Final Fantasy Hacktics

Hello there. first of all i want to let you know that i am interested in your project and while im a nobody in this forum i still would like to try it out. i have a few questions, observations and a bit of curiosity.

these are a few questions that i believe are important and help generate more interest and posibly but rarely "hype". Note that im not a pro with mods or anything like that but i would like to know how serious and prepared you are for this task! <-- just kidding.

feel free to skip them or ignore them if you want to avoid spoilers or if theres no answer yet.

1. in terms of difficulty what can we expect from this project on a scale of 1 to 10? you mentioned you want something difficult.

2. How exactly is that rebalance for Swordskills working? i remember reading you turned them into spells so that means MA is
more important now wich is something rarely seen on knights.

3. Are we going to see New items? if not all of them then maybe a few exclusives?

4. i see you talk about human jobs but what about monsters? are we going to see new stuff?

5. Are you touching random encounters? i ask this because ENTD editing can drive a man insane and it takes FOREVER to finish.(that if you are planning to change every single battle in the game)

6. outside of FFTPatcher there are many tools and tasks that i believe are extremely important such as the spritesheets and stuff involving graphics. i know your patch is a rebalance but its always nice to see something never seen before and many of the hacks out there are pretty good for that. are you planning to delve into these things?

these are some of the questions i have but since idk the current progress of your mod maybe i should stop there. you did mention you've been working on this for a couple years but for what i can see it looks like its still in early development stage.

Observations.

hopefully im mistaken but i remember reading that each job level is going to be 1000JP.......... have you tested this? based on a very improvised and most likely wrong math calculation it should take about 35+ actions for a single unit to reach lv2 in a job.. and the average amount of actions per unit in a fight its 4-7 i could probably finish chapter 1 and only have ramza level squire once, unless i do a huge grind (wich i wouldn't mind doing since i love grinding but overleveling has consequences in this game).

QuoteI removed all status immunity from human npcs excluding invite. As a result they are more likely to learn instant kill abilities and use them on you

i failed to understand what you wanted to do here.  if im not mistaken almost every generic and player unit have no immunities  to status effects in vanilla or are you talking about immunities from items? the only "Human NPCs" aside from generics are the bosses.

after finishing your edits go to the .xml Tab and copy the entire column of text then paste it in notepad and save as a .xml file then  place that file in your fftpatcher folder and it should appear in FFTORGASM.
if you are using v.492 you should be able to find it right away.

i have just tested and i see the problem now.

alright so i tried 2 things with 2 diferent outcomes.

Okay so i dont know why you cant patch the iso without expanding it :/  mine takes max 1 minute to patch WITHOUT EXPANDING THE ISO and the game runs just fine. the fact that you can open the patched iso in shishi means something went wrong, i just tried exactly what you did and i managed to open the iso in shishi and see the messed  up sprites, i also tested the expanded file in PSX and like you say the sprites look broken.

for what i can observe expanding the iso is what causes this mess.

not sure if the problem is your ppf-o-matic but the only solution i can give for this is that you patch the iso without expanding it.
are you using v3.0? thats the one i use.

thats really odd... i have finished CCP2 and played with all the jobs and i didnt encounter any graphical or sprite bugs.
maybe something went wrong when you patched or the iso you used was already modified.

could you try to post some screenshoots or at least tell me wich sprites are the ones looking broken? also did you manage to open the ISO with shishi AFTER you patched it with CCP2? far as i know that never works.

what do you mean with "crashed"? im aware its not posible to open celdia's mod in shishi so thats not the way to "steal" the sprites if thats what you want to do. dont know if someone has them but...

Unfortunately no.
none of the tools or hacks we have here seem to be useful for this specific task.
you could try asking in the ASM request thread though those are rarelly fulfilled.

oh and you can edit your first 6 generic units in ENTD so that they can have all you want them to have (Br/Ft, Items equiped, unlocked jobs, other things) but i think you already know this.

No. its not posible to do it with patcher.

and the only thing that makes special characters special in terms of gameplay its that they have diferent abilities for their "squire" job and better raw stats and stat multipliers, other than that they are still generic units and are affected by all the changes you've done to the job wheel.
dunno if it can be made with ASM since you have to consider that you want this to work on special characters only and ignore generic units.

P.S. worries me that if you do this then said special characters wont be able to learn reaction, support and movement abilites from the generic jobs and they wont have a use for secondary job making them 1-trick-ponies like Orlandu in vanilla.

this is easily the only custom sprite that has caught all of my atention.
ITS BEAUTIFUL

so mysterious, so edgy, so badass! im sold! and that portrait is awesome too.
i've been playing around with it and so far im not dissapointed, this is a great sprite. i even went and made custom abilities for it just so that i could see the "performing" frames more often because it looks great!
Great Job man.

Quote1.) The patch is going to be a complete rebalance, but it will not be radically different than FFT vanilla, or at least that is not the intent. I am working on items and shops today and once I get bored/find a good stopping point I'll update the change log to reflect that. Scenes are going to be edited here and there, as well as some storyline battles, and various un/underexplored mechanics will be further touched upon in this patch (poaching, stealing, soldier office, exclusivity of magic items, etc.). I do not want to significantly alter the story in any way or make it into a fan-fic. I want this patch to be accessible to new FFT players and returning players who want a fresh gameplay experience.

i see i see. i asked this because your introduction post only mentioned job related stuff so far. by the way if its your first patch i wish you good luck, that item editing can be extremely time consuming if you plan to modify all items.

Quote2.) The learn on hit is as intended right now. I haven't played around with it in game yet, but I feel the high level magics should both A.) not be tossed at the player every battle because they are stronger and with larger AoEs now (to match their animations) and B.) be an accomplishment to get for free. To me, it's fine that not every Wizard hits your party with Flare/Tornado/Quake when you see them because this could easily get frustrating. The other combat magic abilities have had their damage and/or utility increased so they will not be negligible anymore when used against the player.

okay i sill think the chance for this to happen its going to be a very rare event but i get what you are trying to do.

Quote3.) Player characters will have the charge option as part of their default command list: Move, Act (Attack, 2 job commands, Charge, Defend), wait, status, and auto battle. I find the Charge command to be a lot of fun and not without purpose, so I did not want to completely remove it as other patches have. It is true though that mechanically, they are just stronger versions of normal attacks, so I did not see a reason why players should not have the option to use them. When I replaced attack with the charge command it did create AI issues, but when I replaced Equip Change with Charge the AI no longer had those issues and the player had access to charge skills.

oh, getting EC to open charge menu was a clever thing. by the way have you tried unflagging the Used by AI box for charge ability? i understand that doing this can hurt the AI/NPC but the AI tends to use charge 90% of the time with the other 10% being the use of a diferent skill to inflict a status, to heal an ally unit or a normal attack to kill a unit with critical HP.
archers may be affected a lot if you remove charge for them but it should be fine if you can give them a diferent skillset and move charge to another job such as squire. and i dont know if you have noticed but have you seen the amount of archer npcs in ENTD? its ridiculous! it goes like 50% archers, 30% knights, 10% monks and the remaining 10% other jobs.

so.. the only thing i dont get is how are you unlocking stronger versions of charge? are they automatically unlocked? or what job+skillset are you using for it? if you give archers a separate skillset then you wont be able to level charge unless you move it to another job.
i could be wrong but you cant mix charge with other abilities because charge is a harcoded command like jump, add a normal ability to any of those skillsets and bad stuff will happen.

okay so last night i wrote an entire post of questions and comments but logging limit kicked me out before i could post so RIP my post. i will go to the point this time.

1. is your patch only a small rebalance and skillset changes to jobs? nothing else diferent? items? ENTD? mechanics?

2. your Learn on hit for high magic level looks like its not going to work, i dont know if you are aware of this but learn % affects 3 things: 1- the chance for a random unit to learn an ability assuming it has enough JP left for it. 2- Chance to learn said ability from crystals (ak units shiny rotten corpses). and 3- [highlight=yellow]chance to learn an ability on hit[/highlight]. the problem comes when you realize that for this sceneraio to happen (i assume high level abilities are going to be over 400JP+) theres going to be only 20% chance for a random unit to learn the ability as long as you give it enough JP and theres also only 20% chance for your units to learn that ability, that means this can be very frustrating, rare and time consuming and it looks like it can be an exploit since you can simply have your Unit A level 6 wizard cast flare on your unit B level 1 wizard several times until it learns it.

3. i cant really understand what you tried to do with charge + auto attack (so auto attack = attack command?) if this is what you intend to do then i'd like to see how it works because i can imagine lots of glitches involving AI and CT management, also arent units using a charge command vulnerable to attacks? no evasion and aditional damage taken. im very confused.

Quote from: Xifanie on April 21, 2017, 06:57:30 pm
Well, you said you had plenty of time to test, and you hadn't replied in 3 days, and did mention you found a solution that didn't require my hack... not much was pointing to you still planning to test the hack, so I kinda had to ask. :p

There is no conflict, my hack simply uses FFTPatcher's Learn % as part of its formula to generate a new one based on that and the minimum level & job level for each ability. With its default settings, 50% = 50%, 10% = 10%, 100% = 100% and so on.

the JP issue was fixed but not the ability learning thing as i have noticed RNG is in fact involved in ability learning also i would lie if i say i have tested the hack but what if i dont find any bugs? part of me thinks you know some issues and you are waiting for me to report them O: oh no!
okay enough jokes sorry for the delay but i got a little to carried away with other things.

i never said i was ditching the hack >_> the only thing i wonder and i think i should have asked its how the learn% in FFTPatcher conflict with the ones in the hack, i got the spreadsheet ready and all but before trying the hack im testing the original learn% then will proceed to try new learn% formula

as for the JP its not spillover, tested without giving enemy units chance to perform actions so there wouldnt be any JP spillover and the result was the exact same but none of my several tries gave me a random with a job level higher than 4 (the only exceptions were the ones needed to unlock a job)and that was using vanilla.

yup i knew about the unlocked job but like i mentioned the issue comes when units know nothing when it comes to their current jobs its not really fun if they have the whole skillset mastered for unlocking x job when their current job has nothing but the most boring ability learned i even tested this and yeah secondary and other jobs were fine but whats the point to fight a Dark knight with no dark sword abilities learned?

as for the other thing im the kind of person that pulls its hair trying to understand ASM, im no ASMer and if i wanted to do it i would probably lose interest right away even if it means changing 1 or 2  things knowing myself that would take months to do. things like "you can do it if you believe in yourself" dont work with me

FINAL EDIT: Back to topic i figured out how to make this work without the hack, the only jobs afected by this problem are the ones without a higher job. mime(using it as a job with high level requirements) can be quite helpful for that. whithout a higher job the RNG decides the level of the job. i have tested this and i found lots of inconsistencies with the units being same level, same job but with diferent job level and thus diferent abilities learned.

in fact unlocked jobs can prove quite helpful, increasing the JP required for leveling job helps too but ofc that means the player is afected by those requirements too but it seems to be the only way to manipulate random units JP (whithout using ASM)

as for abilities learned
even with the  learn % in patcher there are inconsistencies in the abilities each unit learns such as skipping abilities with greater %
so hopefully the spreadsheet will help with that.

understood i tell you if i find something  odd

you are right i wouldnt like to waste your time, if its going to be as simple as use it and tell me if you find weird stuff then yes il do it, currently i have a lot of free time to test it out.

oh i could give it a try i just dont know what kind of bugs to expect and i dont think i need to mention i know nothing when it comes to ASM and that kind of stuff but if i ever find something out of place i report it right away

haha the synt shop bug all i had to do to trigger it was to press select to open item information before the shopkeeper finished telling me the required items i guess he gets mad when you dont let him finish his dialogue

but as far as we know it only happened to me (for some strange reason) and i know how to trigger it so i guess its not big deal and its very rare chance for it to crash the game. even so love your work xif thanks for the help

oh Xif thanks for the reply
so the culprit is the allmighty RNGesus generating noob units with lv2-3 jobs? i see
but i just remembered i also reduced the JP required to level JP in order to gain JP faster but still sucks its all rng based i would love to run into a pt with job levels 7

even so i tried again by setting a unit with really high job requirements it worked for secondary since its was required to be level 6 or so in order to unlock its current job but it was the same story for its current job not a single ability only attacks maybe because the AI gave priority to the strong abilities in the secondary job skillset i will try to invite the units to find out.

that spreadsheet sounds like something i would use knowing your hacks are extremely useful 

okay edit it seems what you said was right i tried the same encounter and this time the mages actually put a fight using abilities with high JP requirements i even recruited them to confirm and they skipped a lot of noob like abilites all i did was to manipulate the learning % and placed the good abilities at the top of the skillset
BUT while this solves my issue it created another issue, more like a personal issue... the thing is setting the job requirements to really high levels will mean the player has to go trough that too and the second issue is i cant stand the fact that say Fire3 is above Fire2 in the skill menu thats just.. wrong it makes me scratch my head but like i said thats personal.
i will continue messing around with it hopefully i get good results

Okay i've been wondering this for a long time and im a little embarrassed to make such a  dumb question but..
how exactly is JP assigned to random units?

im tired of messing with ENTD to create new encounters adding lots of units trying to add some challenging encounters with very powerful generic units but 90% of the time it ends up with dissapointment as the units will always use the first or the weakest abilities   for their respective job, in other cases they wont do anything but attack or use weak abilities from secondary and thats no different than fighting normal units, i have tried messing with the ability learning % setting it to really high numbers (unless im mistaken thats the thing that allows randoms to have x ability learned)

i added a encounter with 5 white mages all 10 levels above the party to my surprise when injured all they did was use cure and protect instead of a really poweful ability heck not even raise or esuna maybe they were really unlucky (or lazy as fk white mages)

tried it with 5 black mages and same results~ bolt ice fire and 1 of them had ice2 but thats it

soooo if theres a way to manipulate this manually i would love to know because this only happens with randoms i dont have this issue in main story battles in fact i get my ass kicked really hard sometimes with black mages casting level 3 magic and white mages spamming cure3 and raise, even the units with custom jobs get to use pretty strong abilities but im guessing this is related to attack.out or... not?

misunderstanding leads to conflict
at least now he knows you are the big boss around

but then again