Final Fantasy Hacktics

Quote from: nitwit on March 13, 2021, 03:52:30 pmIssue here is that you can't limit your ring/perfume palette-swapped shields to specific classes. If you make them suitable for mages or non-warriors, then you're in a pickle because the AI will equip them. You need a separate category of items that you goes in the shield slot but can be set usable for classes separately from shields.

I would change their type to one of the accessory types, then change any actual accessories of that type to a different type (So say I did rings, any shield slots I use will be set as rings and any existing rings will be changed) then set it so only the classes meant to use them can equip rings.  So it would be a separate category from shields while still using the shield slot. (My cursory testing seems to indicate this will work as I think it will)

And here's the Notepad doc:

Quote from: nitwit on March 13, 2021, 02:18:18 amI think you'd have to overcome some hardcoding to force perfumes into the shield slot, but once you do you could give them item attributes.

My plan for now unless I find a good way to do that is to simply take any shield slots I don't use (14 Shields is a lot when they're all sidegrades) and change the item type to ring or glove and change the graphics.  That way it will have the graphics of a ring or glove and be equippable by anyone who can equip a ring or glove, but it goes in the hands because it used a shield slot.

"Our plans are similar enough that you might benefit from my mod planning document. Do you want it? It's just a few text files with all my ideas and analysis, and a spreadsheet or two."

I would be very grateful, thank you.  Do you mind if I also post my notepad document with the current draft of my weapons rework?
(Pardon the short reply, it's why am I up this late hours once again, lol)

@Nyzer Thank you for the input, the excessive options argument is a solid point.  I think I get a bit hung up on a desire to give wide access to potential elements and status effects, but thinking about it that's something skills will be much better suited to providing.  I just like cool weapons with varied effects darnit. XD
Also I am attempting to make the full spread of elements more available to the player, which to that end I also need to make sure that a variety of elements actually, well, matters.  Elemental affinities aren't used much in Vanilla outside of monsters.

@nitwit Holy cow, I was definitely not expecting such an... expansive reply.  I immensely appreciate it.  To try and reply to some of the main points, I am indeed trying to balance out skills and that does indeed include some skills that did not previously have an MP cost now having one.  This was actually part of the spark for the idea of nixing growths, wanting to avoid making MP costs essentially irrelevant, which would double up with presumably better access to MP healing.  Your reply did make me realize though that notably reigning in growth rates is a definitely viable option.  You can have growth without it shaking up the meta too much, as it were.  Which of course if I do that I might need to alter my weapon progressions, as I have the numbers tuned to vanilla-ish growths...  I'll definitely have to look at some specific numbers.  And honestly, unless I can very much boost EXP gain such that hitting level 99 by the end of the game isn't that hard then I honestly don't intend to tool the growths with too much mind towards the very top levels.  Rather a reasonable range you're likely to hit in a playthrough.

All that said I think a growth retool might just be beyond my ambition.  I will have to see.  I don't want to make drastic changes too often to this project lest I end up spinning my wheels and losing motivation. (I know my initial proposal of removing growth is a drastic change as well but it's one that would require less redoing by me to make happen)  What you seem to have with your equipment there isn't entirely unlike what I might have done with weapons, basically having a large variety of permutations covered with an eye towards more or less everything being represented close enough to equally.  With growth being a thing though it definitely limits what I have available at any given point in the game (And I have very limited item slots)

I am trying to at least keep relatively consistent themes with most weapon types though.  Swords are bereft of special qualities but have the best overall stats for a one handed weapon, daggers are weak but have a 100% proc rate for some status, ninjato are stronger than daggers and do status stuff but with far lower chance, katanas now use the PA and MA formula and focus on elements and spell procs, etc.  So while you may not have access to all elements and stats at each tier you do have access to a base weapon, a stat weapon, a semi stat weapon, an elemental weapon, and more.  Basically trying to make all weapon categories plenty viable so there's still a variety of good choices at any time (Also expanding class equipment options) And also as a space saver I sometimes combine fire and earth, ice and water, wind and lightning, so I can represent six elements with only three items.

As far as reducing grinding I am definitely focusing on the reduced JP angle.  I'm aiming to have all classes take no more than 2000 JP to master (1000 for Squire and Chemist) though I may tweak that number if it's too low.  Some classes had trouble fitting without feeling like I was making something too cheap, Time Mage being the prime example but that's due to having Meteor, Short Charge, and Teleport, all of which I believe warranted a significant price.  So maybe I'll move one of those off. (Thinking about it, Short Charge on Mediator would make sense cause they could talk faster!  And then Short Charge and Half MP are on opposite sides of the tree too.  Thanks, I might not have thought of that without all this!)

I'm also aiming to have the game keep up with the player, having storyline battles scale with level but giving them fixed equipment and skill sets so that you can't put yourself in an awful spot with enemy equipment being like two tiers ahead of you like in 1.3.  This makes grinding still useful for getting better skills but limits effectiveness by not having it push you above the enemies.  That reduces the ability to beef up for a tough fight, but I would aim to balance the mod well enough that you don't need to majorly grind (I'll be honest, I usually see notable necessary or near necessary grinding in an RPG as bad game design)  Random battle enemy equipment can grow ahead of the player still, but I'm removing stealing from the game so incentive to grind for that would be taken down as well.

Thank you for the idea of making more stats incompatible, that's actually a great idea!  As is giving more stats CTs, that was something I considered and it's probably a good idea.

Also I think I am going to make shields entirely sidegrade.  I don't think evasion is something that needs to scale like it does, namely because there's no accuracy stat to raise in tandem with evasion.  Evasion will vary, but it'll be in the balance of physical vs. magical evasion shifting as well as sacrificing evasion for other boons. (Mantles will receive similar treatment)  Also I may make some non-shield off-hand items for non shield users.  I'll definitely be overhauling accessories.  So yeah, I think shields and accessories will be where I do a lot of the sidegrade implementation while weapons and armor are an upgrade trend. (Also I'm giving non-mantle accessories evasion but to a lesser degree.  Mantles always felt nigh-necessary to me because of how good they get)

I think that was everything I had to say, but it's 5 AM so heck if I know.  Also I'm going to make a topic for this mod soon explaining my plans and progress in more detail.  Thank you so much for all the input, it's definitely given me some points to refine my plans.

Quote from: Ansehelm on March 11, 2021, 06:33:42 pm-Greater character variety: Highly variable class growths offer greater potential for customizability of characters in that they offer different rewards based on the history of the unit's training.  You can optimize a unit for whatever growths you want, and have the option to mix and match (e.g. 50 levels as knight, 50 as thief, which provides for a faster knight only slightly weaker than a 99 levels knight). While I understand the rationale that some mod creators have for standardizing growths between classes, the drawback is that it results in all units being more fully generic, with all characteristics being determined solely by their class at a given moment.  This is one of those cases where customizability is sacrificed for balance, but you're certainly free to do this.

That's fair I suppose, I've never really thought of this as a... preferred facet of customization myself, and I always felt like it made physical/magic hybrids trickier to have than they need to be, but I can definitely see why people might prefer it.

Quote from: Ansehelm on March 11, 2021, 06:33:42 pm-To some degree, there will inevitably be progression/power creep that makes earlier skills/items/jobs less appealing in certain situations, but there are enough other skills/items/jobs that the game can still be interesting and full of variety.  For example, in base FFT there are something like 19 swords/knight swords that you'll have access to by the endgame.  When you're preparing to fight Vormav, Do you really need (or want) your knight unit to choose between 19 equally viable swords, plus a comparable set of every other piece of equipment? For me, that's neck deep in "analysis paralysis" territory: it's fine to have 4 or 5 equally viable swords to choose from (for sake of argument, let's say that there can be 5-6ish swords that are roughly viable from lvls 1-33, 5-6 from 33-66, 5-6 from 66-99). For the same reason that you wouldn't necessarily want to remain a squire all game, you wouldn't necessarily want to use your level 1 sword all game.  Low level gear still has a purpose, for sale, or ammunition for your ninja.  And from a design perspective, I would struggle to find a unique role for every item if the majority of them were intended to be equally useful at every stage in the game. 

That does make a lot of sense, I could see it being a bit much.  And this is essentially what I'm trying to do with my mod when it comes to the weapons, I'm trying to make it so that all item categories stay viable throughout the game while also expanding the equipment options of many jobs to make certain weapon types less obscurely used.  As such there should be a good degree of viability at any given point, and also there is little difference in strength between the weapons available at the start of Chapter 4 and the ones obtained after Bethla (Which will be all the weapons for the rest of the game) which means there should be at least two "sets" of viable equipment for that portion of the game.

And yeah, seeing the numbers go up is enjoyable, something I couldn't quite deny even as I typed out my reasoning lol.  I'll have to check out those hacks too, I had kind of glossed over the speed CT one.  And the armor/helm RSM one sounds great, I remember Monster Tactics utilized that but didn't know if there was a hack available for it.

Thank you for your input!  Definitely is plenty to think about.

EDIT: Another question I'm asking myself in this vein is how much JP jobs should require to master.  I am aiming to make this mod to not require a lot of grinding, and to that end I was aiming to have every job take 2000 JP to master (Except Squire and Chemist, they're only 1000 each).  I feel like jobs taking more than that to master would be more grinding than what I really want for the mod but also it's tricky fitting all the abilities into that JP cost for some classes without feeling like I'm making some skills too cheap.  This does make me wonder though, considering something I read in another thread I wonder if maybe I should be cutting some skills from classes like Mystic and possibly removing one or two abilities entirely (Like Speed Save and Teleport)

As the title implies, I'm curious how important it is to have things like stat growths and increasing weapon power over the course of the game.  I know it's, like, a constant in RPGs, but how important is it for say a mod of FFT?  You and your enemies are both growing, so functionally the number increases are largely a matter of keeping up with the enemy.  But it also causes the balance of the game to unavoidably shift over time.  Status effects change in efficacy as speed grows, and the viability of spells is similarly impacted (Particularly egregious IMO because in theory the late game is when you need the stronger but slower spells and simultaneously they become inviable or very hard to use due to the speed) and certain skills and such don't grow as well as others due to growing slower with stat increases (Namely any PA or MA times constant divided by 2 then multiplied by PA or MA, as well as any MA times constant)

The above things have been giving me some woes in the effort to balance things in a satisfying way for the mod I'm working on.  There's a similar situation with weapons as well, I had fun designing weapons that I hope will be interesting and fun and balanced, but getting a good array of numbers both for start of game to end and for weapon type vs. weapon type was a pain.  And I hate making what I think is a cool weapon only to know that it's going to become inviable before too long as the numbers march on.  Examples from vanilla and 1.3 of this idea are the Blood Sword, Sleep Sword, Parrying Sword (1.3) and Knight Killer (Not that crossbows are good in vanilla to begin with).

And all this has me thinking that a game of only sidegrades would be both simpler to balance and allow a wider variety of options because weapons and skills don't become outdated.  There would still be number variance between equipment, classes, and skills of course, but it would be all about tradeoffs rather than an increasing baseline.  (MP is an area that would require attention, but I don't think it's as bad as it looks initially.  JP cost will restrict stronger but pricier spells unless you grind, and said spells will still take a big chunk out of your MP unless you make a notable sacrifice to HP to wear a high MP robe)

And on that note, the big argument I could see against zero growth is that grinding isn't rewarding/there isn't a sense of growth, but I think there absolutely still can be.  Unlocking sidegrades and more/better skills (Because yes, some skills can still be overall better than others without ruining the concept, it just requires care to make sure other skills still are useful or have a tradeoff that makes them viable like MP and CT) is still enjoyable growth IMO, and grinding can provide the JP to do just that. (And of course Jobs would still have multipliers to distinguish them).  From what I recall the Monster Tactics mod goes for a sort of zero growth approach in equipment, focusing on sidegrades, I don't think it's too unreasonable to extend it to other areas as well.  That said part of the reason I'm asking for feedback is I want other people to be able to play and enjoy this mod, so I'm concerned about making such a drastic change.

As part of the mod I'm working on I'm doing a major weapon rework, which includes changing how many of each weapon type there are to a significant degree.  But in doing this I realized that I could run into an issue with Draw Out.  From what I see and would assume, the skill slots for Draw Out require you to have (and will potentially break) the weapon in a specific item data slot.  If so then does that mean in organizing my items I have to keep the katanas in these slots in order to have the skills actually call to those katanas or is there a way to change what item slots the skills pull from (Or prevent them from referencing item slots at all?)

Thank you.

As per the title, I'm looking to get around the bugs with trying to turn Elemental and Jump into normal skill sets.  I've used Xif's Generic Skillset Fix patch, and set the action menu entries to default.  But I'm still running into the issue I've read about where the regular skills you put into these skillsets act as a weapon range skill that does zilch.  The same issue exists with Throw, but I've decided to just jazz up throwing items (and regular items as well) instead of trying to redesign the class.  Charge and Math Skill are similar situations, yet regular skills work fine in those skillsets.  At this point I'm coming to terms with the fact that I may just have to live with these limitations, but I wanted to post this in case I'm getting something wrong and someone knows the fix.  Attached is an XML with multiple versions of the Generic skills XML I have used (I have never applied more than one of these to the same ISO, and I have applied these as the only XML to a clean ISO, so it's not that)

Thanks in advance to anyone with input!

@Nyzer Sorry to ping but I can't find where to mark this as solved.  I looked at the topic on not forgetting to mark as solved but there isn't anything for me to click in the area the example pic on that topic shows.

@Xifanie Here is the XML, I found Raven's FFTOrgASM Generator and used it to put out fresh copies to see if it cleared the issues, and this version got rid of the warnings on the crit rates but the others are still the same. (The MyHacks XML is the one made with the generator, the Weapons is the one I did myself)

So I am able to load the hacks and just have the warnings at this point, I just don't know if this branch command warning is a concern.
On a related note I'm trying to use the generic skillset fix hack and to my knowledge I'm using it correctly (Setting the skillset reference in hex for skillsets like Item and Charge to a normal skillset like Basic Skill or Steal) but it didn't do what I thought it was supposed to do, which is to let me use the patcher to program the skill slots of those skill sets like normal skills.  Is that not what this hack does or am I doing it wrong? (My instance of using this hack is in the myhacks XML to if any help can be gathered on that)

And thank you for the reply, I appreciate any help greatly!

Thank you Glain, I will look at that and see if it fixes things. ^^

EDIT: Just did the mode=data thing on weapon proc rates and it got rid of all the errors!  Thank you!  And applied it to all the location entries for the weapon formula entry since I didn't know which one caused the error, and that error is gone too!

I've just started using Raven's spreadsheets (Great tool BTW) but am having an issue with some of the entries you're supposed to copy and paste then save as an XML.  Some of them output the numbers in the proper manner, i.e.
12345678
12345678
12345678
12345678
etc. But others just output one or two long strings of numbers.  Does anyone know a way to fix this, or do I have to separate it out into 8 number blocks myself whenever I pull from this to make an XML?  Also, apologies if this doesn't belong here, the original Raven's topic hasn't been posted in in six years or so and I didn't see any other topics talking about this.
EDIT: Just checked and the string of numbers doesn't break perfectly into 8 number strings so I'm not sure I can even do it manually.
EDIT 2: If the long unbroken strings of numbers ARE correct formatting then I don't know what my actual issue is, I'm getting a "Did not load correctly" error from the ASM tool.
EDIT 3: I looked at another XML hack for comparison and noticed that they're formatted like this:
patches
     patch
          location
               12345678
          /location
     /patch
/patches

So I went through the XML that Raven's put out and made the indent formatting match (Since Raven's mostly had everything not indented at all) and it finally loaded, but now I have a few errors in the hacks themselves. 
Individual weapon crit rates has:
WARNING: Possible load delay issue with register r3 at address 0x80159114
WARNING: Possible load delay issue with register r3 at address 0x80159114
Weapon proc rates has:
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dab8
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dabc
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dac0
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dac4
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dac8
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dacc
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dad0
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dad4
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dad8
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dadc
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dae0
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dae4
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dae8
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015daec
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015daf0
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015daf4
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015daf8
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015dafc
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db00
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db04
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db08
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db0c
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db10
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db14
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db18
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db1c
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db20
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db24
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db28
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db2c
WARNING: Branch command in branch delay slot at address 0x8015db30
And Weapon formula edits has:
WARNING: Possible load delay issue with register r6 at address 0x80185bf8

Note, I did not edit any of those hacks from the way they come with Raven's Worksheets.  Also if it will help I can post the XML file.

Using the patcher to manually change the damage formula for each gun to Formula 63 would give you SPxWP for damage, but I believe that would come with the side effect of allowing physical evasion to apply so I'm not sure if it will cover what you want.  I don't know how to do ASM hacks but if the SPXWP formula isn't being used for anything else that allows evasion maybe you could alter that formula to disallow evasion if you know how to do that?

Alright, thank you.  Honestly I think at this point it might be best if I start fresh altogether, not even using 1.3 as a base.  I love a lot of what 1.3 did, but with how much I ended up changing it would have been comparatively small work to bring along the 1.3 changes I wanted into a fresh ISO and not bugger with things I'm unsure about.  I initially approached this project as minor tweaks because that's what it was, but then my ambitions expanded a bit beyond my methods.

@Nyzer That makes sense, I can see the potential for unpredictable things to happen due to that.  I was hoping there was a simple answer as both this issue and the deleted one seemed to be pertaining to rather specific and isolated things to where I thought there might be a clear cause and fix.  I appreciate the response.

@Ansehelm Thank you, I will try those things out.  The way my mod started I simply opened 1.3 in the patcher, made some changes, and applied it to a clean ISO before applying any ASM hacks.  I only changed it to directly modifying an ISO patched with the 1.3 PPF because I realized there were some non patcher changes I would need, though I think the only thing that brought that to my attention was the Tonberry still using Panther sprite.  Also text changes, though I later realized that was something I could to with FFTacText the same way I did with the patcher.  And then I kinda went off the deep end and made more and more changes and experimentation until what started as an attempt to simply create 1.3 Content with the current version of 1.3 plus maybe a few tweaks to things I didn't like became major reworks all over the place.  I didn't even end up doing the removal of story battle level scaling, I just nerfed JP costs all over to reduce need for grinding to keep levels lower before moving on to other stuff.

All that is to say, maybe it would benefit me to save my work as a patch and a text patch and apply them to a fresh vanilla ISO so there's no 1.3 hard-coding involved, rectify my Tonberry issue another way (Possibly even bring Panthers back instead, I'm more of a cat person than a Tonberry person lol), and start fresh with ASM hacks.  Thank you for the input, it made me realize the use of the 1.3 PPF was way less necessary than I may have thought! ^^

EDIT: Nyzer, if I were to create a more stable version of this mod as per the above paragraph but still have the Ziekden issue, may I recreate the topic considering the title of this topic gives no indication of that issue?  Again, provided the likely culprits from this thread are eliminated and I still have the issue.

What do you mean by don't have the documentation for, if I might ask?

That's understandable.  And I could probably remember which ones I applied if I looked through the list, and I did apply them to a copy of FFT 1.3 that I modified, I just was unsure because I don't think any of them effected equipment.  Although, one of them was a hack that was supposed to change Equip Change to not consume your action and it didn't seem to actually work, but that's the closest thing.  That and a hack to fix it so that innate reaction abilities don't overwrite the equipped reaction abilities because I gave every class innates and some of them are reactions, but I don't see how that would effect equipment. (I am more or less aware of the reaction priority system that convolutes such a thing by the way, but am unsure of the specifics)  I will edit this comment with a list of the ASM hacks I applied, to the best of my knowledge.

EDIT: ASMs I have applied (All of these came with the ASM tool with the exception of the reaction ability overwrite fix which I found on the forums)

Fixed override problem (the aforementioned innate reaction fix)

Katana break chance (Set to 0)

No zodiac compatibility

(?) Random unit equipment more selective (I dont think I used this one, I remember taking note of it but I don't think I actually applied it)

Crystals can include special job abilities

Start button skips events, effects, battle and event text, etc.

Unit slots backfilled when unit is removed from party

Speed up text crawls

Crits always deal bonus damage

Learn on hit = XX% (XX set to 64, or 100%)

Teleport chances per extra tile reduced by XX% (XX set to 14, or 20%)

Float status grants Fly (sadly doesn't work, units move like they have fly but don't actually get the benefit)

Un-Truth Faith/Innocent bugfix

(?)Broken/stolen items can be bought back at Fur Shop (I don't think I used this, partly because I removed stealing from the game, but looking at it there's a possibility I did... And I read somewhere this one can be glitchy, so maybe that's it?  But I'm also pretty sure I didn't use it for that very reason)

Special characters can do propositions (I think I used this one)

Mighty Sword has XX% chance to break equipment (XX set to 19, or 25%, plus I did the code change mentioned in the hack's description to undo the half damage change)

Equip Change innate all (I think I used this one)

Require sword - require weapons (I believe set to make sword skills work with any weapon)

Equip Change fix (Is supposed to allow changing hand equipment with equip change without spending action, doesn't seem to work)

Removes permanent brave alteration (version 2.0) (I think I used this and the next one, but if I did I'm not sure they work because the brave boost from choosing to save Argath/Algus at Mandalia gave a permanent +2)

Removes permanent faith alteration (version 2.0)

And that should be all of them!  All the other hacks in the list weren't ones I would have used.

(Solved) I have been having a problem with enemies equipping things that are very much not weapons in their right hand.  Miluda 1 wielded a Genji Shield in addition to her regular shield despite the item being enemy level 40 (due to some of my changes it is no longer marked rare, however), and in the next few fights I saw a White Robe, Small Mantle, and Spike Shoes wielded in the right hand slot (if there were any others I forgot).  I don't know what could possibly be allowing units to bypass the requirement that random gear be equippable to the slot, and I especially don't know how they're bypassing the level requirement in the case of the Genji Shield and White Robe.  I have no idea what is causing this, if it isn't something in the patcher then my only guess is it's a side effect of an ASM hack I used, I say side effect because no ASM I have used should have effected enemy equipment in any way.  Is there a way to check what ASM hacks have been applied to a given ISO?

Apologies if this is the wrong spot, as this is an FFTacText question (But it was included in the "FFTPatcher Suite so I thought it might fall under the same umbrella) but I am having one issue with FFTacText that I wasn't able to find anything on.  Simply, my changes didn't do anything.  I changed various ability names and such, cleared out the Japanese text because I was getting a DTE error, and then finally the text patch was successful.  Then I went and booted up my save file and... none of the names were changed.  I imported my ISO to the text editor and it shows the changes as applied, yet the changes are not reflected in-game.  The file I loaded was right at the start of the Gariland battle, IDK if that means anything, I don't see how it would though as the data for the old names shouldn't even be there anymore?

What I'm doing is a modded version of FFT 1.3, I took 1.3 and made some tweaks, saved it as a separate patch, and patched it to a fresh ISO, and did the exact same thing for the text.  Just in case that matters for anything.

EDIT: Um, nevermind, I'm just dumb.  I patched the text to the backup of my mod in another folder, not the one I'm actually running with my emulator...