ALMA 4: Excalibur grants Forever: Orlandu

[pokeytax]

Truth is I don't even have these on my home computer.
LibreOffice is free and not quite as bloated as it was?
Or you can wait for someone who has them to process your changes for you, I will this week if no one else does.

[formerdeathcorps]

Are you saying that normally the version of MIPS that the PSX uses needs a delay slot after loading bytes/hw/w which are ignored in like pSX because it uses a more recent version of MIPS?

Yes, though the emulator that gives the most problems to this regard is actually ePSXe.

[Glain]

More recent version of MIPS or not, I dunno. It's something to do with the way the emulators work that diverges from what the actual PSX hardware does, in certain conditions. I don't really think we can know why that is unless we actually saw the source code of the emulators... but it's not important, as we should be considering the load delay anyway.

[Eternal]

Looking at the Skillsets tab now. Can you explain it to me a bit? I don't see a clear explanation for what it does in the spreadsheet.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

Does anyone think I should tell the guys at gamehacking.org, qhimm, and whatnot about your findings RE mips 3000?

[Eternal]

Can't hurt.

[pokeytax]

Looking at the Skillsets tab now. Can you explain it to me a bit? I don't see a clear explanation for what it does in the spreadsheet.

You can replace Attack with SKILLSET or add SKILLSET to the Act menu when various stuff (mostly Supports and statuses) is active. For example, have Equip Spear grant use of JUMP or Critical change Attack to LIMIT.

Importantly the AI does not recognize Attack replacements and only accepts one added skillset. However, Defend and Equip Change still function for the AI, so altering those skillsets via GSH is an option if you need multiple added skillsets.

I intend to upgrade this in the future because having to waste a dummy support when you just want Lancers to have Jump and Dragoon commands is lame and the AI implementation is quite clumsy.

[MagiusRerecros]

Do you have the Analysis Toolpak (Excel) or AddIn (OpenOffice)? ALMA uses DEC2HEX/HEX2DEC which requires these.

Analysis AddIn seems to actually come standard with OpenOffice nowadays. For example, I haven't installed any extensions to OpenOffice myself, and yet I can still use the DEC2HEX function in OpenOffice Calc without do anything special.

I don't know whether or not Analysis Toolpak comes standard with Excel, because I don't have Excel. Don't have the money to spring for Microsoft Office, and it didn't come pre-installed on my laptop like it sometimes does...

[Eternal]

Okay, so let's say I want to make a skillset accessible to all jobs, but NOT for the AI. How would I go about doing that in ALMA? Without replacing Attack, of course.

[pokeytax]

There should be a "Player Control" option wedged in between the Movements and the statuses. Try that. And then, uh, let me know if it works?

Also, I should make it clear that if you want player-use Defend and Equip Change you need to use two rows to manually set them. They were originally in the bottom two rows by default to make that clear, but I stupidly left some testing garbage in the most recent version, I think.

[Ryason55]

I'm kinda having issues with this. I used this to add a new Support-based skillset, so I applied only the "Skillset" and "AI Skillset" hacks after making the neccessary changes. When I go to test this, I find:
-EVERY AI controlled character has the same primary skillset overriding their set one (I've seen "3C Mighty Sword" and what might be "2C Breath", in different battles of course)
-All (to my knowledge) human jobs (Plus 3B) innately have the new skillset
-The skillset won't show up at all for Jobs 39, 8E, and 8F, and the Item skillset is removed from their status screens during battle

Here's the set-up I used:

Code Select Expand

Extra Slot (blank Support 2) 4D
I had added "4D" myself, but the same effect also happens with an unmodified spreadsheet.

[pokeytax]

Unfortunately I'm going on vacation until Tuesday so it'll have to wait, I'll take a look when I'm back. Can't believe how many gamebreaking bugs this segment has... it sounds like it's not something simple like your putting the command in the top line instead of the bottom, if it's happening in an unmodified version.

EDIT: Okay, seems to be working now for PCs. I'm a little worried about the AI side though.

[Eternal]

Enjoy your vacation. You've earned it!

[Argy]

Pokey,

Fantastic program, looks all nice and pretty (and there are some shiny parts as well). Since I am not the best at all in understanding the hex values etc, can I ask you for a massive favour? Can you give a step by step example of changing something in ALMA and the applying it to the patch? Obviously, this can be at the bottom of your to-do list! Thanking you in advance :-)

[Dome]

I tried making this

Move over surfaces: Turns walk on water in: Walk on water + Walk on lava + Half: Water and fire
Any ground: Any ground + Any weather + Move in water + Immune:Poison
Finger guard: On top of what already does, makes you immune to every bad status the mediator can inflict (Sleep - Death sentence - Berserk Don't act)

I also posted the .Xls some posts ago...but I cannot apply the hack with OrgASM when I make it
Any help?

[MysticKnightFF5]

Actually...that would make finger guard rather awesome. And charm, include charm just because there needs to be a counter to your DPS fighter getting charmed before you can throw shit at him.

[Dome]

Actually...that would make finger guard rather awesome. And charm, include charm just because there needs to be a counter to your DPS fighter getting charmed before you can throw shit at him.

Charm is similar to a talk skill after all...it might be worth considering

[MysticKnightFF5]

<has lost most of my team over my damage dealer getting charmed>

[pokeytax]

Can you give a step by step example of changing something in ALMA and the applying it to the patch? Obviously, this can be at the bottom of your to-do list! Thanking you in advance :-)

You will need: ALMA 3.xls, Microsoft Excel with Analysis Toolpak or LibreOffice with Analysis Add-in, FFTPatcher (FFTorgASM).

1 Change cell C4 on tab 'Items' to 50. This assigns Attribute 50 to Daggers.
2 Change cell U16 on tab 'Attributes' to 1 (or anything really). This assigns Teleport to Attribute 50.
3 Open a text editor (e.g. Notepad).
4 Copy the entire contents of the 'XML' tab to the text editor and save as 'argyalma.xml' in your FFTPatcher directory.
5 Run FFTorgASM.exe, check the box by 'ALMA: Attributes', and press 'Patch ISO...'.
6 Select the ISO you want to patch and press 'Save'. (Always keep a backup!)

This should make Daggers grant Teleport.

Please ask more questions if that's not clear enough, I know you may feel dumb but you're not and every time you ask a question a lurker gets her wings.

I tried making thisI also posted the .Xls some posts ago...but I cannot apply the hack with OrgASM when I make it
Any help?

You need the Analysis Add-in/Toolpak for LibreOffice/Excel. I did make an .xml file for you last week which I'll post tomorrow if I have time, but spreadsheets are the most efficient way to make a customizable hack, so joining us in the 20th century is probably the best plan in the long run.

Going to be rewriting this so don't expect the new version too soon. Adding previewability for the advanced stat modification is going to be a royal pain (rebuilding all stats from raws every time), but half the fun of equipping a Muscle Belt that adds +50% HP is seeing that number tick up in the preview screen, so I'm committed at this point. Still need to find where HP/MP previews for R/S/M live, though... if they even exist without major remodeling.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Random thing while you're doing that: Celdia reported that her Item that had innate: Half of MP wasn't working correctly with ALMA as well.  Any idea what's causing that?

Also, you should try to lighten up on the Macros, even if it means telling people just to not be dumb and input 01 and not 1.  I ended up redoing the Spreadsheet you made for Pride because a solid sum of people couldn't use it.  It was the Macro you were using to force the input to be 0X and not just X that was wigging it out, if you're curious.