Final Fantasy Hacktics

Very clever hack. Not exactly what I was wanting (I still want some battles to pop up without your permission, though less) but I imagine I can add in the functionality I want.

Thanks.

Dunno if this exists yet:

How about something to change the % chance to get in a random battle? I'd like to halve it.
Also, a lot more complicated: Standing on a random battle map and selecting the dot (like you would in a town to pull up the menu) puts you into a random battle (among all the available battles from any direction, still of course keeping the story progression limits).

Quote from: nyzer on July 21, 2015, 11:13:38 pm
For the sprite thing, if there's just no listing for those four jobs, you may have to copy and reinsert those sprites into new slots normally used for "special" jobs in Shishi. It might not be the best fix, but it should work.

Yeah that's something I'd prefer to avoid, since if possible, I'd like the patch I'm making to be done entirely with the patcher. Keeps things simple to have one file. Will use other tools if I have to though.

I don't truly understand the logic of the sprite number, so maybe one of the unmarked numbers will give me the sprites I want. Generally speaking I know that sprite number X will give sprite number X+1 (as shown by shishi) and set the unit's base job to number X. Stuff like Generic Male/Female and Monster really muck things up though, along with setting a sprite number well outside the bounds of the job list (like sprite number B8 or something weird).

Right, that's the answer I was looking for for that question. Thank you~

(moved from the patcher sticky)

QuoteFew questions:

1) What's the best way to ensure an enemy calculator has access to a lot of good spells (flare, holy, petrify, etc) without modifying the normal generic jobs in any player noticeable way? I don't want to mess with JP costs or requirements. (giving them access to dummy jobs or something is fine though)

2) [solved] I seem to recall hearing that I shouldn't use the Lucavi sprites for regular enemies. Some quick and not very thorough testing showed that they worked fine. Any pitfalls I might fall into, or is my memory shot?

3) [solved] I found a list of sprite numbers for most the generic jobs (basically what shishi says +1), but this doesn't include calculators, bards, dancers, or mimes. If I want to force one of those sprites for a unit, what numbers should I use?

Elric's reply:

QuoteTo force a generic. Select either generic male, female, or monster as the spriteset. Then choose the job for the unit you want.

When using Zodiac Beasts in other slots make sure to set their SEQ and SHP accordingly (Arute, etc)

I know how to set a character's job and how to set it to one of the generics. What I want to know is how to force a different job to use those 6 spritesheets, since Generic Male, Generic Female, and Monster interfere with the listing order. I can take a Holy Knight and make them look like a geomancer by setting their job to holy knight and sprite to 76-77. I can't do the same for those 6: sprite sheet number 80 should be Male Calculator (going by the listing shown by Shishi) but is instead taken up by Generic Male. Maybe Dancer and both Mimes are fine (I haven't tested), but even if they are, both calculators and bard seem unavailable.

As for the Zodiac Beast thing that advice sounds like it was meant for shishi, which I'm not making any edits with or anything. If I put a Queklain copy in a random deep dungeon battle alongside other stuff, will anything break or look weird? I'm only asking (and not simply testing myself) since I have a vague memory from years ago that this is a No No. My tests has shown everything's fine except the lack of a death frame. If no one else knows of anything worse than that, then there's no more issue here.

Still wondering about the calculator thing.

Moving to a thread then.

Few questions:

1) What's the best way to ensure an enemy calculator has access to a lot of good spells (flare, holy, petrify, etc) without modifying the normal generic jobs in any player noticeable way? I don't want to mess with JP costs or requirements. (giving them access to dummy jobs or something is fine though)

2) I seem to recall hearing that I shouldn't use the Lucavi sprites for regular enemies. Some quick and not very thorough testing showed that they worked fine. Any pitfalls I might fall into, or is my memory shot?

3) I found a list of sprite numbers for most the generic jobs (basically what shishi says +1), but this doesn't include calculators, bards, dancers, or mimes. If I want to force one of those sprites for a unit, what numbers should I use?

Nice. It seems you're starting with manageable projects which is good. I've been trying to make full games since day one and had few finished projects.

So those with knowledge of japanese (or those who read the WotL script) know that Hokuten has "north" in its name and Nanten has "south" in its name.

So why then is the "north" faction in the west and the "south" faction in the east?



Old maps of Japan often had the island laid out horizontally. So, one theory could be that north was originally in the left direction on the world map as a reference to this and a way to make things look archaic, and people forgot somewhere along the lines.

"Commie" = shortening of "communist".

These days usually used jokingly.

Quote from: Elric on July 09, 2015, 08:03:10 pm
(You've been here forever, no idea why you thought to post this in the FFT Hacking section...)

I started searching for similar topics in help, then hit the search button, came across some random topics in hacking, forgot I was still there, and hit post topic.

tl;dr: Whoops.

QuoteI don't the exact answer, but to the best of my knowledge, at most you will normally only see 5 different spritesheets in random battles. Whenever there is more than 4 sheets, then 2 of the sheets will share the same coordinates, in which you will only have one spritesheet or the other, two sprites won't spawn on top of each other when set to Randomly Present.

The same coordinates thing does make sense. I'll keep it in mind for my own random battles.

Just how random is the randomly present flag? Is there a set number of units that it needs to show, are each rolled separately to appear, or? I don't want to have sprite sheet limit issues.


As a side note, I was looking through a bunch of the story battles and whatnot and found some weird combinations of the flags. Some things have both always present and randomly present selected. I'm guessing it has something to do with events and/or dummied out data, but not sure.

7) The first (or occasionally second) named female character in your party will need rescuing at some point, she'll die, or both.

You should be able to get any character in your party easily with a save game editor. Just give one of your generics the sprite, job, and stats of the character you want. They won't be perfect though; most jobs normally not available to players don't have a proper formation screen sprite and will either appear as Ramza or garbage (they'll look fine in battles).

I have only done this with the PSX version so apologies if this is in any way incorrect for WotL.

And ultimately we can blame Aleister Crowley for that, being the originator of the spelling for his work in the occult. It was made to differentiate actual spells from stage magic, not be fancy and cool looking. These days it's 100% a stylization, and one I personally dislike.

QuoteAlso, phantom kingdom portable gameplay changes? Now that's something i wanna hear! Could you make a patch?!

It's not as fancy as you might think. Mainly all I did was alter the end-of-stage bonuses to give more experience at levels above 500 and also to give it to every member of your party (not just the ones deployed).

Making the changes is pretty standard memory tracing and was easier than I expected. By far the hardest part was figuring out how to actually put my code in the eboot (settled for having to put it in what appeared to be freespace but I was never quite certain).

As for distributing a patch I never learned what the most commonly used patch format was so I never bothered. 'Suppose I could hand out my python script that modified the eboot (all byte changes included).

Yeah, almost everything with a name had its name changed for no other reason than to change it.

Also the Ye Olde Dialogue was written by someone with no knowledge of old english. People talk with combined speech patterns of people from every social class (ex: "highbourne moppets are still moppets"). Also adding "k"s after "c"s is really, really dumb.

I'm not a huge fan of FF7 in the first place so I don't care, but this seems like an incredibly obvious way to make lots of money, so I only wonder why they didn't do this sooner.

The slightly tedious and non ASM way is to give everyone Gained JP Up innately. This assumes you're getting rid of it as a regular support ability, which is probably a good idea anyway.

If you want to keep Gained JP Up as a support ability and double JP gained, that'd require a bit of asm, which I can't personally provide.

'Course it is. The slowdown fix wouldn't of been possible if people weren't going around poking into the game's raw code.

Dunno how relevant it is, but I myself made some gameplay hacks to Phantom Kingdom Portable a few months back through injecting my own MIPS code. I don't imagine WotL would be all that much different.

Rad is slightly unique in the PSX version: if you hit select in the party roster to get hints on the UI objects and use it on his name, he'll say something unique. Actual generics just say "......" since those lines were taken out in the localization for space.