Final Fantasy Hacktics

Wow. The new progress is very cool.

I like the modular human model you've got. Very cool.

Keep up the good work!

I look forward to what you do next.

Once you have your engine up and running, what comes after?

Woo! Looks great. I like the addition of animated sprites, and I look forward to your future releases.

Quote from: reyhan37 on August 25, 2015, 10:21:17 amThe damage formula for crossbows is WP * PA.

I don't think PA should play in any part in a crossbow's damage. Its power comes from the mechanical spring of the crossbow and the penetration of the bolt. I propose

[Damage] = WP * WP
ignores Zodiac compatibility

This kind of formula is what makes Gun and Monk damage so wonky. In this case you're looking at Gun Damage for Crossbows.

This will result in Guns being significantly more effective to a poorly leveled party, and near useless in comparison to other weapons If you're someone who does some grinding to get the jobs, skills, and levels they want their characters to have.

This is of course the opposite effect of Martial Arts, which is super effective if you are well leveled, and complete shit if you're under-leveled.

This is (obviously) because stats scale by level, and items scale by plot progression. Weapons that use just one or just the other balance poorly. Regardless of whether you CAN implement such a formula, it's a bad idea.

A better idea would be to have a variable that increments based on plot progression (this may already be a thing, either by default or in another hack) and then build a formula based on that, multiplied out to have the same basic progression as whatever the average growth pattern of item-based damage is.

In the case of the crossbow (and gun) perhaps use a multiplied Spd to effectively yield a number range on the same scale as your PA.

All fair points.

I look forward to seeing your next version.

Very cool.

Out of curiosity, why did you choose to go XML instead of a real database?

I bet if you opened this up the way of RPGMaker and sold your engine+editor on steam you could probably make some decent sales.I'd be quite interested in it, particularly if the gameplay mechanics were in editable scripts (even just interpreted Java/C#/whatever) rather than hardcoded and precompiled. It's got a fairly polished look to it with how you're rendering things, you would just need a good collection of sample art assets, which could be the ones you use in the game you're working on anyways. Ideally you'd want the option to compile the finished game to several platforms, like the newer RPGmakers can. (Otherwise people still might feel a need to go with something like Unity).

I'd like to make my own 3d SRPG at some point, and you can bet that something which saved me months of work I would otherwise have to do would be something I would be willing to pay for, and I doubt I'm the only one who feels that way. People do, after all, buy RPG Maker.

Though, I'd prefer a proper overworld, rather than the map-menu from FFT.

This looks really cool. Color me intrigued.

What direction do you intend to take this project in?

Quote from: Asakawa on June 21, 2015, 01:44:40 am
I asked but have not received the answer so I wanted to ask you . I want to know to get an idea of what can be done with the ASM in the game. I don't know of the  limits so I wondered if you guys new if it was possible. All the answers just let me get an idea of where to go.

I also looked into this idea several years back. I'm not one of the regulars here, but I'm around from time to time, and have been around from time to time for quite a while, and here is what I have to say about reverse-engineering the game (as someone with a BSc in Computer Science and work experience developing software for a living):

It would be significantly easier to use the data you can see in the editors that exist (probably by copy-pasting and manual data entry, but you could also write a fairly simple tool to extract it automatically), the game sprites & textures, and the information in the battle mechanics handbook (slightly inaccurate in a few places though it may be) and make a new game engine using modern software development tools, than it would ever be to reverse-engineer the game and work with that.

Even if you could get a functional decompilation of FFT, which will recompile appropriately and work the same (not a small task), the code resulting from such an automatic decompilation would be an unreadable mess, which would take a great deal of time to interpret, document, and organize.

The only reason I can possibly think of to do this is if you need it to run on an actual PSX - and I can't imagine why you would want to do that.

If you're thinking of making a game from scratch, I'd suggest you learn to work in Unity. You can write software in that that you can port to basically every major system right now (IIRC including some of the consoles, but definitely Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS).

Oh, thank you Kyozo. That's going to save me so much time.

I was in the middle of making my own sheet based on what I was able to find, and comparing the two, I was on the right track but it would have taken me quite a while to get there.

So, when I am designing abilities (such as Crush Punch, to take an example). How do the formulas factor in? How do weapon stats factor into the formulas?

That is quite neat.

That is similar to what I am looking for.

But I want ither a customizable spreadsheet to start from, or to know how that works, so that I can balance the classes in a hack I am working on with a large number of custom classes.

Has anyone done up a spreadsheet that will allow you to punch in the variables of a class, and it spits out the stats you an expect to have at leach level, or possibly charts them in a graph?
How about one that allows you to see what various formulas will spit out, damage wise, based on stats per level for a class?

Or is that something I would have to come up with myself if I am wanting to have some numbers crunched for class balancing?

Oh. I see what you mean. I hadn't realized that it was doing that.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I made sure they're going into different places (3 separate "Blank") abilities at the bottom with the other support abilities, plus maintenance.

They all show up in the class lists, they just don't show up in ENTDs.

So, I was chipping away at this (see attached file) a while back trying to make the more boring skillsets into equippable support abilities, such that I might give them more interesting base skillsets.

I don't recall what I started with, but I know I didn't come up with it from scratch looking for offsets or anything like that.

Jump works great as a support ability by the way.

I have not had luck with doing the same for Item, Throw, and Charge, however.

Has anyone else toyed with this idea? Is it a quick fix to make the proper menus pop up and to have them show up in your actions menu in combat?

Request:

For enemy units: Party Level +(+1...+99) -> Party Level +(-15...+15) & Party Level (Random) +(-15...+15).(Doesn't matter what is done with the other 39 slots)

Basically, I would like to have the option to include "Easy" Enemies into an ENTD without hardcoding their levels.

By any chance do you mean the one in the top left for the eyes being too bright?

I agree with you, that one was Kagebunji's suggested adjustments, just for reference sake.

If you mean the fact that I used white on the 3rd up to the final portraits, well, I like that, and there are portraits in game that have that (for instance, Delita, and the Generic Knight)., so I intend to keep those.

I just didn't want to oversaturate the hair. After your suggestions of going a bit lower, I think I agree. I'm going to go with 60% color adjustment.

What *Exactly* Does this patch change, why would others be interested in platying it, and how i it better than vanilla?

You've given very little in the way of details.

That's not saying it *ISNT* better than vanilla. It may be. I have no idea.

So, I updated my portraits.

Top left is Kagebunji's suggestions, the one next to that is JimmyJW88's, and the others are my current version. of the portrait.

I incorporated many of Jimmy's suggestions.
He had some really good (and subtle) ideas for adjusting the shading, and for the scar next to the right eyebrow, as well as some of his shape change suggestions.
I didn't take all of his suggestions though.
The neck is still thicker than he had it (though its thinner than it was), and I actually used a different neck entirely for the four on the top row in a more 3/4 angle pose.
I kept the whites of the eyes that my source portrait had, rather than inverting the shading of the eye and darkening it.I definitely like it better that way.
The beard is a combination of my old design and Jimmy's.
The hair is somewhere bewteen Jimmy's sugggestion and my old design, and there's some new stuff at the bottom.
The eyebrows are a little bit thinner than they were before, but darker than Jimmy and Kagebunji's suggestions, and rather than remove the scar, I made it more obvious.
I adjusted the clothes a bunch, and the head is now in the same position in all of them.

At this point I'm pretty happy with the details and the shading, though I'm a bit uncertain about the color.

I did a color adjust, as my hair is actually pretty red, however, it may be a little bit too obvious, so I thought I would ask your opinion on that. Is the color adjust good (the 100% one)? Should I tone it down more?

I'm uploading it with several degrees of color adjust, and looking for advice on at which point you guys think it's too much, if at all. I'm leaning towards the 67% or the 75%.

[Edit: Reposted the image so the color adjustments can be more easily compared.]

Hmm. Thanks for the input, jimmyjw88. Some of the changes you made, I like and will see about adding in. A few of the others I don't, and a few others I'm unsure of, but I will use what I can to improve the portrait.

• I like how you changed the forehead scar, and I like many of the shading and outline tweaks.


• I will compare your design for the goatee to my two designs I have for it before I settle on one.


• I think you made the neck too thin, the portrait I based it on and all of my references head thicker necks than that (as do I in real life), and the neck size I had is the same as the one on the Knight portrait I started with, but maybe I will make it a little thinner.


• I'm pretty happy with the eyebrow I came up with, Yours lacks the scar and looks a too thin, though I may go in the other direction and make the scar more prominent instead of removing it.


• Finally, you removed the silver ear piercings, which I don't want to remove but may consider drawing differently. I want them visible, but it's hard to determine the best way to render them in such low def.

Hmm. Yeah, I can see how you might think that's a mole when rendered all pixelly. Thats the tail end of my eyebrow. I have a scar through the eyebrow where no hair grows (I used to have an eyebrow ring, and it got torn out when I was 17 - the skin came with the ring when it was torn out - and the eyebrow continues on the other side of the scar. That's proportionately how much eyebrow continues past the scar. The scar itself is about half an inch thick, and almost the same height as my eyebrow.

I do have fairly thick, dark eyebrows, though I tried to make them less blocky than in my first draft while still being thicker than Kagebunji's version, which was too thin.

As for the 16 colors, they should be, it's possible for one or two of them I forgot to condense down a color, and those would still have 17 colors (some of the clothes had 4 colors, some had 3, and I only had 3 palette slots open for clothes - One of the portraits is actually only using 13 colors though).

I will doublecheck it later.

BTW Thanks Re: Shrine Knight. Thats kindof what I was going for. Somewhere in the neighborhood of CH2 Ramza, CH2 Delita, Wiegraf, Vormav, Rofel, Izlude, or Meliadoul. I really like how the ones where I combined the armor with the hood turned out.

Maybe one of these days I'll sprite myself up and do a self-insert mod of myself as a knight-special character.

Alright. Here are several new iterations on the portrait.

The second one from the top left is Kagebunji's suggestion. I incorporated the main things I saw from his that looked wrong in mine, and made an updated version, then started playing with different clothing options.

Lots of referencing of FFT Portraits. Particularly Delita, Cletienne, Wiegraf, Vormav, Izlude, and the Male Knight.
End work is a combination of Knight + Kagebunji's Suggestions + Bits from Wiegraf, Izlude, Ramza, or Vormav (depending on which version), along with a bunch of original work.

I think I'm happy with the face now, and with all of the clothing options I added.

Any other constructive criticism, or do you guys also think it's good now?