 and 136, in the original JP version, these happen to be the IDs of these Magic Barrier and Recall Dead. As there are so many unknown formations, it does no harm to leave them there for now in any case and they will hopefully help the users referencing this wiki to earn those formations, knowing that those are confirmed formations. If someone notices a misspelled, incorrectly filled out or ID'd formation, they need only correct it or mention it so that one of the active contributors (such as myself) will make the appropriate change.

Thanks for confirming these two formations and their makeup. They have been added.

September 14, 2011 by A Wikia contributor

Thank you. That was already added Yesterday.

September 11, 2011 by A Wikia contributor