Final Fantasy Hacktics

Several years? I think you are exaggerating. I am pretty sure even making the game from scratch would not take that long. Well I can do some work in python. (Thanks to Oblivion modding there) Tethical does sound like it would be cool but if I were to work on a game made from scratch I would start my own so I could have complete creative control over the story and characters. Well I had not planned to program over those slots but to expand the number total and have the additional sprites load after the map and all. Now I am not sure how well that would work to have some sprites loading after everything else. Might cause them to be overlapped by objects loaded before but that is just a guess.

I half expected some "Cloud sucks" rant. Instead I get a well thought out and intelligent reply. I am pleasantly surprised.

I see. However I could program in more slots after the ones used for loading the map and all right? Just adding in like maybe 8 additional slots to load character sprites with? (If so then I know what I will be doing for the next month)

Ah. FFTEVGRP does not seem to show all the sprites slots available though. Many of which are just squires that are assigned to seemingly randomly picked jobs. I see the problem I think. The spreadsheet does not list all the job/sprite slots that are unused. Just the in game ones. I did not notice until I looked and saw there are less total entries on it than is listed in Shishi's. Well my problem was a total noob error, I did not fully examine what I was looking at to see if it even contained the slot for the sprite number I wanted to use. (I really need to look more carefully in the future)

Well weapons sure I can see the issue with the sprites but armor should not be a problem. Neither would monsters using jp to learn their skills. Just got to find out how to remove whatever is keeping monsters jobs to auto learn all their skills and remove what keeps them from getting equipment. From there it should be easy since then just allow them to equip armor and equipment like capes for the skeletons.

(Now I did put a warning for spoilers however I doubt that is needed for games made in the 90s however I have gotten in trouble on gamefaqs for not putting spoiler warnings for games on the sega genesis so I figure I should put it just to be safe.)

Even pre-jenova cell cloud was a total beast, he took down the great Sephiroth while Sephiroth had his sword through Cloud's torso. Yet in fft he is one of the weakest special characters. Why not have him as the uber character instead of Orlandu? It would make more sense to have a well known and loved character who has proven to be so insanely powerful it is not even funny in his own game also be strong in another game where he is a recruitable character.

No way could it be a balance issue since if balance was what they are after then Cid would not even be in this game and neither would Beowulf. (Seriously against anything but a boss Beowulf is basically the easy button because of his seal ability) Maybe they thought his limit breaks would be more useful than they are. However shouldn't the beta testing revealed that it is a total pain just to make Cloud any good?

So the total sprite limit of 9 is done because of the vram, I get that. Then things like the total slots for sprites, skills, jobs, maps in the game and all that were probably limited because the amount of data that could be held by a disc back then. Now the disc size getting a lot larger is not a problem as discs now have a lot more space than back then and if you are using an iso on your comp then space is REALLY not an issue. So the one limitation I am seeing is the emulator, if it was set to allow more than just the standard amount of vram that a ps1 had then limitations could be removed right?

So basically my question is. If epsxe used more total vram then could a hack be made that removes the sprite limits and increases the total available slots for jobs and all that fun stuff?

Well that probably would work but there are not a lot of empty human sprites...or a lot of empty sprites in total

Sorry I was not very clear, my bad. The job slot I was trying to alter was number 11 (the first Dark Knight). The sprite I was trying to assign to that job was number 58 (57 for shishi's sprite editor).

Use fftpatcher to alter its skillset and give it the abilities you want it to be able to learn. Not sure if there is any hardcoding that will mess with it as I only have worked on the psx version.

Well I can help a bit here. They seem to be counted as monster jobs and I have been trying to figure out how to alter that however no luck yet. They are only used once and well just replace them in the ENTD with another undead creature type instead that is used more frequently. Oh and for using 2 of every monster type instead of 3 for more free slots. Totally! however they still will be counted as monster types. I personally have used those slots for unique characters with their own unique jobs and it works fine...well besides them not being able to alter their equipment or abilities in game. Now to by invite proof I am not sure if you mean recruiting them as enemies or them joining you if they show up as a guest. If they are a guest and you ticked the box for "join after battle" it should work. I think it works even if they are an enemy as long as they dont go crystal or treasure and the box is ticked in fftpatcher on their job. As for invite, just untick that box under their immunity innate status area. Hope I was able to help.

Well basically I am trying to figure out how to do that but I hit a dead end. I thought it sucked that monsters just came with their skills all learned and could not equip any items. Now I don't plan to try to allow chocobos to use swords or something silly like that. I would set their class in fftpatcher to not allow any equips. However the ones with more humanoid shapes I would like to make able to equip armor. However that is only secondary. Mainly I want all monsters to have to learn skills the same way as humans do. This way all variants of the same monster type can learn the skills of the other types with jp they earn.

So if anyone can tell me how to do that then I will do all the grunt work and release it for free use to the community. (Plus it will help me work more on my FFT overhaul which I also plan to release once it is done)

That is not many open slots. Found some slots that were redundant for the most part as they are only used in 1 battle and aren't unique they are just generic jobs basically with undead and float as innate status (would make more sense for the ghost types or the skeletons to take their place anyway,however they seem to be coded as monster types. I want to give modders every single open slot that I can plus it would help with the mod I am working on that adds a bunch of unique characters with unique jobs to the game.

Well there are plenty of unused sprites, many are squires assigned to random jobs. So I plan to edit every ENTD to clean up all the job duplicates to give room for empty jobs that will be assigned to the unused sprites so that for all future projects there will be more than 2 slots available for custom characters. Now my issues is I can't seem to edit the sprites job association (for instance slot 58 (or 57 for shishi's editor) is a squire whose job is Samurai. So if someone can make an XML that can be used with FFTorgASM then I will do all the ENTD work. (Gafgarion for example has two Dark Knight jobs that are identical in nearly every form so one of those will become a blank slate job. Also Delita's unused Arc Knight job) I included below the xml I made that would assign sprites to unused jobs however it doesn't appear to work at all.

And yes I see the typo. It should read "UWEntries"

So I tried out the spread sheet to alter the entries for a few unused sprites to use some now unused jobs
however it does not seem to do anything. the number 58 sprite which is an unused squire that for some reason is registered to the job Samurai will not alter. I tried a few other ones as well and every time I load up a game to check the changes, there are none. I followed the directions given in the topic where it was uploaded but it doesn't work. Very frustrating.

Ok so I hadn't done any modding for this game in years but I recently started again so I had to redownload the tools.
Now FFTorgASM has a lot more options than it used to. My problem is that many of the options don't explain what they do. The formula ones I get but there is a lot of stuff like "Sprite hack [Special units and generic humans]" and in the area where the description for formulas normally is it just says that exact thing again. It has me a bit frustrated since I googled around but cant seem to find any information on what these options mean. Is there a list of what the options actually do somewhere?

That sounds really cool though, id love some new custom jobs....id make them myself but i dont really understand hacking and coding very well.