ALMA 4: Excalibur grants Forever: Orlandu

[pokeytax]

This would "just" be for passive abilities, though, right? It wouldn't fix the whole problem of not being able to use spots, right?

Pretty much. It's not so much a solution as "well, this beats having thirteen different ranges for Jump."

I'll make sure there's no issue with that tomorrow LD. In general, though, don't worry too much about bug reports; I'm concentrating on that pSX issue first and the code and spreadsheet are not in final form.

[DaveSW]

Ok, this looks absolutely amazing!

Just to make sure, using this would allow me to say, set it so that if I equipped  Reis' Dragon skillset, it would be possible that Jump would be made available too? (Because jump would now count as a support command, like Defend)

In essence, using a work around to make it so that one job could grant access to 2 commands?

Also, any way to set so that all skills in a given command are always usable, and never need to be learned?

[LastingDawn]

Alright Pokeytax. Things appear to be looking pretty good so far, how goes fixing the PSXfin bug anyhow? Have you pinpointed the issue?

[RavenOfRazgriz]

That's right, I can use this to create my Skillset Supports with relative ease.

I'll still need a bit of assembly code for a few niche features but this saves much effort.  I've found I'm going to be using this almost exclusively for Support Abilities, wow...

Hopefully you get those pSXfin bugs squared away soon!  Then it's just double Supports and I'm a mostly happy camper.

[Vanya]

If you set +50 HP as an unattainable skill through ARH (Requires a Two Handed Weapon and a Shield for instance...) then that skill should be Sealed and never seen by the player when they look through their battle commands.

I was under the impression that it only greyed out the ability, not that it prevented it from appearing in the menu.

@pokeytax: I was wondering what happens if I take a support ability and use FFTPatcher to set it's ability ID to an ability that does nothing like silent walk? Will other abilities that reference it still give the effect it originally had or will it use the empty one instead?

[pokeytax]

Just to make sure, using this would allow me to say, set it so that if I equipped  Reis' Dragon skillset, it would be possible that Jump would be made available too? (Because jump would now count as a support command, like Defend)

If you altered Defend to Jump yourself and had Talk Skill add the old "Defend", yes. Jump isn't a support yet, although I'm working on solving that. Also, specials are currently all or nothing - you can't presently grant Reis Jump when she equips Dragon, but not Ramza Jump when he equips Guts, although ARHing it might work.

All skills knowable is outside the scope, I dunno how that part works.

Vanya: I don't know. If you changed Two Swords's ID to Silent Walk, my intuition is that:

equipping Two Swords does nothing
innate Two Swords does ?????
ALMA Two Swords gives Two Swords

but who knows.

[Vanya]

I'll have to give it a try.

[LastingDawn]

I was under the impression that it only greyed out the ability, not that it prevented it from appearing in the menu.

@pokeytax: I was wondering what happens if I take a support ability and use FFTPatcher to set it's ability ID to an ability that does nothing like silent walk? Will other abilities that reference it still give the effect it originally had or will it use the empty one instead?

As memory serves right it works like the Materia Blade, if you don't have the right item, the skills simply won't appear. I'll check this later on in the day.

As for other problems though...

I tried to put Attribute 50 on the Dagger, which is only supposed to give me -20% HP and Jump 3from Attributes 2 but... When I test it... things get a bit wonky, for lack of a better term. My hp goes up x4.5 (even though it's supposed to go Down 20%, if I have this right), my MP increases by x4.5... so I guess that would be +450% as well, it appears that my PA and MA also follow that same trend.

x4.5 is a very strange number, at first I thought it was the game reading out of bounds and just applying numbers that shouldn't have been considered as parts of that, but the game normally never considers these things in percentages but have solid values.

So it is clearly reading ALMA, just seemingly not in the correct way it should. I'll see if this only applies to negative values.

[pokeytax]

A stable version 2 is up. This one should be right, so report any bugs. I'll go over it more rigorously later, but at this point, I don't care if it sets your computer on fire as long as it runs in pSXfin.

To-do:
- tack on a "caboose" to ALMA that lets you piggyback your own ASM before or afterward
- tweak the ARH to set Requires: Crystal for Jump/Math/Supports/whatever, so these slots can do double duty as passives within a job's skillset
- continue disabling R/S/M so it can be used for better purposes (e.g. Gained JP Up)
- merge movement and support
- fiddle with enabling skillsets via supports or ALMA
- forget how bad debugging is in order to facilitate coding above

I'm not sure how much I'll just this myself, but the Cannot Enter Water example gave me an idea that I could at least use this for monsters when it comes to more useless innates....

Yeah, all the crazy lolpatch bait was fun to throw in, but really ALMA is most useful as a repair tool for the terrible supports and movements. Some things are just worthless as-is.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

If you fill that To-Do List out I think you have success with ALMA.  Honestly, until very recently I've had a very hard time justifying ALMA's existence outside of using its giant monstrosity-ness to do very minor things like change a couple Supports and edit a few weapons.  If you fill that To-Do List out I can basically use it for the majority of my Support Commands and I'm assuming many others could too, so it'd actually be a pretty worthwhile tool.  The innate Supports on weapons is a bonus that lets me save editing a Status slot, but still, that just falls under editing a few weapons even if it's editing them in far more meaningful ways.

Tl;dr: Gogogogogogo.  I'd not worry about the ARH bit until far later, it's honestly minor since a little of critical thinking lets you simulate what that'd do anyway.  4 and 5 are imo the best two to do first, since disabling R/S/M is really only needed in some cases.  Others like Secret Hunt, Monster Skill, Monster Talk, etc. can easily be made to have no "effect" with a different kind of minor switch so this is only needed for overwriting Gained XX UPs and Move/Jump +Xs, imo.

[DaveSW]

Woah, wait a second, hard time justifying ALMA's existence? If I'm not mistaken, with ALMA I could:
1. Make heavy armor have a 'weight' by lowering speed
2. Give Dragoons a real skill set that when equipped, also gives that unit Jump
3. Make a weapon that drains HP, and has Innate: Poison
4. Make mastering a class worthwhile by giving a stat boost to that character for getting to job level 8
5. A robe that lets you walk on water (Robes of Ajora, anyone?)

To be clear, all of the above examples are possible, yes?
This seems like the single biggest thing to happen to FFH since the FFT Patcher, and it is awesome.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

FDC has a far smaller hack that does 1.

It can't do 2 currently.  That's on his To-Do List if you read, and is the one thing that I said would make ALMA justified greatly.

You can do 3 in FFTPatcher already by setting a weapon to use Formula 06 (or 07?) and to have Always: Poison as an Item Attribute.

Doing 4 makes the huge schism between player and AI even larger, so it's really only useful in a patch that heavily strays from standard FFT gameplay or if you don't care about actually difficulty or use 1.3 styled bosses where they're just godmode at baseline.

Doing 5 was his most recent addition, and one I noted as being better but still not super-huge given the size of ALMA itself in pure code.

It's not quite the single biggest thing, either.  FDC's working on an equally large hack that is arguably larger in scale when completed, though when both are 100% done I intend to abuse the hell out of both anyway.

[pokeytax]

Haha, you think this is RavenOfRazgriz being critical?

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Haha, you think this is RavenOfRazgriz being critical?

At least you know.  Now I'm curious if this is gleaned from my posts in other threads or if FDC's told you...

Though really, I'm mostly just saying that this is getting close to being useful as a general-purpose tool.  Before, the majority of its uses were... abstract, or good for a few niche Support Ability fixes.  Now it's finally hitting the point where it can be put to a good deal of work in the hands of someone who doesn't want to turn FFT mechanics on their head with Job Level based bonuses and other crazy things, which to me is what's really needed to help justify it for a general user.

[pokeytax]

New update that implements disables for all Movement abilities, plus Gained JP-Up and Gained EXP-Up. Some of them are still shaky and I have yet to even test it, so it's buggy and/or nonfunctional, but it's close enough I'll toss it out and update it later. (EDIT: Made a dumb fix to the Equip X tab.)

It's also got some miscellaneous stuff like easyedit Equip X abilities per philsov's notes and the Inherent Support fix I did yesterday, as well as the skillset hack to let you change the Act menu. Feel free to ask questions if it's confusing, as that probably indicates something's broken or needs to be streamlined!

[RavenOfRazgriz]

The easyedit features are nice to have, saves a lot of work juggling things around.

The disables are optional, I assume?  I'm also guessing other Supports like Secret Hunt and Maintenance are just being annoying currently.  It's good to see a lot of progress on the disabling has been made already, though.

[pokeytax]

The disables are optional, I assume?

Yeah, of course. I've been sitting back on the other supports because I was going to wait until FDC finished up and survey the wreckage, but honestly every tool should work with vanilla so...

[Tea]

On the equip X tab, why does the default not make any sense to me? Equip armour has [3;helmet, armour, perfume]. Why perfume is checked, I don't know. Equip shield has [3;shield, perfume]. Now even the value "3" makes no sense to me. Also, harps are checked everywhere. What exactly is the meaning of this?

Also, another question, about something which I didn't get, then thought I did, then decided I did not: These boxes, what do they do?

[pokeytax]

It's just leftover testing. The harps and perfumes should be removed. The "3" is the scheme, which determines which two of the four equipment buckets this ability affects.

Those boxes are the on/off switch for the passive attributes. According to the screenshot above:

- attributes attached to ARSM abilities are enabled when their job is active.
- attributes attached to job level are enabled when that secondary is equipped.
- attributes attached to mastery of jobs are enabled when the character is a Squire, Mime, or Base Class special character (e.g. Engineer Mustadio)

Please ask more questions if it's still confusing! There's discussion on the last page as well.

[Tea]

So on line 27, there are four "freelancer" slots, and a check to decide whether specials count as squires.
And on Line 25, "everything", does it mean that attached attributes are always active (Dancer S1 with attribute PA+1 learned means permanent PA+1 boost, regardless of job, secondary, and equipped SRM), or that they are active on secondary+active job+these jobs?

Thanks for the help!