ALMA 4: Excalibur grants Forever: Orlandu

[pokeytax]

There is another similar pSX-only, runtime-only bug occurring when an attribute is applied in battle. I stuck an attribute on Dagger, so equipping a Dagger will crash the game. The hack runs fine if no attributes are called.

I'm going to go squash it through trial and error, but the ALMA 4 file in the OP exhibits this issue for the curious.

[MysticKnightFF5]

FDC, did you learn all your asm skills here, with no university classes or anything?  Are you guys going to start the next facebook someday?

If FDC makes the next facebook, I will assassinate him. On that, I (very seriously) swear. (I mean it FDC, you better not)

[formerdeathcorps]

Yes and no, PGF.  FFH got me started on learning ASM, but I practiced by hacking GBA games too.  The Internet also proved invaluable in finding opcode translators, information on computer architecture (these are often lecture slides from professors, so to say I didn't use any university classes would be a lie, just not formally), and the actual limitations of the MIPS chip and the pSX.  Quite often, studying existing code lets me figure out how to write what I want, and how to improve the space used.

And MK, no need to worry or endanger yourself (or me).  I'm not into "social networking" anyways.

[pokeytax]

Close enough to be released. I'm going to go through and test more comprehensively using the CCP and Parted Ways ALMA 3 loadouts, so I still wouldn't run your patch on it, but I want to put it out before I go on vacation this weekend. I'm going to try to flesh out the OP soon, as I realize the scripting is basically useless with so little documentation.

Stuff that still doesn't work:
- Initial and Cancel statuses. Huh, weird. You can use the new attribute box to easily chain to an ordinary item attribute that adds these though.
- WP and evasion modifiers. FFT is kind of addled about these (it loads them from unit data, then ignores them and recalculates based on equips, then writes that to unit data) so I'm going to have to tinker to get them working.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Looking at the changelog, it looks like you scrapped a bunch of stuff no one was really ever going to make much use of for things like gear sets that are more generally useful.  I like this change.

ALMAscript? I'm looking at it, and even with the help, it makes my head hurt.  This is partially due to the fact that many settings (FLAGGED, REWARD, Skip X Steps, etc.) aren't clearly defined into what they actually mean.  The distinctive names are nice - but without something beyond a vague idea of what they do, it doesn't help much.  I think your help notes need to elaborate on what each of your settings actually means for the coding-impaired, and your example logic (Two Swords denies Gun/Crossbow + Sword, etc.) needs to be broken down so people can actually see what it's doing, because honestly, even I have no clue what you're actually doing there.

If you're still hurting some space, you could always try fixing that stuff FDC mentioned if you haven't already.  Though, the Identity Attributes don't seem all that useful, personally, since all you need to do to simulate that effect with Job Attributes is give non-Ramza UberSquire or non-Mustadio Engineer a dupe of the Job in a different slot, and there's so many Job slots that having space for this is easier than taking a piss.  Seems like an absolute waste of space, considering that.  A number of the other features look pretty nice though, like I said earlier.

[pokeytax]

ALMAscript? I'm looking at it, and even with the help, it makes my head hurt.

Yeah, making it easier is high on the list. It shouldn't be an ordeal to make a simple gunblade.

Identity attributes

Maybe what I said was unclear - these don't add traits to Ramza's UberSquire job (as you note, this is easily done with job attributes) but to Ramza himself. So giving attribute 50 to jobs 01, 02, 03 means that Ramza will have Gained JP Up whether he is a Squire or Knight or Calculator, but a unit besides Ramza with current job 01, 02, or 03 will not have Gained JP Up.

[RandMuadDib]

interesting... so i could, in theory, give a Llyud character innate "Fly," regarless of his current class? or is this Ramza-specific?

[pokeytax]

interesting... so i could, in theory, give a Llyud character innate "Fly," regarless of his current class? or is this Ramza-specific?

Yeah, that's the idea. Of course, if you want generics to stay competitive, you'll have to either couple "Fly" with some debuff or grant generics their own global attribute (identity 4A).

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

How big of a pain is the previewable item attributes thing giving you?

[pokeytax]

How big of a pain is the previewable item attributes thing giving you?

It's already working for simple stat adds and decrements. For the whole enchilada... well:

- vanilla FFT just deals with simple stat adds and decrements, so it just looks at the difference between the old item/RSM and new item/RSM.
- ALMA has too much crazy garbage like multipliers that can't be easily modeled. The easiest way to find out the difference between old and new stats is... run ALMA. So I'm going to have to rework it into a proper subroutine that stores r31 in the stack, run the subroutine on a a full dummy of unit data, and compare the new data to the old data manually. It seems possible, and thankfully it's in WORLD.BIN where space is less precious, but I'm going to get the main code running first.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

You mean stat multipliers?

[pokeytax]

You mean stat multipliers?

And forced de-equip, and minimum multipliers, and added R/S/M attributes... there's just a lot going on.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

Well, can you throw something together that pulls off previewability and keeps only the extra attributes and those attribute properties that are only present in vanilla?  Because that's all I really need - extra attributes and previewablity.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

So giving attribute 50 to jobs 01, 02, 03 means that Ramza will have Gained JP Up whether he is a Squire or Knight or Calculator, but a unit besides Ramza with current job 01, 02, or 03 will not have Gained JP Up.

Ah.  Okay.  That makes it at least somewhat valuable then.  How much space is it taking up though?  If you're still tight on space, that seems like something that could be reduced to only a few entries - I can't imagine the majority of people will use this on more than a single unit or two.  It just seemed totally irrelevant at first.  Knowing that, it seems kind of cool for at least a one-of character.

(Then again, opening ALMA4 is being weird for me right now so I can't open the interface.  Probably my OpenOffice being a chuggy fuck.  I only got a peek at it earlier because I had temporary Excel access where it opened and ran beautifully, so it's definitely OpenOffice I think.  Either way you may already have this coded in a really compressed and space-efficient way that compensates for the fact most people will only use it for a couple units if any, just checking to be sure.)

[pokeytax]

Well, can you throw something together that pulls off previewability and keeps only the extra attributes and those attribute properties that are only present in vanilla?  Because that's all I really need - extra attributes and previewablity.

But... that's what it already does... once I figure out what's wrong with the initial/cancel statuses. In fact ALMA 3 had that covered. Don't worry, your weird item attribute fetish is already well served.

Either way you may already have this coded in a really compressed and space-efficient way

The spreadsheet is ludicrously big so if OpenOffice is having problems I may have to split it up. I can sympathize, my home computer actually can't run any spreadsheets with Analysis Toolkit.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Well, I half-lied.  It does open.  It takes a few minutes though, and all the Macros are broken as like with basically everything else that isn't outright made in OpenOffice to ensure it works.

I finally stopped being a lazy ass an acquired an Excel as well so I can look things over better in a while, but I'll probably still make all my spreadsheets in OpenOffice myself just to ensure compatibility and all that jazz.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

Dude, just use Gnumeric, it's faster.  Or wait a few months for LibreOffice to get better.  OpenOffice is dead now; LibreOffice is the dominant fork of that particular tree.

And did you ever clear up the problem with the negative Move/Jump/SP/PA/MA?  The problem being an oversight where whoever coded it didn't notice that 0x80 is used in Jump to signify Stepping Stone, and decided to make 0x80 give -128 Jump.

[pokeytax]

Stress tested using Parted Ways and fixed many glaring issues. At this point, I don't think it's much less reliable than ALMA 3, so patch creators might consider moving over. Unless this version crashes on load and I can't check until tomorrow!

I'm going to try an .xlsx file, which open-source programs might tolerate better.

Stepping Stone

I forgot about that one. It shouldn't come up too often, you'd have to use a multiplier or trip negative overflow, but it ought to be fixed regardless.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

So there's a different trigger for Stepping Stone?

[pokeytax]

No, but ALMA will generally leave it alone, unless you reduce the 83 or whatever to 7F by adding -4 move or 41 by adding 50% move. Small increments should be fine, since typically monsters aren't going to be having a ton of ALMA attributes applied to them anyway.

I added an attribute summary because, wow, the hack is unusable without it.