Final Fantasy Hacktics

That's what I'd figured. Thanks for the fast response and for clarifying.

I happen to like the WOTL translation, silly though its Faux-Olde English may be. But if push came to shove, I'd take the added content over the pseudo-Shakespeare any day of the week. Looking forward to the next release of your patch.

Glad to hear you are still devoting some time to this project! It's at the top of my to-play list.

Quick question: how difficult would it be to add the WOTL script and dialog to The Lion War? And broadly speaking, how would I do it? Is there a way for me to integrate the text from FFT Complete into your patch, or have the two patches forked enough that this is no longer easily doable?

My assessment so far: a good 90% of animations are buggy, though the abilities seem to work. My theory is that you can give Construct 8 (or any monster, for that matter) pretty much any human ability aside from abilities that consume MP. (Have not tested abilities known to be hard-coded: items, jump, bard/dancer, etc.). So long as you don't mind the occasionally bizarre/glitchy animation, and you can put up with it, the abilities will work fine.

Personally, I don't mind if Construct 8 has a bizarre Chakra animation, so long as he can perform Chakra, which he can. (I switched out Choco Cure for Chakra, given that the latter is slightly less powerful than the former, and is limited by height. Choco Cure was too powerful in his hands).

I haven't tried weapons and equipment, but my guess is that they won't work.

Got it. So that probably rules out my Terminator-esque fantasy of giving him guns, right?

What about Items-based abilities? Martial Arts? I assume the latter would work, but maybe not the Items?

Well, I went ahead and started doing this anyway. For science!

Obviously Construct/Worker 8 is a monster, so I didn't want to mess around trying to give him human equipment or jobs. Instead, I tried to add some non-spell abilities to his "Tasks" skill set. Gave him some Squire abilities, like Focus, Steel, and Tailwind. Also gave him Choco Cure for healing. He may be slightly overpowered now, and his animation for Choco Cure is buggy. I might remove that ability. But everything works.

I'd love to make Construct 8 a little more versatile and useful, especially towards the endgame. Maybe enable him to use items, like a Chemist, or something along those lines. I know he doesn't have weapon animations, so I don't want to go there. But I'm just wondering if there are any hardcoded limitations to worry about before I try to mod him. For instance, would I be able to give him the Items ability without any crashes or issues?

Thanks in advance.

FYI, having the rouge in your inventory does NOT prevent the event from triggering. Confirmed on several PSP playthroughs, in which I used an all-items cheat to obtain 99 of everything -- including 99 Tynar Rouges -- and the event still triggered.

AFAIK, there are no negative conditions against triggering -- only positive conditions that must be met. These are:

- 500,000 gil in inventory
- Agrias, Mustadio, Ladd, Alicia, Lavian in party (note: event still triggers if Ladd, Alicia, and/or Lavian are unavailable due to an errand)
- Land on a city on 1 Cancer (note the exceptions listed in the post above)

Is there any way to adjust (read: lower) the amount of experience gained per successful action? To the best of my knowledge, every successful action carries with it the same exp gain. If I'm doing an appreciable amount of job grinding, my characters quickly become overleveled.

I realize I can: a) use deleveling traps to reduce my characters' levels, and b) adjust each ENTD scripted encounter so that enemies scale up with me. I have already done the latter, and the former I find unnecessarily tedious.

Looking for a solution that would simply slow down the exp gain, i.e., by awarding less experience per action. Not interested in lowering JP, per se.

NOTE: I am referring to WoTL (PSP), not to the PSX version. I know this makes things more difficult.

Yeah, I suspected as much. Too bad.

In re the limit, I do find it a bit annoying. I know 24 is more generous than the original limit, but even still: factor in all specials and secret characters, plus a handful of generics, plus the two monsters you pick up organically through the storyline, and you're at the limit very quickly. If you want to add more specials, you basically have to start booting some generics or some monsters. Usually I give the monsters the axe when forced to make a choice. I try not to dismiss humans if I can help it. For some reason -- call it roleplaying -- I like to imagine that every generic I start with, recruit, or entice has a part to play in my roster and my story. I get attached to those little toons, what can I say.

I assume the party size limit is hardcoded and capped at 24 units. Unfortunately, I'm sort of a completionist, and those 24 slots don't give me a heck of a lot of wiggle room. I'd love to increase the limit if it's possible.

Any idea if it can be done, and if so, how? I am not optimistic, but nevertheless, I'm curious.

Quote from: Oroborobo on May 14, 2013, 10:07:06 pm
to be clear,

You cannot have duplicates of special characters anywhere in the game during events, because they each have specific unit ID and if you have agrias in your formation and also have event instructions (walk this way, stop, raise your arm, have a textbox pop out of your head, etc.) it will just snatch her and she will do the things she's being programmed to animate doing, and it will fuck up all the slots or something, I can say I'm not very knowledgeable about programming, but I know what you have to do is rewrite every single story scene and battle dialogue blurb and etc so that it doesn't point to the exact character ID you're using and make them do wonky shit

if you learn to use the easyvent editor you should be able to see how the instructions are pushing the little actors around using specific addresses to identify them

since most patches eventually reach a phase where you have to run through and clean up all the events to insert characters, it's a problem that will eventually solve itself through your process, but it is definitely a headache if you're testing story battle difficulty balance with your added characters or trying to figure out how things work in the first place

This is helpful clarification. Thank you.

Quote from: Elric on May 14, 2013, 09:59:39 pm
That's 3 posts in a row, all within the same hour... I'm editing these, next time, just use the edit button...

Apologies. I've been conditioned by other boards, in which condensing all of one's replies into a single post creates a tl;dr effect, and thus minimizes the chance of responses. I did not realize that multiple replies would be considered a nuisance here. I will certainly try to be more conscientious about this in the future.

Quote from: Oroborobo on May 14, 2013, 01:57:16 pm
I'm fairly certain that all you need to do is rewrite all the pointers so that every situation that has the character used in an event scene or battle or guest slot or join after battle flag points to the correct version and not the unit you changed, then you can reinsert your modified character however you like.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be that simple. There appears to be at least something hardcoded about the flagging of "Guest" versus "Join" versions of certain characters (Agrias, Mustadio, Rapha, and so on). For instance, I tried condensing all of Agrias's appearances into the "Join" version, thus freeing up the "Guest" version for a new character. I went through each ENTD instance line by line to double check that I had everything pointed at her. I checked and double-checked the "Join" and "Guest" boxes on the ENTDs in which she appeared.

Even still, I encountered a fair amount of wonkiness in test play-throughs in Chapter 2. For instance, the new character using Agrias's "Guest" slot would speak as Agrias during battle scenes in which Agrias (as the "Join" version) was customarily a guest. When I reached the first Lionel Castle cutscene, where Agrias normally leaves the party, the new character occupying "Agrias (Guest)" left instead of Agrias. And I was stuck with a guest version of Agrias in the party, who could not be dismissed and could not be used in battle. I didn't bother play-testing through to the point where Agrias becomes fully joinable (Balias Swale) -- but I figured that the dummy Agrias in my lineup would cause even more issues, and at any rate, my custom character had bailed.

I suppose I could retry this entire exercise by using "Agrias (Guest)" as the real Agrias, and using "Agrias (Join)" as the custom character. But that may cause similar issues. Not sure.

Quote
You DO need to change the instructions directly however, you cannot just have people swapping places and not end up fudging things right up with the leftover instructions that are now for the wrong character.

Could you elaborate on "changing instructions" beyond the use of what I did in FFTPatcher as described above?

QuoteI'm pretty sure there's a version of Celia and Lede that aren't used at all though, you should be able to find out which by experimenting yourself or looking around in the sprite editing tutorials, and then you could cleanly insert those wherever without fear of overlap glitches

Yes, I'm aware of these versions of Celia and Lede. I'm wondering if there are any more like them, i.e., totally unused and open character slots.

Quote from: Glain on May 14, 2013, 03:36:17 pm
You can straight-up use the unused slots 0x35 - 0x3A for new characters; you just need to replace the formation screen and pre-battle graphics.  FFTEVGRP can edit the image slots themselves and UWEntries can point the jobs to the image slots.

Awesome, thank you.

Wait...the UWEntries code seems to need FFTorgASM to implement. I thought FFTorgASM didn't work with the PSP version. Has that changed recently?

It's well known that one of the easiest ways to create a new, custom-sprited character is to "collapse" the two versions of a given character, thus freeing up a slot for a new sprite/character. For instance, condensing both Gaffgarion (Enemy) and Gaffgarion (Guest) into the same slot throughout the ENTDs with FFTPatcher will allow you to use the now-extra Gaffgarion slot for a new sprite and new character. Same thing with Meliadoul (Enemy) and Meliadoul (Guest).

A second method is to make use of the Celia (Unused) and Lettie (Unused) slots by moving a non-battle character (say, Valmafra) into one of those slots, freeing his/her original slot for a new character.

Unfortunately, there are problems inherent to doing this for many of the characters who have multiple slots. For instance, trying to collapse Agrias (Guest) and Agrias (Join) will cause problems when Agrias joins, leaves, then permanently joins your party. It will also cause issues for whichever new character you place in her leftover slot (i.e., using Agrias (Guest) for a new character will cause that character to leave when Agrias (Guest) is supposed to leave).

So my question is: which characters are safely collapsible or movable in order to free up slots? Is it just the characters who have an "Enemy" and "Guest" version?

Really excited by all the hard work that's been done on porting/rebuilding Lion Editor for iOS. Is anyone working on something similar for FFTPatcher, and/or any of the other tools?