Final Fantasy Hacktics

Awesome, this looks great! The original Attribute Rewrite hack is one of the central ASMs in my mod, so I'll have to check this out.  A few questions though:

When you say not to use the attribute page in Patcher, does that mean that all existing attribute values in patcher should be zeroed out, or are they just ignored/overwritten by the spreadsheet data?

Edit: Also, trying to understand the implications of abilities having attributes.  It seems that you can basically make any ability grant any other ability/status/immunity, etc.  I imagine, for example, you could have a self-targeting ability that grants immunity to negative status and boosts elemental resistance for the duration of a battle.  Or an ability that allows you to acquire certain R/S/Ms, say Defense Up or Throw Item, for the course of a battle, that were not otherwise equipped?  And as far as targeting, do the attributes affect the caster only, or another unit that is targeted?

Howdy,
I'm back and so is the mod, hosted in original post. For those wondering why it was gone for a while, I encountered an error in March when trying to update, whereby I could remove the original file to the title post, but not upload a replacement.  Between this and some life events I wasn't really able to prioritize this mod.  Anyway, I'm back to working on the mod and will be providing further updates and more info on the current state of the mod.  The March update, never seen before, is now hosted with more coming soon.
Happy to be back,
Ansehelm

AFAIK there isn't currently a way to do this, since no weapon in the base game hits more than one unit at a time, and I'm not aware of any mods or ASMs that change this.  If I recall, even the range of most melee weapons is hardcoded, such that if you want a sword to have 2 range, you have to build it on the slot of a spear or pole.

Quote from: Ramza Stan on March 11, 2021, 04:32:51 pmAs the title implies, I'm curious how important it is to have things like stat growths and increasing weapon power over the course of the game.  I know it's, like, a constant in RPGs, but how important is it for say a mod of FFT?

Totally up to you.  It's your party and you can cry if you want to It's your mod and you can change whatever you want.  There are multiple viable ways of reducing the importance of growths and increasing PA/MA items/skills in such a way that most items/abilities scale well, and I imagine a lot of people here prefer that method of balancing a mod.  I'll leave it to them to make that argument, but I'm going to play devil's advocate and argue in favor of growths/increasing WP items:

-First off, a lot of players (myself included) do like the feeling of progression that comes with increased levels and stats.  There's something satisfying about reaching level 99, especially with a unit that you've optimized for a particular role. Which leads to...

-Greater character variety: Highly variable class growths offer greater potential for customizability of characters in that they offer different rewards based on the history of the unit's training.  You can optimize a unit for whatever growths you want, and have the option to mix and match (e.g. 50 levels as knight, 50 as thief, which provides for a faster knight only slightly weaker than a 99 levels knight). While I understand the rationale that some mod creators have for standardizing growths between classes, the drawback is that it results in all units being more fully generic, with all characteristics being determined solely by their class at a given moment.  This is one of those cases where customizability is sacrificed for balance, but you're certainly free to do this.

-To some degree, there will inevitably be progression/power creep that makes earlier skills/items/jobs less appealing in certain situations, but there are enough other skills/items/jobs that the game can still be interesting and full of variety.  For example, in base FFT there are something like 19 swords/knight swords that you'll have access to by the endgame.  When you're preparing to fight Vormav, Do you really need (or want) your knight unit to choose between 19 equally viable swords, plus a comparable set of every other piece of equipment? For me, that's neck deep in "analysis paralysis" territory: it's fine to have 4 or 5 equally viable swords to choose from (for sake of argument, let's say that there can be 5-6ish swords that are roughly viable from lvls 1-33, 5-6 from 33-66, 5-6 from 66-99). For the same reason that you wouldn't necessarily want to remain a squire all game, you wouldn't necessarily want to use your level 1 sword all game.  Low level gear still has a purpose, for sale, or ammunition for your ninja.  And from a design perspective, I would struggle to find a unique role for every item if the majority of them were intended to be equally useful at every stage in the game. 

So that's my take on why I prefer highly differential growths on jobs and PA on weapons.  I get that balancing can still be an issue, but there are some pretty good solutions already out there.  For example, my mod uses Glain's "Speed reduces CT" hack so that spells don't take forever to cast and are still viable at high levels.  (Also currently testing magic growths to achieve smooth scalability).  I also use Pride's Item Attribute Rewrite hack, which allows items to grant R/S/M abilities, so that it's not just a matter of which helmet gives the most HP - you can have a high HP helmet, a low hp helmet that provides a good status (e.g. protect), a low Hp helmet that provides the Defense Up or CT Save ability, a medium HP helmet with good status immunities...all of which could be good choices at any point in the game. 

Anyway, I'm not trying to discourage you from making your mod in any particular way, and I'll leave it to others to make the argument for low stat/item differentials, which is certainly viable.  Hope this gives you something to think about.   

That's quite a list of hacks, so the odds of interference are extremely high. Even if the hacks you added don't normally alter how items are equipped, they could very well be using the same space as some of the ASMs that 1.3 uses, so there's a very high likelihood that the base hacks are getting partially overwritten in a way that's causing these bugs.  Unfortunately 1.3 has long been unsupported, and I don't know if there's even an accurate list of the ASMs it uses. For best (read: not terribly buggy) results, I wouldn't recommend modding over someone else's mod, especially if the contents of that mod are unknown.  That said, here are a couple leads I might recommend if you're up for a little troubleshooting.

-(Easy) Use the FFTOrgASM conflict checker to see whether any of the ASMs you've applied conflict with each other.  There's a (small) possibility that some of them are conflicting in a way that creates this bug.

-(Less Easy) Starting from a clean 1.3, apply each ASM one by one until you recreate the bug, and do without the offending ASM in the future.  Not guaranteed to work and possibly tedious, but probably your second best bet.  Your best bet, by far, is either to take 1.3 as-is, or to make your own from scratch with the elements from it you like.

I don't have experience with this particular bug, but not knowing what ASMs have been applied is a major red flag and could lead to something like this.  If it's a mod you're making, you should know all the ASMs you've applied.  If you apply ASMS or other changes to someone else's mod, you open a pandora's box of bugs due to all kinds of unforeseen conflicts with unknown ASMS in the base mod (or bugs due to you making any type of changes in the wrong order).  Again I'm no expert on ASMS, but I'm 99.9% sure there's no tool currently that reads an ISO for applied hacks, and even if there was, it wouldn't necessarily get a clean read due to potentially overlapping ASMS.

Quote from: CloudsOverFF on March 02, 2021, 03:39:21 pmI think I'm asking on the right place. Playing PSX ISO
I am trying to make custom weapons. I made a gun using graphic 2d, pallette 5 I think. It looks right in the inventory, and it functions exactly as I made it to, however, the in-battle graphic when the character actually uses it has the appearance of the longbow when fired. Not sure how to make it actually look like a gun-- any thoughts?

In the future I might recommend posting this in the general "help" questions section (after searching the forums for similar questions), since this doesn't have anything to do with fftpatcher (although I understand why you might think it does).  In-battle graphics need to be changed with Raven's Weapon Battle Sprites spreadsheet, and applied as an ASM.

I asked this question once upon a time:
https://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=11728

Quote from: Tytytoast on March 02, 2021, 05:09:16 amHey! found a slight annoying and somewhat game breaking mechanic based on the players perspective.  I'm not sure if other characters can learn it, but bounty can be used by Gaffgarion on Ramza and succeed, immediately ending the battle.  Just a heads up!

Yep, this is intentional - not a bug.  Bounty is a low hit-rate instant treasure attack that is unique to Gafgarion's job, although Ramza can learn it from Gafgarion's crystal.  This type of ability is rare throughout the game, although some high level monsters have a similar one. There is at least one rare item which can prevent you from being susceptible to its effects, but more on that when I add the Poach list in a day or so.

For best results, check out the Lion War Base Patch Resources thread and use the TLW-FFtext editor as per the instructions there to make your edits, then apply them with fftactext .457.  Some vanilla jobs like Rafa's have a duplicate - one as a guest, and one as a normal party member.  The sky pirate replaces one of those jobs, and all references to heaven knight are rerouted to the other job, so there will also be a job that reads "Heaven Knight" that you can rename.  If you're not sure which job with the same name refers to which character, the numbering in the FFtactext editor matches the numbering in Shishi, where you can see which sprite a job is associated with.

Rule of thumb is that multiple mods/hacks are never fully compatible.  Sure, you could apply the romhack over TLW, but at best it's going to overwrite all of the job/ability names that were changed for TLW, and probably create other bugs.  Best bet is to download TLW resources, and manually change all the abilities/names you want with the FFtext editor like Nyzer said.  Most shortcuts just lead to bug-world.

I'm going to standardize damage in my mod by switching punch abilities to linear damage. AFAIK there aren't any straight PA*X abilities that don't also involve WP, so I'm looking for an ASM that changes a formula to PA*X.  Also, how does one change the standard punch/barehanded attack formula (not the individual punch art abilities)?

Solid assessment.  Randoms can be pretty tough, but I'm working on smoothing the difficulty curve, especially early on.  I imagine you're referring to one of the Mandalia East battles, since Mandalia north and Sweegy are (mostly) safe. I'll probably give that one a tweak, or move it to later in the game.  I'm doing a runthrough right now to tweak randoms and generally make battles in the CH1 geographical area a little easier. Also looking at reducing multipliers for some monsters as the ramifications for giving them new skills/more move only become apparent through testing.  But I still want beasts to be...well, beasts.

Job progression is intentionally slower than vanilla because higher tier jobs have better equips & skills (e.g. knights being able to equip spears, samurai equipping bows) that I don't want to be available too early.  Even so, Ch1 can be beaten with just the squire/chemist skillsets, and you get 2 free knights in chapter 2.  Getting skills from crystals and jp from propositions is more important than ever.

Working on an update with random battle adjustment, skill & bugfixes, to be out in a few days.

Alright, update is live, check the original post.


Also updated the Missable Content section and added a small Hints section, with more info to be coming soon.

Quote from: silenthill27 on February 20, 2021, 03:04:30 pmLong time lurker here, this mod sounded really awesome, wondering what the status is like - Are random battles still crazy? I know this is considered a work in progress still, how much of the game is playable?

Great question, and well timed.  After an unexpected months-long hiatus, I've gotten back to work, and a new update should be live within a day or so.  Overall I've made CH 1-mid 2 significantly easier, and have switched a lot of the hardest random battles such that it's still possible to roll them, but they only appear late in the game.

Quote from: Nyzer on February 19, 2021, 09:59:26 pmIt definitely isn't included. It came out a month and a half after this version of TLW.

Shoot, you're right.  The bench hack was an instant classic and I'm so used to using it with my mod that it feels weird to try any patch that doesn't have it. Not a bug then.

Quote from: Ansehelm on February 03, 2021, 02:16:47 amMy guess is that there is something off with your setup, or perhaps you've modified the iso further after installing the patch.  I've both beta tested TLW and am finishing up my own patch that uses TLW as a base, and I've never encountered this type of issue.  A fresh install on a clean iso would be good to confirm if this is really a problem.  AFAIK bad sprites can't cause this type of issue, more likely something to do with Eventing, ASMs, or an Iso that got corrupted.

Disclaimer about my previous post: I realize that the versions I playtested were previous to 1.06, and even my own mod is largely built on 1.05 (had to diverge at some point since I can't use Special Snowflakes due to a conflict with a different ASM in mine.), so there is a chance that xxxsdpsn is correct with reference to these bugs.  That said, I did a fresh install of TLW 1.06 and loaded an endgame save, and worker 8 functions normally, although I can't vouch for the events mentioned unless I do a clean runthrough of 1.06.

One thing I did notice though, is that the Unit bench hack seems not to be active in 1.06. This is only based off of loading a save started in my mod, but anyone doing a TLW 1.06 run right now should be able to confirm whether 1.06 has the Unit Bench Hack.

So pretty self-explanatory, I want DD to be discoverable earlier, say after the Finath River plot battle.  I had assumed this was a matter of editing the World Map Editor/Conditions spreadsheet, but even after reading the World Map instructions wiki entry, I can't make sense of the DD info enough to do it.  Is there a post that explains how the DD triggering works, or is that in another area altogether?

Sweet, I'll take a look at it.  Thanks for the help! 

Heyo humans,
I'm making a character in my mod that's basically an Über Chemist and uses the extra (A1) Item skillset with more item availability than the standard chemist.  I can't seem to get the skillset to function at all - the character can learn skills, but in battle it always says "no abilities can be used" under the base job.  I've looked into this a bit and all I've found are posts talking about changing the "action menus," under which the A1 Item slot already has "Item Inventory" set. If I change the type of action menu, the items show up in battle, but are all colored in red, and I can't use the items, supposedly for lack of mana...
I'm aware that some Asms alter how skillsets are used, but all I've seen in those posts to be in the context of Jump, Geomancy, etc, and haven't seen them with reference to items. 
So how can I make additional item skillsets work for the player?

Quote from: xxxsdpsn on February 01, 2021, 01:25:50 pmA few bugs:
----->Game goes black screen when going to quest string 1 side quest 2a.

From patch notes "2a.  At the start of Chapter 4, if you have Mustadio, you can immediately go to Goug to discover the Steel Ball."

I have Mustadio in party, my next battle is Dogoula Pass. After going to Goug I get the now loading in the bottom right, after a moment of loading the screen remains black. Music should begin playing but it does not.

To progress my side quest further I loaded a base fft went to goug -> got cutscene -> saved -> back to 1.06

-----> Game goes black screen when going to quest string 1 side quest 3a

From patches notes "3a.  Any time after completing 2a and 2b, if you have Mustadio, you can immediately go to Goug to revive Worker 8."

Again used a base fft iso to progress quest, went to goug -> got cutscene -> saved -> back to 1.06, then save after


-----> Cannot enter a battle with Steel Worker

Load screen freezes any time I try and use Steel Worker in a battle. It freezes on the load screen between unit selection and the battlefield. I first noticed this when using my normal group + Steel Worker. Then I tried again with just Steel Worker. Both times froze in the same location on different maps.

Seems something is broken with the Steel Worker sprite? that would likely fix the other 2 events with steel worker.

----->Nelveska Temple Battle Freezes during unit selection
likely tied with worker 7 and 8 sprites.

My guess is that there is something off with your setup, or perhaps you've modified the iso further after installing the patch.  I've both beta tested TLW and am finishing up my own patch that uses TLW as a base, and I've never encountered this type of issue.  A fresh install on a clean iso would be good to confirm if this is really a problem.  AFAIK bad sprites can't cause this type of issue, more likely something to do with Eventing, ASMs, or an Iso that got corrupted.