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Patch Ideas Proposal Thread

Started by RavenOfRazgriz, September 17, 2012, 06:12:58 pm

Raijinili

Nah, they don't have to.

I was thinking about how FFTPatcher lets you modify elemental affinities of jobs, and was surprised to realize I don't know any mods that revamp the whole elemental system and puts it front and center (Golden Sun comes to mind). Then I realized that someone could make an Avatar (The Last Airbender) mod.

I'm not gonna do it, of course. I've never seen that anime. But maybe posting this will help inspire a fan.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

Nyzer

Well, sure, but that's still modding FFT into that kind of game, right? So that'd be related.

Honestly, the question just confuses me.  :?
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

Gordon_Ramza

Would it be possible to change Ramza's class after Ch. 2 ends, and how easy (or difficult) would it be?
  • Modding version: PSX
The fact there is a character named Beowulf and a family named Beoulve seems pretty stupid. It is not Ramza Beowulf or Beoulve Cadmus/Kadmas.

Raijinili

For some reason, I have this idea for a game modded onto FFT where each battle is:
- You start off invisible (Transparent). This represents your stealthiness when people don't know you're there.
- You go in and steal a character's shoes (losing invisibility).
- You put on the shoes.
- You then need to "escape".

Mechanically, the theft requirement is enforced by forcing you to reach a particular tile, which you can't do using your base movement. You need to Equip Change the shoes on, and then use the extra movement to get to the tile. Victory condition will either be to step on the "switch" or to kill a Chicken next to the tile.

It is possible to require stealing multiple pairs of shoes. You'll need to Equip Change to get past each shoegate.

Possible shoe effects, and their obstacles:
- Jump: Vertical height. Horizontal gaps.
- Move: Horizontal gaps. A corridor of units; if there are 3 units in a row, you need at least 4 Move to get past them. The units can be invincible corpses. (Wait, aren't there tiles anyone can walk on but not stop on?)
- Float: Water and lava.
- Status immunity: I imagine you can create a corridor of spike tiles which have traps that inflict Dead/Stop/etc. (which all the enemies are immune to).
- SP/Haste: If you're not fast enough, a sentinel at the end will instakill you when you try to approach. Need to time it so you can double-turn them.
- Elemental immunity/Protect/Shell/Evasion: Similar to above. Sentinel will deal fatal damage if you don't wear the right shoes.
- Combinations of the above.
- With an ASM hack, shoes may be able to grant innate abilities, such as Fly, Ignore Height, Move In Water, Move-Find Item, and Teleport.

Extra thoughts:
- The shoes can also have negative effects, forcing you to choose between using CT to take them off, and sticking with them.
- May need a self-Transparent skill (possibly with a cost), and/or Sunken State. I believe (hope) Equip Change breaks transparency, so you need to find a safe place to put on the shoes.
- The Steal Shoes skill should be 100% so that the first segment of the battle doesn't require so much RNG.
- There may need to be a hack (an Event instruction?) to remove items from your inventory after battle.
- Perhaps give a choice between multiple units to choose as your thief. Not sure how this will work with fixed builds.


Fleshing out the concept

- Fixed battles. You can't build your thief. They will be provided to you.
- The battles will come from FFT's story battles.
- Dialogue included? Skippable, hopefully.
- You will steal Ramza's shoes.
- You need to steal them before he dies, because he can't be revived.
- There will be three sides in a battle: Ramza's side, the enemy's side, and you.
- All enemies will have their AI set to target you. Once you are revealed, they'll all go after you.
- In some battles with bosses, you need to steal shoes from both Ramza and the boss.


I don't know, the concept of stealing shoes off someone's feet is just hilarious to me for some reason.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

3lric

All pretty much doable via events and attack.out sheet alone, but like... what? xD
  • Modding version: PSX

Raijinili

I designed it to be doable. The only part that I don't know how to do without ASM are the removal of shoes after battle and a way to implement character choice.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

Aeros

Hello. I don't know if anybody has proposed this before or if it's already a thing, but IT was thinking what if monsters have jobs? Monsters still don't earn JP, but they can either get new jobs either by gaining five levels in their current job, or by getting a certain amount of crystallizations. IDK, this might crash the game because of too many monster sprites in use, but would be quite fun, even if it's only one monster type that gets a job. Additionally, either you can recruit the monster from the soldier office or Poaching den once you've encountered them. Monsters will have only three attacks, all learned, and the Beastmaster skill is now useless.

Some ideas would be adding more chocobos, seeing that there are already so msny chocobo sprites already done. White chocobo, Gold chocobo, armored chocobo (that can equip armor, hooray!) and a chocobo cannon ( yes a chocobo cannon) would be cool

The Malmboro (I forgot who made that, it was Alma inside a Malboro sprite I believe) would be awesome.


If you think this can be made possible, I will work on monster job ideas right away!

  • Modding version: PSX

Nyzer

Monsters have shit tons of hardcoding that makes fundamental changes to how they function anywhere from difficult to "it would be easier to remake FFT from scratch".

Also, assume any unused or WotL specific methods for job unlocks are not possible.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

Aeros

  • Modding version: PSX

Aeros

Hello. I'm still not familiar with what you can and cannot do with ASM hacking, so these ideas may not be doable. Please let me know whether or not they can be done.

Worker 8 needs to be repaired before it can join your party. This is basically just to make the game a tad bit harder. Some of Worker 8's parts are hidden in Ivalice, and you have to travel around the world map to find the parts. When you land on a certain area on the map, a text will pop up  saying that you found one of the parts. I don't know if this can be done, but maybe replacing one of the Items in the Deep Dungeon/ Midlight's Deep with a Worker 8 part would make it even more challenging. I suggest replacing the Kiyomori, since that can be bought at the Outfitter.

Teleportation has less of a chance of failing, but now cost MP. Not sure if that one has been proposed yet. Master Teleportation will remain the same.

Nyzer was saying how you can't have item consuming abilities, but does this also apply to the Formation/ Party Roster and not just a job ability?

Destroying eggs will now give you common Poached Items.

Phoenix Downs (or some other item) can be used to hatch eggs immediately
  • Modding version: PSX

Raijinili

ASM hacking is reprogramming the game. If it could've been programmed in, it can be reprogrammed in.

I think the easiest of those will be the destroying eggs one, as long as you don't need to show a dialog box. When an egg is destroyed, call the poach code with arguments, faking other things.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown

Aeros

I'm pretty sure this is possible, but I don't know if anyone's done it yet. How about converting all the skills like Thief, Dancer, Bard, and Knight into one ability? Instead of Steal EXP and Steal Helm, the game completely randomizes which ability will be used. Steal Heart will have to be tweaked or excluded though. You will probably have to heighten the chances of getting a successful Steal or Rent in the game to make it more fair.
  • Modding version: PSX

Retrogamer1987

Played through a couple of mods recently (specifically, Emergence and Valeria for WOTL) and there are a multitude of things that I think could be addressed to make the game better. Some of these might be doable with FFTPatcher I believe.


Issue 1: Revival and "crystalizing"

I get it, it is a really cool concept and adds a sense of urgency when one of your characters die. However, all too often especially in hacks that increase the difficulty, your characters are going to be dying a lot more often. When they do your now forced into a situation where you have to revive them within 3 turns (which passes VERY FAST) or finish the battle before they die. This oftentimes just ruins fights and there have been several times in challenge mods where I would just have to let a character or 2 crystalize in order to finish the battle and lose them forever.

Now because of this as well...you're basically FORCED to have at least 2-3 of your deployed members to have some type of revival ability on hand. In Vanilla, there are 3 secondaries you can select for this: Item, White Magic or Martial Arts. In some mods, Summon can also revive and Ramza's "Wish" skill. But if you don't bring characters with these abilities, or the 2 characters you deployed with them are killed, frogged, petrified etc, your SOL. Not to mention, Revive from Martial Arts requires you to be right next to the dead character with a strict vertical limit, Phoenix Down brings them back in KO range only 1 panel away, and White Magic revival often has horrific accuracy issues.

You can make sure all 5 of your deployed members possess Item, White Magic or Martial Arts to help prevent a scenario where your only healers die, but that also greatly limits your character's diversity and creativity with builds.


Solutions:

I've seen "defend" and "re-equip" as innately present in all jobs as a mod. What about "Item". If every character had the basic Item command, you at least wouldn't be completely boned if your main field medics are taken out. This would make chemists somewhat obsolete minus "Throw Item", but if such a mod was made the chemist job could be reworked.


Another idea is to grant more revival abilities to help the player comeback from these catastrophic situations. Time Mage for example could "Rewind" someone who is KOed back to when they were alive, The Fairy summon could revive instead of heal, Wish from Ramza could revive. Oracle could get a AoE Reraise skill, Samurai could have a sword that does AoE revive, Bard could have a revival song, Mediator could have a revive speech skill.


I know it sounds like Revival Santa Claus, but it is seriously a huge issue in many of playthroughs with these hacks and it gets frustrating having to put Item and White Magic on almost everyone to get through a battle without my characters crystalizing.


Last but not least, is also to simply remove crystalization altogether, but I don't know if that's possible with FFTpatcher and frankly the idea is cool, there just isn't enough effective methods to bring people back from KO status.

Issue 2: Brave and Faith

This is another cool concept that is kind of core to the game and gives FFT some of its flavor. However, can be beyond stupid and broken. With the exception of Treasure Hunter / Move Find Item, (low brave to find the BETTER item....also kind of stupid) you want all your characters to have high Brave, which means spending a stupid amount of time at the Guild or abusing the Mediator. Faith functions as a double edged sword which is interesting.

I personally just try to ignore it and play the game, but with more challenging mods managing your character's Brave/Faith and only using character with the adequate levels is even more important.

Solution

Why not standardize Brave/Faith so all recruited characters have 70/70 of each? Or something along those lines (except Malak as Low Faith is his gimmick). Does anyone really enjoy using the mediator or spending all that time at the Guild to find units with the correct Brave/Faith for your team!?


Issue 3: Job Growths and Stats

This is one I know some mods have addressed. No one wants to spends all their time leveling as a Knight/Monk to get good HP and PA, Ninja for speed, or specific mage classes. You rather be whatever class you enjoy. That is why I usually just ignore Stat growth altogether and just play the game, and it only really becomes an issue when you had someone spend a lot of time as a mage class and decide you want them in a physical class later. Youre sort of forced into choosing a character down a physical or magical path.



Solution

Homogenized stat growth across the board, which several rebalance mods have already done.


Issue 4: Zodiac signs and RNG

It is another cool idea, and I feel bad that I keep up on crapping on the FFT team's ingenuity, but in practice it serves to be kind of annoying when your damage and chance of landing a positive or negative status varies so much.


Solution

Just remove compatibility altogether (Cerabow Mod I think has done this, maybe some others too)


Issue 5: The Battle of the Glass Cannons

Especially later in the game, the Damage/Health ratios becomes immense and you can start to OHKO many enemies, or 2HKO. Damage outranks all other strategy, why stop/slow/poison etc when you can kill your opponents so easily.


Solution

Lower damage or increase health. Increasing Health Growth and Health gained from Equipment is probably the easiest way to go about it. Doubled health totals would make battles so much more strategic and epic. At least until Health caps at 999, but by that point you should be near end-game anyway.


Issue 6: Charge Time

Once again, cool concept and adds an elemental of strategy. It's always very exciting when you see the enemy is powering up a big spell and you silence or kill the mage before they can get the spell off. But it also makes mages suck and extremely inconsistent. Charge times for bigger spells can be stupidly long, and frankly late game the Black Mage and Summoner in particular can be close to unplayable without the Short Charge ability, as you'll almost never land a solid Bahamut or Ice 4 hitting multiple people without that ability.

Solution

Innate Short Charge on all classes to remove it as a practical mandatory support skill for any magic set. And/or reducing CT on later skills so you can actually have a chance to cast something before all the enemies are able to just move out of the way with no effort.

Issue 7: Insufficient early game MP

In chapter 1 and 2, MP struggles for mages can be very difficult to manage. For physical classes, like trying to have a Knight with a Time magic secondary, or a Lancer with Mystic Arts, both of which are completely smart and viable on paper since most of the skills in their secondary classes don't need MA to drive them. However, these Physical classes have such low MPs they can only cast low level spells maybe once or twice.


Solution

Improved MP growth across classes and actual give modest MP+ boosts to armor/helmets/shields so physical classes can consider having a support magic secondary to allow more possibilities for build diversification.





I'm not sure if a Mod exists yet that already addresses all these things if there is I'd love to know about it!
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

mcgeheeiv

Bring all special playable characters to the beginning of the game as an add-on to the latest completed legit project and original game. This means you can play Cloud, Cid, (Luso if this is a PSP) to your party at the start of the game.

Purpose: create a Castlevania 3 like feel when you beat the game you can start with Alucard for example to begin the game with or whomever you picked throughout the game. This way we can experience whatever characters we want and level them throughout the game. If you don't like a character.. say Boco, you can just dismiss him. I believe on PSP should be like 18 total characters.

Sorry if this has already been pitched but did not see it and is this do-able?   

Thanks to the hacker/patchers out there!

Kind Regards,

Eddie
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

mcgeheeiv

One more thing and this should be obvious but all characters should be naked and level 1.
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

3lric

Quote from: mcgeheeiv on February 17, 2021, 01:04:18 pmBring all special playable characters to the beginning of the game as an add-on to the latest completed legit project and original game. This means you can play Cloud, Cid, (Luso if this is a PSP) to your party at the start of the game.

Purpose: create a Castlevania 3 like feel when you beat the game you can start with Alucard for example to begin the game with or whomever you picked throughout the game. This way we can experience whatever characters we want and level them throughout the game. If you don't like a character.. say Boco, you can just dismiss him. I believe on PSP should be like 18 total characters.

Sorry if this has already been pitched but did not see it and is this do-able?   

Thanks to the hacker/patchers out there!

Kind Regards,

Eddie


And so then how would you even handle the story?? Or are we just throwing that out the window here?

This particular idea does not interest me personally, but it would be a good started mod for a new modder to work on, so maybe someone will pick it up for you if you arent intending to do it yourself
  • Modding version: PSX

mcgeheeiv

Quote from: Elric on February 18, 2021, 02:01:43 pmAnd so then how would you even handle the story?? Or are we just throwing that out the window here?

This particular idea does not interest me personally, but it would be a good started mod for a new modder to work on, so maybe someone will pick it up for you if you arent intending to do it yourself

I'm a self-taught coder and between career/family.. no way for me to take this on.

I'd throw that out the window same as Castlevania 3. I always love to be able to re-experience a game with all the characters because I feel we got them very late for Act 4.

or

Maybe adding some text explaining that hearing of your success as a Beoulve has brought heroes to join your fight could work too with a quick explanation that you need to win the fight with say Cid to continue to earn his respect to keep him on your team?

Really? You would not want to play through from A1 having Cloud or another character that you feel didn't get enough game time without replaying the same areas over and over to level?
  • Modding version: PSX & WotL

Spooniest

I apologize if this has been asked about before.

I estimate that about 1/3 of the sound effects in FFT: WotL are wrong. Has anyone looked into simply replacing them with the PSX Sound Effects? I've checked around on the forum for a bit now, and I don't see anyone talking about it, or ever having talked about it.

Off the top of my head:

- Any kind of bladed weapon strike.
- Any sound effect of a lightning elemental spell.
- Any sound effect of wind or a "whoosh" of a body in motion (think the Dragoon's "Jump" sound).
- All death cries of humans (male/female) and monsters

Basically, anything that uses that noise channel, to make something sound "scratchy" or "breathy" seems to have been redone for WotL, and it does NOT sound good, at all. I can't guess as to why this was done, but it was probably to do with the tiny tiny speakers on the PSP. It isn't 'distortion' in the strict sense of the word. That's a guitar effect, and as a guitar player of 25 years I am familiar with what it sounds like. It seems to me like the sound effects were edited on purpose and that's what they came back like, and they were never fixed.

Is this even possible? One would think that in 14 years (or whatever it's been), someone would have tried to do this...?

Apologies if any of this seems overbearing/idiotic/banal to you, dear readers. I don't believe I've posted in this forum much before, so I am almost entirely unfamiliar with your local culture. How's the food here? Heh.

nitwit

Quote from: Spooniest on July 19, 2021, 08:04:13 pmI apologize if this has been asked about before.

I estimate that about 1/3 of the sound effects in FFT: WotL are wrong. Has anyone looked into simply replacing them with the PSX Sound Effects? I've checked around on the forum for a bit now, and I don't see anyone talking about it, or ever having talked about it.

Off the top of my head:

- Any kind of bladed weapon strike.
- Any sound effect of a lightning elemental spell.
- Any sound effect of wind or a "whoosh" of a body in motion (think the Dragoon's "Jump" sound).
- All death cries of humans (male/female) and monsters

Basically, anything that uses that noise channel, to make something sound "scratchy" or "breathy" seems to have been redone for WotL, and it does NOT sound good, at all. I can't guess as to why this was done, but it was probably to do with the tiny tiny speakers on the PSP. It isn't 'distortion' in the strict sense of the word. That's a guitar effect, and as a guitar player of 25 years I am familiar with what it sounds like. It seems to me like the sound effects were edited on purpose and that's what they came back like, and they were never fixed.

Is this even possible? One would think that in 14 years (or whatever it's been), someone would have tried to do this...?

Apologies if any of this seems overbearing/idiotic/banal to you, dear readers. I don't believe I've posted in this forum much before, so I am almost entirely unfamiliar with your local culture. How's the food here? Heh.
If the effects are altered, you know what files they are stored in, and you can extract both of those files, then you can just compare them to see if they've changed. Simplest way is to first check if they are different sizes, hash them (using Get-FileHash in PowerShell if you use Windows 10) to see if they are different in some way, and then use some sort of binary diff program to print the differences between the files. I can offer some advice on doing this should you need it.

If the effects are not altered then the next suspect is the sound engine, and I no very little about that. Considering it's compiled code for two different platforms (one of whose instruction set is a superset of the other, and both with different hardware configurations) it's unlikely that the sound engine code would be identical even if you could find and isolate it.

Knowing that the same or similiar code was compiled for two somewhat different platforms could help with docompilation if you can figure out how to use Ghidra or IDA Pro. A 2nd year CS student hacking a different game I also hack has tried to get it to work, with mixed results.

If somehow you rule out both of those, then the last culprit is the hardware itself. There is nothing you can reasonably do about that unless you are an electrical engineer or a masterful hardware hacker.;

Spooniest

Well thank you for the thoughtful reply. Yes, that sounds like you know your way around digging through an iso file like this.

But no, I haven't even looked at the respective Isos for FFT and WotL to see what's in them, much less know where the files are stored. Knowing SE/Sony, they are probably compressed using a proprietary compression algorithm of some sort, which, when you run into that, you basically either need the exact software tool that was used to compress them, and decompress them with it, or you are "S.O.L," until someone comes along and cracks the algorithm.

However, yes, if we had both sets of files up in front of us, it should simply be a matter of converting the files that are in the PSX version to a format the PSP hardware is going to recognize as "a sound effect." That much seems simple enough, but you'd probably also have to plug them in with identical filesizes, since a program like this will run a check on any files it loads up into the ram, to make sure they are the right size, before putting its "green stamp of approval" on them and allowing the files to be displayed/played back/otherwise actually rendered by the program.

But like I said, I would have no idea where to begin. I know a bit about how games work, but as far as cutting them open and toying around with them, I'm afraid I'm still kind of an amateur.

Almost all the modding work I've done has been through preprogrammed utilities with a GUI. I've done some light hex editing, but that's the limit of my expertise.

You might say that I am "aware of"  a lot more stuff than I'd claim to be adept at.