Final Fantasy Hacktics

I haven't shown anything on events in a long time so here's a new thing I made:

This event allows you to skip the first two fights, but still name the main character and the clan, all without breaking rumors and missions (as far as I can tell).
It skips the tutorial on placing world map symbols, too.

I have a lot of tiny hacks like that, I can't really think of a good way to distribute them so I just add them as options to the JP purchase system, I could also add an option to not install the JP purchase system in case people only want the small stuff, or I could make a dropbox folder with all of them and trust people to know how to install them. What do you guys think?

Also, I made a minor update to the JP purchase system to fix some broken stuff, it shouldn't affect the .ups files but if you downloaded the buildfile please redownload it.

Work on the job/ability assignation rework is going pretty well, it has many features already and all that's remaining is the most tedious stuff, like making sure "Steal: Ability", "Doublecast" and the Morpher job are all working, stuff like that. Once it's done it should also mean that the 1bit abilities for the JP purchase are complete, since I'll be able to replace the core ability checking routines to change all other routines at once.

Here's the new "can equip" menu, with a page for each race in order to support up to 42 jobs for each playable race, you can also customize which races show up in the menu so if you want to remove all races but humes you can do that:

If you pay attention you'll notice some new icons, which are another feature that will be included, although they wouldn't show up by default (I changed the special character's races so they would show up).
Another thing to note is that only jobs that have been unlocked will show up on this list, and there is a way to flag a job to just never show in case someone wants to do that. This could be used for things like Chocobo Knight having a job entry for each color, but only showing on this list once, or to have new female versions of existing jobs not show up either, making only the female-exclusive ones show up.

I'm starting to wonder if the new ability lists are worth the effort, there's not too much work left to do so I'll try to complete it but I think the ability to control job changing for all races and all that is the main feature here, the ability lists don't really add anything new, they just make adding/removing abilities from a job easier. I started this whole thing because I didn't want to hardcode a way for viera Red Mages to learn "Cure" at the same time as viera White Mages do for the JP purchase system, I guess that got a bit out of hand.

I'm fine with questions here, I guess at some point I should start a compilation topic with download links, this would stay as the discussion topic, for now I don't think it's a big issue though.

I have no clue how the game generates the recruitment units, I haven't looked into it at all, I think I saw some nightmare module at some point so that would be nice documentation to start with.
I was thinking about reworking the prison into a recruitment center, I haven't done any research on that so this is just a random idea.

For testing I use No$gba Debugger, when I play casually I use mGBA. I also use mGBA when I want to get certain graphics from games.

I love that you guys are leaving so many ideas here but please understand that I will take a while to work on them, I want to focus on one thing at a time. I'll be looking here when I want a new idea to work on.

I'm not informed on how the mechanics work so there's a lot of things I wouldn't know the desired effect of:

• What is the bonus damage you get from attacking from the back in FFTA2? Is it some % increase?


• Does the directional damage bonus apply to abilities in FFTA2?


• What are "fixed damage" abilities? Do you mean abilities that do the same damage as Fight? Are abilities that do 1.5x damage not boosted?


• What does the bonus damage from berserk apply to?

I don't see any reason why any ability couldn't be given its own modifier with some ASM, Magic Resistance+ would be pretty easy considering I already made Move+1, space is not a concern, there is plenty of space available on the ROM, for a-abilities the table would need to be repointed though, but if repointed it can handle up to 65535 ability effects, way more than anyone would ever need.

Also, new sneek peak, a gif of the new job wheel working (after setting all jobs to hume for testing):

I don't know if there was some confusion here but I'm not making one single patch, I'm not making a mod, I'm making engine hacks people can use to make their mods, I might make a complete mod in the future but that is not what this is. If you want to mix and match the engine hacks you will have to do that yourself.

Nothing prevents you from getting the JP purchase system but not the permadeath (which isn't even included with the purchase system to begin with), or getting only the manual sort hack without anything else, these are all their own things, the patches I release are just so people can easily check them out and even those patches don't have everything in them, if you downloaded the manual sort patch you would notice that it's ONLY the manual sorting for vanilla, no purchase system, nothing else.

This is as modular as it can get, I can't imagine a way to offer more customization than this, you can download whatever parts you want, include them on a buildfile and use Event Assembler to install them EVEN on an existing mod.

However, for some stuff leaving the default vanilla systems alone is just not possible, there is just no way to add more jobs to humes without making abilities take up less space, there would be nowhere to save the AP of the new abilities to, if people want more abilities for humes (so that they can have more jobs that aren't just a mix of the other jobs) they will need to use the 1 bit abilities patch I'm working on. This patch frees up a lot of saved space for each unit so it will be mandatory for many things.

That said, the job/ability assignation rework I'm making will have a customization option so you can set it to either 1 bit or regular AP abilities, if you do set it to AP you won't be able to add more jobs to humes but you could add more jobs to other races.
This will be included in the purchase system (because the purchase system will require it), but will also be available on its own, as usual.

Anyway, have a sneak peek, Ezel with access to all Nu Mou jobs, on top of his expert job, using the job/ability assignation rework.
Of course I also made sure that other Nu Mou don't get access to Hermetic (it won't even show on their list).
And a gif that shows a soldier with a custom ability list purchasing an ability and unlocking it on another job as well, because I made them share an index.


This will take a while to get completed, pretty much every place that checks for abilities or similar needs to be adjusted, I have done a lot of progress though, the status menu is almost done, the job change menu is the only thing missing there, then after that I need to work on the job icons (those things that say stuff like SLD and GUN), both so that they are easy to change and set and so that the screen that shows which jobs can equip which items can show all jobs (I will probably make it have a page for each race, although I'm unsure what to do about experts).
After that, there's still the whole battle side of things missing, there needs to be new routines to check and make the list of abilities you can use in battle, make the enemy know which abilities they can use too, and also rework "Steal: Ability" and "Doublecast" so that they use the new ability lists.

Currently you can either set a custom list of abilities to a job or let it use the vanilla system, you can add extra checks on top of the vanilla job unlock checks and also on top of what I call "show" internally (jobs that you can see but can't change into), for example, Hermetic has a "is this character Ezel" check, if the check isn't passed the job won't even show up on the list, for monsters and other similar jobs there is a routine that always returns false that can be used.
You can also specify which jobs can't set item as their secondary command (by default alchemist and monsters) and which ones get it as a third option (by default just alchemist).
There's also an option to set which jobs are set as unlocked by default, because apparently that's hardcoded in vanilla, even if you made all jobs have no requirements they would still not show up on your command list until you visit the job change menu.

As I said this will take a while, but other than the change jobs menu this is going to be tedious work rather than challenging work so I don't have any doubt it can get done. Once it's finished I will update the purchase system with it (and a few other changes) and I will probably make a new post just for the job/ability assignation hack so that people can leave their feedback and questions about it there.

Edit:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/14hyhegmbnqnlvg/FFTA_Manual_Sorting.rar?dl=0
I have been updating the manual sorting hack silently, the link is still the same as always but a few things have changed, mostly bugfixes, I think it's complete now so here is the list:

• Made it so the manual sorting button is always available, instead of only when sorting method is by number.


• Fixed the last selected unit staying as selected when leaving the party menu.


• Fixed weird stuff happening sometimes when using the manual sorting after battle.


• Fixed the new graphics not being drawn and cleared properly when at the bottom of the screen.


• Fixed the last selection not being cleared when R was pressed.


• Fixed the selection indicator not being cleared sometimes when R was pressed.


• Fixed a bug with mGBA that was unselecting units when scrolling the party menu.

I haven't tried to make recruitments happen, but since the game itself can already do them it shouldn't be too hard. I have documented a lot of event codes and one of them is the special character recruitment, which can even happen mid-battle, there is an issue with getting multiple recruitments to happen after battle, though:
When the mission complete animation happens and the battle ends, all enemy data is cleared. This means that even if we had an enemy that was invited, the enemy wouldn't be there anymore by the end of the battle to accept this invitation, there are several solutions to this, the one that makes the most sense to me is making the game not clear the data as soon, making it be cleared after the recruitments or when a battle begins instead.

Right now I'm working on other stuff though, I want to change how abilities are tied to jobs, how the game checks which jobs are available to each race and how the game checks for job unlocking. These things are too limited right now in my opinion. I'm doing it as a part of the jp purchase system but I will try to make it compatible with vanilla as well.
When I'm done the result should be:

• Races having any number of jobs, including races that can't job change in vanilla, or new ones.
  


• Being able to determine a list of abilities for every job, with the option to do it the vanilla way still intact.
     (The limit of jobs at once on the job wheel is 12, I'm still undecided on how to handle this).


• Being able to easily set custom requirements for job unlocking with ASM such as needing X level or being Y character.


• More control over which jobs show up on the job wheel so that theoretical jobs specific to one character don't show up for people that can never have it.


• A new place for the list of unlocked jobs to be stored to, allowing 0xFF jobs to be unlocked up from the previous 41.

Please note that when I say "unlocked jobs" it can mean two things: when a unit unlocks a job they can change into it, but it also becomes "unlocked" for the rest of the game, which makes it appear on the job wheel for units that can't yet change into it, if you have any good idea about what to call these two different things that would be nice.

As for the 12 jobs limit on the wheel, I was thinking a way to handle it would be to split the wheel for units that have more than 12 jobs into several wheels of equal size (so a unit with 13 jobs available would have a wheel of 7 and a wheel of 6), being able to change between them with L and R and maybe showing the current wheel you are on in the corner. I would think that at absolute worst someone would want 3 wheels for 36 jobs but I would try to make it handle up to 9 (for a possible total of 108 jobs... No idea who would want so many of them).

If anybody wants to help with this: feedback on the ideas is welcomed, it would be very nice if you could check if after loading your files the area from 0x2001F80 to 0x2001FAF is empty or not after reaching the world map (I haven't been able to find any use for this area even though it saves) and also if you know of any set of sprites that could be used to make a custom job please let me know.

Yes and no.

Yes, you CAN give jobs any ability you want, including abilities that other jobs already have, but if you want to increase the number of abilities a job has, as opposed to replace them, you will run into several problems.

The first problem is Humes. Humes are the race with the most abilities, as you can imagine the game systems were made with this in mind, both in RAM and when saving the limit of abilities is going to be 0x90 (144), with Humes having 140 abilities already this means they can only get 4 new ones. If you want to give more abilities to one Hume job you probably will have to take some other ability away from them.

The second problem is tedium. The way ability IDs for jobs work is that there is one list for the whole race and each job has one starting index and one ending index. For example: you can give Hume White Mages a list that goes from 0x3A to 0x46, but not one that goes from say 0x3A to 0x46 and also includes 0x22.
Imagine you want to give Time Mages Cura and that you want it to go specifically after Silence but before Quarter and not replace any other ability. Unless you use a tool that can do this for you, you would need to copy the data for the whole Nu Mou ability list to freespace, make a gap for Cura (best way to do this would be to copy the half of the list that goes after it and paste it one ability over), write the data for Cura between Silence and Quarter, increase the number of abilities Nu Mou Time Mages get by 1 and then increase the starting and ending index by one to every other Nu Mou job that goes after Time Mage. This process is not hard, it's just boring.
If you just want to merge jobs it might be easier for example, you could remove Illusionist and give Blue Mage the Illusionist's entries by changing the starting index, then do whatever you want with the Illusionist's entries.

The third problem is the learning. Each ability has one ID, even if two jobs are given the same abilities (unless their lists overlap) gaining AP on one ability for one job would not give AP to the same ability on other jobs: Time Mage's Cura would not give AP to the White Mage's Cura.
There is ONE case in which this appears to be ignored: Vieras have two entries for Cure, one for White Mage and one for Red Mage, yet gaining AP in one also increases the AP of the other, this however is likely hardcoded and not useful to us.

I plan on working on a different system to assign abilities to jobs in the (possibly near) future so if you are interested look forward to that. However, it will most likely not be compatible with AIO editor, AIO doesn't like many of the things I make because I change how the game itself works (and the tool obviously can't just adapt on the fly to it), thankfully I have been using an alternative since I first started so it doesn't affect me too much.

Today I decided to work on something I always wanted as a kid, it doesn't change the game much but I think it's a big quality of life improvement.



I call it manual sort, it allows the player to customize the party order.
Tomorrow I'll try to work on adding sound effects to it but the patch is otherwise completed.

I will make a release after it has gone through more testing.

EDIT: Sound proved to be way easier than I expected. I guess I'll release it today.
Here's the download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/14hyhegmbnqnlvg/FFTA_Manual_Sorting.rar?dl=0
Includes both the .ups patch (for vanilla) and the buildfile.

How to use:

• Go to the party menu and switch the sorting method (with L) until it's in the Numbers mode.


• Press Select on a unit you want to swap, the units will be ordered by number if they aren't already ordered.


• The selected unit will be marked by two stars.


• Select a second unit to swap them with, or select the same unit again to cancel.
     You don't need to do anything special to exit manual sorting mode, just keep using the menu as usual.

There are options to set Marche and Montblanc to be impossible to swap, in case it causes issues, but it is not enabled by default.

It has been a while since the last update to the skill purchase system.

This version is still compatible with existing savefiles. This will however likely change in the future, when ability progress is made to take up 1 bit instead of 1 byte.


The newly included "Move +1" ability.


The new limit for JP, 9999. Together with the other graphical changes this allows for abilities to cost more than 999 JP.


The new, optional, movement confirmation system, which prevents movements from being undone.

Changes:

A few changes may seem like downgrades at first, this is because they are preparing the groundowrk for 1 bit abilities, getting rid of AP in exchange for save data space.
I might do a version that still has the AP stuff in the future, but many engine hacks I'll work on will use this new save space.

• Increased JP maximum to 9999 and adjusted every display and earning limit accordingly.
     (Please let me know if I missed any of them).


• AP rewards are now JP rewards, they grant JP only but work otherwise the same.


• Changed the AP icon to be the same as the JP icon.


• Removed current AP from the ability list display, now only total cost is displayed.


• Changed the "Combo" icons into "Movement" icons.


• Added the "Move +1" ability, replacing "Combat Combo". The ability is complete, it costs 200 JP and the Mythril Sword still grants it.
     The effect is tied to the ability effect ID, meaning that giving that same effect ID to a different ability will work as expected.


• Added an option to the buildfile to make movement impossible to undo.
     Movement can still be undone before selecting the facing direction.
     Units will always select a facing direction after moving even if it isn't the end of their turn, as confirmation.
     This is a work in progress and in the future there will be an option for this to only affect units with abilities like "Lifefont".


• Added an option to the buildfile to make shoes stealable with "Steal: Accessory".
     These options should be really easy to apply by themselves if you want them without the purchase system, check out the buildfile download.

Fixes :

• Fixed "Item" and "Mythril" dummy abilities showing on the ability list.


• Fixed the old JP value flashing for a frame after purchasing an ability and exiting to abilities menu.


• Fixed JP not showing as 9999 (or 999, previously) in some menus when a unit is above the limit.
     (Getting past the limit with legitimate play should be impossible, please notify me if it isn't).


• Fixed JP display on party screen not working at all.


• Fixed JP cost display on support, combo/movement and reaction lists not working properly.
     It is not possible to buy abilities from these lists, you'll need to buy them the usual way.

Options:

In order to access these options you need to download the buildfile version of the hack to modify "Rom Buildfile.event" and rebuild the patch.
Feel free to discuss about your option preferences as it might influence what is left as deault false or true in the future.

• No movement undoing, default false.


• Stealable shoes, default false, stolen by using the "Steal: Accessory" ability.


• Remove judges, default false.


• Steal JP damage and variance, default 20 damage, 10 variance up and down.


• Judge rewards, default 20, multiplied by 10 with the Hunting ability.


• Forbidden and invisible abilities list, blue magic that is learnt from monsters is forbidden to buy, dummy abilities are invisible.

Download Links are still the same:

The patch for vanilla FFTA:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vv44ec74uof50xl/FFTA_JP_Skill_Purchase.ups?dl=0

The source buildfile, which you can use to apply this to any FFTA romhack, as well as to customize the whole thing:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cbjl8bahx29rpyq/ffta%20skill%20purchase.rar?dl=0

The patch for Grim Grimoire, apply over a rom with Grim Grimoire already patched:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/eccmgnwwrnoitfo/FFTA_JP_Skill_Purchase_GG_Beta_0.993.ups?dl=0
Keep in mind that Grim Grimoire might update in the future, rendering this .ups patch unusable, if that happens use the buildfile download.

First of all, please don't say "hex code", it's just numbers, you don't call decimal numbers "decimal code".

There are many tools that let you view images from a rom, but images from different systems have different ways of being stored and compressed, this can vary wildly even within the same system and FFTA happens to be a game that uses many different formats for its data.

You can look for tools like GBAGE and yychr if you want to try your luck but you would likely have an easier time using an emulator with debugging tools (this is very common). I say this because most of the graphics will be hard to find, compressed in a way that is not supported by any tool, "missing parts" (when tiles are used to compose an image) or "out of order" (in an order that is useful to the game, but not so much to humans).
Even if you did find the right image and could extract it correctly you would also need to find the palette this image uses, as these two things are not linked, GBA images do not contain the data for their own colors.
Many of the effects are also composed of multiple images, or have transformations performed on them, the raw image you would find might not correspond to how it looks in-game.

I really think you should try using an emulator instead, look for things like tile viewers under tools or debugging in your emulator of choice, many emulators also allow you to turn off layers so that you can separate a single layer from the others.
That is your best bet, I think. There are also pages dedicated to ripping and hosting sprites, have you tried looking for those? just googling "ffta sprites" should get you something.

Yes, although I think if there's some other accessory before them then that will get stolen first, so you will need to work your way down to the shoes if the enemy is wearing a ring or something, haven't checked though.

No problem, please let me know if there's any issues.

Also maybe consider changing the name of the topic so people know that it is solved and/or that the patch can be found here.

I assume with "simple" you mean it changes nothing else? Luckily for you this is something I wanted to do eventually anyway.

It took me a bit longer than I expected because I wanted this to not take any extra space, eventually I decided to take some space from the japanese font, I doubt that's going to be a problem for anybody, it's like 6 bytes anyway.
There's a piece of a routine I had to rewrite but I managed to make it fit where it originally was.

This patch should work with any mod, as long as you are using the USA version of the game but keep in mind I didn't test it extensively, I just tried to steal a few items and it all seems to work okay.

Sorry for the delay, I've been very busy lately, I tried to address all your points.

Enemy units are in every way the same as player units, the only two differences between player and non-player units is where they are loaded to in ram (non-player units are loaded after the last unit of the clan, even if it's empty) and a bit that determines if they are red/green.

Using one bit for gender would make sense, but I would have to look into it to see what would be easier, making gender a bit or a new race, I want to work on adding new playable races at some point anyway.
I guess gender could be something unrelated to race, since people might want monsters to have genders too, but some races could always be male or female.
Another possibility is making it be two bits, one for male, one for female, some things, like boxes, would be neither, some monsters might be both (flans maybe?), but unless new abilities that interact with this or some monster breeding side activity is added it would be pretty pointless.

To me units in FFTA always looked androgynous enough to not worry about it but if people care about it enough to make alternate animations for the genders I would be glad to add them in.

As for personality, AI is something that's hard to mess with, the only variables that are easy to interact with are the job's aggressiveness level and the ability AI properties, I worry that changing them only a bit wouldn't be noticeable to the player and changing them too much would make the AI exploitable. Other factors that could possibly be played with are current hps, making a unit thing they have less hp left than they actually do or that they target is lower on health, etc.

I know nothing about feats/badges, depending on how they are granted some of them would take more space (number of kills, total damage dealt, number of tiles traversed, etc) but it sounds like a possibility.

Combos take 3 bytes total, one for the equipped combo ability and two for the total JP (even though it maxes at 10...) and AP takes 0x90 bytes, each byte being the AP the unit has for the corresponding ability index of that race, with the first bit being used to mark if the ability is usable (because it's mastered or because an item is granting it).

Making Items available to everyone would probably not be too hard since it's already programmed in for alchemists. Having an individual inventory for each unit sounds possible if abilities are made to take just one bit, but a menu for it would need to be made though and if we get the AI mixed into it... it would take a lot of effort.

I think making abilities have a chance to fail would lead to people just not using them until they are mastered, some abilities already have a lower hit%, some cost mp and some aren't good enough to risk an extra chance at not landing, it would also take some work and I don't know how it should affect abilities that aren't actions.

I took combos out because I plan on turning that slot into movement abilities instead, nothing is really preventing combos and totemas from being allowed to exist within the JP purchase system, they would just be constantly available since getting JP is extremely easy.

Sorry for the delay, I've been busy lately, I attached the buildfile version to this post.

Creating the .ups file is not integral to building the rom so there isn't any real issue, you can create an .ups file manually using NUPS. If you look at the .bat file it calls for ups/ups.exe, I actually don't know if there is any repository specifically for this tool but you can download it from this one https://github.com/FireEmblemUniverse/SkillSystem_FE8/raw/master/ups/ups.exe

I had both the bar and the number of AP in the past, I eventually discarded this, the number tells you everything you need to know and worrying about the bar working at the same time was just wasted effort.

I have some ideas about implementing combos at the same time as skill purchasing but it will take me some time to get to that since I'm on a break right now and I have some other projects started too.

A way to get a lot of free saved space on every unit would be to remove the whole slowly learning abilities thing, that way we could make them take just one bit (maybe two, one for learnt, one for equipped), you would be able to equip abilities that weapons grant you but you would never master them unless you purchase them. You would get points to purchase with for performing actions, but also from the regular AP rewards after a battle.
With this we could keep track of how many levels with each job a unit has, their kill count, have custom names for units and many other things. How would you guys feel about that change?
Also, shoes could be made to grant a movement ability you can equip instead of always giving the effect.

I've never played with Montblanc dead so I don't really know how the replacement works, the important part is that there is no replacement for Montblanc before the first Jagd, which is what causes the issues if Montblanc dies before then.

Changing the Judge type for each mission is possible (and pretty easy) so I guess that could be checked to prevent the death countdown. I didn't think of this because adding the whole mechanic for it to only be used in three maps sounded like a waste, but I guess people could remove judges from specific missions if they wanted.

A "stabilized" condition (like the old KO) could be added too, there's a few unused bits for that, which could be used for the Judge stabilizing idea or for some spell.

As for Judges moving downed units, I don't know, the targeting would probably need changing if it doesn't normally target downed undead units, it sounds a bit pointless to me anyway since most of the time the Judge would be stabilizing everyone with no issues? Unless you kill a lot of people at once in which case you shouldn't be taking long to beat the map anyway.

Montblanc being dead early on in the story leads to things like him joining back at level 1 only for story missions (he isn't even added to the party when this happens, you just have him for that one battle). He will also keep appearing in cutscenes which doesn't make much sense to me.

The game over check checks for the character ID of the unit so the replacement shouldn't cause a game over, you don't get a narrative replacement until after the first jagd anyway and by that point Montblanc being dead doesn't cause a game over so there shouldn't be any way to get problems with this.

As for the blood pool: There isn't much space left in VRAM and even if we had the space I would rather have a counter than a vague pool of blood that could also be covered by the sprites.

As I said above, I found ASM really easy to understand and learn, there aren't that many instructions so there isn't really that much to learn to begin with, but if you are used to working high-level you may find yourself having to reinvent the wheel to do simple stuff like loops or case statements.

You can also program in C and get ASM from that but I've never tried it.

When I start an ASM engine hack I usually start with some feature of the game as a base, in this case it was the undead unit revival counter and the already existing unit removing animation and routines, all I really had to do was combine these things.

Assuming you have something like that to start with and some documentation on the game already, it doesn't take that long, I worked on this engine hack for about 10 days, taking days off and dedicating days to testing too.

ASM was the first language I programmed in and I found it pretty easy to understand.
I'll send you a pm with some links you can take a look at if you want to get started.

Today is my birthday and I bring you guys a present: a new patch.

This patch is similar to the previous one, it adds permanent death, this one however does it in the style of FFT instead of the Jagd style, units that go down get a counter, just like undeads or the doom status, and when it reaches 0, the unit dies permanently.



Undead still work like they used to, mostly, they now have a chance to die when their counter ends, this can be easily changed following the instructions provided with the download. (The default chance is 50%)

There is also a list of jobs that can't die, this is meant to prevent things like boxes dying on you because that would be silly, you can check the full list on the file included with the download, as well as instructions on changing it if you want to.

There are units that are safe from dying, special characters (only while not player controlled!), bosses and judges (just in case).
These units will get the counter only if they are undead, and will always revive if they are undead.

The patch also adds a "new" game over condition: if Marche dies (the counter runs out), you will get a game over, if Montblanc dies you will also get a game over, but only if he dies before you reach the first Jagd map.