Final Fantasy Hacktics

Wait how did you get the 50/50 effect on Rekindle? I don't remember there being any accuracy formulas like that in the game.

I NEED MORE FREE TIME.

The ability changes are very thought out and I love the feel of the unique classes. I need to just stop going to work so I can actually play this through. >_<

Great dialogue fix! I honestly thought that was the thing least likely to be fixed.

And frankly I still think it's stupid that the battle sprites and clan menu sprites are even "different" to begin with. They sure look the same to me. >_>

Although I suppose the issue that occurs in battles with too many units would be a cause for concern since the menu displays a full 24 units on the same page.

Well this IS the main jumping off point for almost all of the animation data we want...unfortunately it's a maze of pointers and values with unknown purposes.

This one isn't like the structures that I could decipher just by comparison. Figuring this jumble of numbers out would probably involve a significant amount of guesswork and play-testing, with or without wizard powers.

Which sucks because...it's right here. Most of the relevant data that hasn't been cracked is RIGHT HERE. >_<

Not sure how much I can do with this personally, but there's a structure at 0x39651C that's extremely relevant to animation hacking. This was found by Darthatron a while back but I haven't been able to learn enough about it to really matter.

The structure has an entry for each A-ability, with varying lengths, and is heavily laden with pointers, though some sections also look like possible flags at a glance. These pointers probably point to almost everything we want to be able to edit for the sake of animation hacking.

Here's a very simple example of something in this structure: Change the bytes at 0x396520 to 247B3908. This forces Cure to use Fire's palette for the particle effect, resulting in a red version of Cure.

Note that this structure will only really be relevant to high-level hackers. The only reason I even found the palette pointer is through play-testing. Testing other values in the structure mostly resulted in unpredictable effects that I couldn't really make sense of. We would have incredible freedom in our ability animations if anyone were somehow able to make heads or tails of this...thing.

I'm going to assume that FFTA2's job mechanics are roughly the same as FFTA (which I have far more experience with).

Let's say you wanted to make Elementalist a bangaa job. You would need to change the job's natural race to bangaa, move the abilities around so that the elementalist abilities would be on the bangaa table, repoint some things, edit the sprite with a separate program to make it look like a bangaa, set up new prerequisites for the job that a bangaa can achieve, and change all related text in the game to match the changes. And that's just off the top of my head.

As for the Keeper, I'm not actually sure what locks the Keeper and the special classes (Heritor, Bard, Sky Pirate, Dancer, Nightshade) from other units in that race. That would require some digging.

Naturally it's possible to add or remove a job from the job pool. It's just kind of a messy process since jobs in this game are tied to many, many, many structures and routines.

Yeah rebalancing formations is specifically time consuming, especially since some missions are intentionally harder than others at the same point in time. But less than half of the 300 numbered missions are actual battles so it could be worse.

I'm too lazy to reread everything. What parts are still under development at this point? Just bits and pieces for ambience? Seriously serious bug fixes? Post-game?

Hm...I do miss playing the game on an actual handheld device. But I seem to recall DS systems having a serious problem with shoulder buttons breaking down rather easily. Did the 3DS improve on that front?

No idea. Have you tried looking for the moment that a specific unit's speed is added to an unknown value (the counter) in real time with an emulator? That's the only thing I would really think to do, given how over-simplified the mechanic is. Sorry that I don't have anything useful to say. :/

Aw...sucks that dogtags aren't cooperating. That would be a specifically nice touch.

Sounds like you found an ID value. It would make sense that the mission items would use a different set of ID values than the regular inventory items, since they generally aren't loaded on the same screens in-game.

If you wanted to actually edit the portraits pixel by pixel you would use a graphics editor. If you just want to change the ID values so that (example) Short Sword had the icon for Bronze Shield, then you could just replace an ID value in the structure.

UNDEAD RING! INFINITE HAPPY FACES!!!

Quote from: dck on March 04, 2016, 06:30:19 am
EDIT3: Dear diary today as I had literally finished up the new generic tooltips for items I couldn't afford single entries for, a way to sidestep it altogether occurred to me.
Didn't want to sleep anyway.

Diary wants details. What was the sidestep you missed out on? Does it involve pointers? Because...pointers.

There are character editing PAR codes for this game iirc. So you could mod him into a full blown generic human or something and dismiss that. Don't recruit him on your next playthrough. Al-Cid is garbage.

Adding more abilities to the agent job without removing any would involve a hex editor, used to repoint segments of the structure in the ROM. As for replacing the abilities in the agent job, I was under the impression that Lennart's editor could do that.

And if you wanted to give the agent job the ability to use secondary jobs, you'd need to get 133t like a boss and figure it out on your own. Because most people would rather remove Al-Cid as a playable character than do anything else involving him.

Quote from: _Sephiran_ on February 17, 2016, 05:31:22 am
Sorry for the double post, but I found the reason, why the clan battle dialogues with Llednar
still crashes. Darthatron's fix is not the problem. After some testing I came to the conclusion,
that the Mission-Complete-Text can't involve the Clan-Battle-Complete-Text. So it can't be fixed
with Darthatron's fix, because it is at a different location. I found the location.

The Mission-Complete-Text-Function starts at 0x08047952. For more information: http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=10685.msg212006#msg212006

The Clan-Battle-Complete-Text-Function starts at 0x08047BBA.

Both functions start with checking Marche. I did a successful test, I changed the byte 02 at 0x08047BBC to 0D.
02 = ID for Marche. 0D = ID for Llednar. Now Llednar has Clan-Battle-Complete-Text! Of course, this is only
a test and you can't use that effectively, because now the game will crash, if Marche ends a clan battle.

spoiler: Llednar Clan-Battle-Complete-Text

So we need a second fix, this time for the Clan-Battle-Complete-Text. I tried to create a fix, but i failed several times.
I think, I have the right location, but some values need to change. Here are the locations:

spoiler: Hex-Editor: Locations

Has someone an idea, how to create the fix for the Clan-Battle-Complete-Text?

Hot damn! I wish I knew the fix, but I at least wanted to congratulate you for closing the gap on this Llednar dilemma. As I recall, playable Llednar was a hot topic back in the day, so I'm impressed that someone's this close. Have you looked into how the generic classes select dialogue?

I -think- they select their dialogue based on race, whereas Marche selects his independently of race. Stapling Llednar into the generic human routine somehow might be a bit easier.

Ah, so I assume the unlearnable skills are the result of every mission and random battle handing out zero AP? That's dirty, but I love the creative manipulation of the system. Little ideas like that can add up to make for a fun hack.

EDIT. On a completely unrelated note, will you be avoiding missables? I'm a perfectionist.

I'm interested in this "instantly mastered or never mastered" mechanic. How exactly did you get it to work that way?

EDIT. I'm also impressed with the general feel of your classes. I can see that a lot of thought went into these concepts and I'm looking forward to seeing the release.

Quote from: dck on February 01, 2016, 08:21:37 pm
Hi, I'm curious about what bcrobert covers in this post, have you confirmed that adding that fourth effect is recognized when using the skill? I'm wondering because as far as I can tell there are no vanilla abilities that use four effects, and in my attempts both with AIO and the nightmare modules the effect never seems to trigger at all.

Oh. I never actually created any 4-slot abilities, come to think of it. If the 4th slot is actually not an effect slot, then it would explain why "Hunting" randomly has a value of 0xA set to it. Perhaps it's actually a value that decides how many judge points you get upon killing a unit with that skill? (Hunting=10, all else=1)

The fastest way to double-check this byte's utility would probably be to test the effects of the byte in-game. It's always possible that we overlooked something since that particular structure was deciphered back when we were constantly breaking new ground.