Final Fantasy Hacktics

I was wondering if there was someway to use the space of abilities like that otherwise non-Normal, like Items or Throwing (Star) Items or some of the lesser Jumps, that are located towards the end of FFTPatcher.

When it comes the ability page, I'm hesitant to get rid of anything, even the blank spaces right before Item section that just say they apparently "Crash The Game". Given my reference discovery that Items are currently not working in other classes how I want them to, I've decided to get rid of them and it would be useful if I could also use their ability space for new skills instead of only being able to use their "physical" Item space for new weapons/equipment.

TIA.

Not that I know of, I think doing that would require ASM hacking - whatever that is. Either way, chances are you'll have to play with abilities below Parasite. Just be warned, don't mess with the one directly above Potion - it's "Attack."

Good to know about the Attack thing; bad to know about the need for ASM hacking.

I'm still weary about messing with those gaps even though they "say" they "only" crash the game.

Ugh.

the only thing you would need to "asm" hack about the 9 skills below parasite is what kind of stance the character takes when using the skill. currently they resemble a draw out stance, just raising the arms and executing the skill.

they dont crash at all as long as you assign a working effect file. that was the only reason they crash in the first place. They are perfectly good slots.

also bombs have a skill that has 3 different versions just because of their sprite color difference. "small bomb" you could use just one if you really wanted to write over some skills. they take a weapon strike stance.

the skill just below the time mage spell "meteor" is also a free slot and takes a magic casting stance.

Duly noted. Thanks Zozma.

Let's add up these spaces:

• Space below Meteor.
• The first instance of Seal, which is the flawed one that Celia and Lede never used in vanilla. The spot is otherwise fine as far as I can tell--I haven't done testing--and "fixing it"--I think the only flaw is animation--anyway would be pointless since you can just replace it with the other Seal that already works.
• Two instances of Small Bomb. I think the only "major" difference between the three was just so that the small bombs generated by the animation matched the type of Bomb using it, hence the red, blue, and black coloration specifications.
• An instance of Tentacle, probably. They use different animations, but I'm pretty sure it's not a huge difference.
• Grease Touch can go if you don't feel like changing its status since Oil is still not working for us at the moment. Same with third version of Bio that only adds Oil.
• Hell, you could probably condense all the Bios down to three spells. That would save seven spaces in and of itself.
• You can also get rid of one of the Blood Sucks since the only difference I've seen at the moment is that the human/Elmdor one adds Blood Suck at 100% and the Vampire Cat one adds Blood Suck at 25%. I'm not even sure why that is. I'm assuming it's something that we can't hack yet, though it may also be the fact that the latter has Separate Blood Suck originally. That's only thing I haven't played around with regards to Blood Suck yet (and yet I feel like I'm forgetting something).
• Finally, there are the 10 spaces below Parasite but before the blank space above Potion.

Basic math shows that's at least 15 spqces if you take the all eleven blanks, one of the Blood Sucks, the flawed Seal, and two of the Small Bombs away. If you add up everything, though, you get almost twice that amount with 24 spaces--the seven "wasted" Bio-related spaces, unchanged Greased Touch, and whichever Tentacle--being go to go.

I still want to be able to get rid of Items if necessary, but I guess this is good start.

*goes to mess around with formula 40*

yeah the bio's are a waste, i consolidated them into the three green spells. the green ones only because that color makes the most sense.

i never new that that version of seal just didnt work at all?, tho the assassins are deadly enough without it, but i would love to see them get even deadlier.

also, if you dont want to asm hack, most monsters basic attack simply uses the same physical damage formula as attack and they use the weapon strike animation. you can get more sword skills out of that or whatever you prefer. (i had problems, however, with monster ai when changing their basic attack just to "Attack" found above "Potion"

The assassins use Seal ... I've had them use it on me before. It's not very often, that's true, but they do use it. Unless you're talking about something else, because the first instance of "Seal" is in the "Use Hand" skillset.

for some reason its only a last resort for them, like if you're immune to death and stop.... oh wait, they had no hesitation to use it on a normal monster right away i took boco there once...

Are we talking about 1.3 here, though? Because Voldemort7 fixed the fact that in vanilla they never used Seal even though they had it, hence why I called it a "flawed" version. I think it's because the animation for the first Seal is for some reason Sunken State's animation and the computer doesn't use Transparent, especially in vanilla.

As for the other things, I don't think that I'll have to get rid of regular monster attacks at the moment. Considering the type of changes that I want to take to my patch, it's far more likely that Zodiac monsters will be the one to go, so their abilities are first up on the chopping block for me.

Speaking of demonic abilities, Zozma, if you don't mind double-checking, can you relay to me which animations for Bio are the green ones?

Bio
Bio
Bio
Bio 2
Bio 2
Bio 2
Bio 2
Bio 3
Bio 3
Bio 3

hmmm i might have switched the blues and reds around? i forget

Oh, so they're all the first ones. That's rather convienent.

For more convienence, that's 0D4 Bio, 0D7 Bio 2, and 0DB Bio 3.

Duly noted Zozma. Thanks.

*finally gets around to playing with formula 40 after messing around with Squire*

Yes, I've seen them use it in Vanilla ... especially since I've never played v1.3 - it's just rare. Annoying as hell though. Might be because the AI is checked as "Cancel Status" and not "Add Status" making it occur less often, like Bad Breathe or All-Ultima and "Random Hits" (despite it doesn't hit randomly).

Hunh. Weird. They never did it to me in vanilla, but I believe you, so....

So, I found the difference between the Blood Sucks: It is the Inflict Status Code.

Knowing me, this data is already around, but it would appear that Separate status makes ANYTHING attempt to add status at 25%, including the formula 38--I guess it makes since 100% of 25% is 25% and thus it wouldn't boost it up 100%.

Actually, there was another thing that separated them, which is what I kept forgetting to report in the other thread (where I felt it didn't really belong anyway): Elmdor Blood Suck ALWAYS has the message "Must live as a vampire!" conveyed with it, regardless of whether the status is actually added (like it is always is All Blood Suck's case) or not (like it isn't 75% of the time in Separate Blood Suck's case).

It may be part of the animation, now that I think about it actually....

Other than that, I think the only thing I've found out so far is that unnamed abilities don't glitch the game like I thought they would, but they WILL absorb each other if you have more than one, so I'm still not entirely sure about that since all my "Chemist" had was a modified Death Cold.

I suppose I should conduct experiments via that before I do anything else.

Not quite... the only reason they would use Seal would be to "cure status" on one of their Allies and the AI knows better. So it's not that it has anything wrong with it, more so that the AI specifications were incorrect.

Ah.

Speaking of Fear's restrictions, is only possible to use three Fear moves within a skillset? I ask because I was trying to test quite a few things out earlier on today, but kept getting slowed down by only three or four Fear spells popping up.

I originally thought it was because I trying to use Teta's "Magic" Job, but then I switched to Cloud's Limit and had the same problem.

Damn restrictions.

(Oh, and for the record, Blood Suck animation appears to have nothing to do with the "Must Live as A Vampire!" animation that appears.)

Quote from: "Lydyn"Yes, I've seen them use it in Vanilla ... especially since I've never played v1.3 - it's just rare. Annoying as hell though. Might be because the AI is checked as "Cancel Status" and not "Add Status" making it occur less often, like Bad Breathe or All-Ultima and "Random Hits" (despite it doesn't hit randomly).

You are mistaken...

Assassins simply cannot use Seal on the player in vanilla.

The AI flags prevent them from doing so.

You must have been playing a modified patch.

"Cancel Status" does not make it occur less often, and is totally unrelated to the function of "Random Hits".

"Random Hits" will prevent AI from spamming a skill every turn, yes, but "Cancel Status" is something else altogether.

All "Cancel Status" does is make the AI think that this particular Seal is for CURING the petrify status on allies. But since the ability isn't even flagged for use on allies, it effectively makes the AI never use it, ever.

Switching that flag to "Add Status" will let the AI correctly identify it as a skill that adds petrify to enemy units, and will let them use it.

"Random Hits" has nothing to do with this, it was simply a case of Square disabling the skill for them in vanilla.

Well, either my memory is faulty or I'm not mistaken. I still claim I remember them petrifying me though. The only modified patches I played so far are my own. Not like it matters anymore anyways ... as for getting back on topic (because arguing would get us nowhere ;P) I really don't know about the Fears.

What did you do with them exactly? Stuff more than 3 fear abilities into a skillset? And it slowed the game?

I'm not trying to argue, I'm pointing out facts of the way those functions work with the AI

Quote from: "Lydyn"Well, either my memory is faulty or I'm not mistaken. I still claim I remember them petrifying me though. The only modified patches I played so far are my own.

It's possible you're confusing it with one of the Apandas' Petrifying Bios unless you're remembering either inside of Limberry or on top of Lionel.

QuoteWhat did you do with them exactly? Stuff more than 3 fear abilities into a skillset? And it slowed the game?

I was mostly dicking around with the less used status like Performing and Charging and Jump yesterday when it came to inflicting them since you can never do it in game--I used the Fear formula because they come prepackaged with 100% success and I was also curious about the Separate thing, which was the only thing that answered yesterday really. (It was only earlier today that I realized why what I was trying to do with formula 40 wouldn't work.)

As what kept happening, yes, I was trying to put more than three in a skillset, which I figured wouldn't be a problem since ALL Fear skill sets already have four skillsets.

However, whenever I would try to test them in game, even though I had learned the entire class (since Fear skills are naturally 0000), I could only access the top three skills in the class. It was dependent on the other of the skills too.

I'm not sure why that happens, unless you can only use three Fear skills and Seal for some reason (the one Fear skill that all Zodiac demons with Fear have IIRC) doesn't count towards that restriction.

Ugh. I hate double posting, but since no one has answered my question in a fortnight, I think that I've discovered that all the Zodiac's Skill Set are capped at four moves for some reason.

That or Item is fucking me over from the grave.

Probably both.

I'll try and test more later tonight, but I really do need to do other things.

(I'll try and post my relevant notes next time I post.)

Sorry.

I don't see why you're apologizing.

I also don't see why Chemists are such fucking whores.

JUST BECAUSE I'M TRYING TO KILL YOU DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN'T DIE GRACEFULLY.

I will now share some of my latest notes, most of them from today. However, I will note that there are some things in following notes that have been "censored" solely because I want to keep the changes to my patch as much of a surprise as possible, especially since next to nothing is finalized.

Feel free to image **** as me cussing more than I already do:

"11/10/08
8:35 P.M.
So far the second test is going atrociously:

• "Item"/**** seems to actually be acting up MORE now that I just subbed Item. I'm pretty sure that I changed Item to Default in the Action Menu, but really, that Skill Set can just go fuck itself. I guess I'll just have to change it back to Phantom. (The problem its having is that Item won't actually use any of the spells, but just attempt to copy the last action of whatever occurred. This is especially weird since the Chemist in the Magic Gariland City battle successfully tried to use "Faith"/****.)
• For some reason, Heal isn't healing HP. I think I'm going to have change the formula since I probably made a stupid mistake.
• Another anomaly was that the Ramza of Chapter 2 had a differently random Brave and Faith than the Ramza in the Chapter 1. I'm pretty sure that in the prologue Ramza is always supposed to have 70 Brave and 70 Faith and yet he had 64 Brave and 46 Faith.
• The continued anomaly of the beginning Squires and "Chemists" coming in with items they can't equip (and only Daggers and Swords instead of all the new stuff they equip) is annoying me. I really have to start trying to make sense of ENTD stuff more seriously. Thankfully, this problem seems to be only for Gariland Magic City, as at least one Squire at Mandalia has used an "exotic" weapon. (This time it was the Cloth Persia. Last time I think it was either a Javelin or a Bow Gun.)
• Speaking of weapons, I keep forgetting to nerf the power of the C Bag. While pretty pathetic when you normally get it, its power of 10 is a bit overpowered in Chapter 1. (I also have to take away its MA +1.)
• For some reason, turning all the Items to "never" being available made all of them available in shops immediately (except for Elixir since it was initially like that anyway). Um....
• For some reason Poison Nail doesn't seem to have any range on cats. While this isn't exactly a bad thing, I just thought I gave it range. I'll have to go check anyway, though.
• Finally, it would seem like changing R/S/M, as with attempting to change Item, in the Abilities menu to something else really does nothing. This is especially important because despite changing Weapon Guard, Abandon, Arrow Guard, and Finger Guard to Support, they still took up Reaction slots, and Innate Reactions override any Reaction you have. (It's difficult to tell if these reactions are overridden completely or still have a chance of activating, but since they aren't in the Reaction slot when you go into battle, they're probably completely overridden.) This means that to get Weapon Guard on everyone, I have to use ASM. This wouldn't be such a huge pain (despite knowing next to nothing about ASM) if it wasn't for all that time I spent adding Innate Weapon Guard to every class. (This reminds me that, similarly, it seems like the computer doesn't use Defend. I'm really hoping it isn't like Equip Change because could have sworn the computer has before, though....)

And I still haven't even unlocked "***" to test. Ugh.

(Good news though is that monsters don't seem to care about JP costs or learning chances and monsters can still be the subject of multiple reactions since they can't change them anyway.)

11/11/08
5:01 P.M.
Anyway, I managed to do a bit more testing before succumbing to sleep and laziness. So far, the only problem I remember seeing is that Poison Nail won't work for humans now.

Well, that and the continued glitch with Phantom. It's better than Item not fucking working at all though. Ugh. Damn the necessity of lesser evils.

I'm going to start more testing now after I figure out how to fix Poison Nail.

(Oh, and this reminds me that I need to greatly up the cat type monsters MP.)

5:12 P.M.
Okay. So I decided to fix it by giving Poison Nail Blood Suck's formula with Y being 2(%). I decided to up Cat Kick's absorption to 3%. (I also decided to up Cover's healing percentage to 10%.)

Other than that, I decided to "fix" the Cat Panthers MP "problem" by just dividing their MP Growth by 5, which should make it greater paradoxically. I didn't do any extensive stat projections, so....

11/12/08
3:34 P.M.
I'm beginning to think that all the Zodiac-based skill are restricted to just four skills, so I just happened to have really shitty luck by picking Phantom for ****'s actual carrying class. I'll try changing it to something else and seeing if I can actually use the skills I've fucking bought.

Other than that, the test last night showed me what works with ****. The equipment is fine. The same with both Net skills (though I'll have to change the animations for at least the bigger one since the current [second/red] Bio 3's animation does NOT fit; I want to note that apparently the second Bio 2's animation is white in coloration). I was having problems with other two skills that I had at the moment, the first because I made **** not able to stack with **** and the second because I left the X as 0 in the formula that Work uses. (Interestingly enough, after taking the initial damage, 999 damage was displayed, but it didn't register/rape my HP, so I'm not sure if it took or not. It probably doesn't add status at 100% anyway considering Compress doesn't kill people all the time. It's kind of annoying not being able to tell what formula has what percentage of status outside of obvious ones like Hit X% or Blood Suck or Death or whatever.) Other than that, with regards to ****, I need to remember to give the second "Bio 3" a JP cost. It's the same with **** and **** (whichever one I end up using).

I similarly still forgot to change Threaten, which still isn't working using Talk Skill's formula. I'm beginning to think that Talk Skill is only geared to adding select Status Skills, though it's probably actually just ability slots themselves and the inability to change this via just FFTPatcher. (Hence why Voldemort7's four new Talk Skills technically aren't Talk Skills and thus not blockable by Finger Guard.)

I'll just try and test this out by having Threaten add Death Sentence instead of what it tries to Cancel right now. (It'd be one thing if I knew those statuses weren't affected, but "****" works perfectly, so...)

Other than that, I keep forgetting to give certain things **** now that I'm giving them to **** (and haven't changed their names via that typing thing that I've yet to look up), like ****, ****, and whatever the last third skill currently is for ****.

I would also like to note that apparently, as with Items and Shuriken, turning Katana Blank just made them all appear (except for Masamune and Chirijiraden) in Dorter's shop after I beat the crap out of Dorter itself. Oddly, I don't recall any of the Ninja Swords appearing despite that the fact that I remember turning them off as well....

Only other thing I can think of that's been acting up is me also forgetting to it possible for Bio to hit the caster.

(Well, that and the whole Weapon Guard annoyance.)

4:04 P.M.
Curse you, Einstein. Why must you have been correct about stupidity being infinite?

Ugh. Why the hell didn't I check if there was a different <Blank> used for the Items that never appeared in Shops?

Because I'm retarded! YES! THIS IS NOT DELICIOUS!

(By the way, since I'll probably forget later, including to look at this note, the <Blank> that should make Items not appear in shops at all is the fifth blank on the list just before the Unknowns start in.)

Damn. I just realized that I am so retarded that I apparently almost forgot to get rid of Poles again. Go me.

(THIS IS MADNESS!)

4:30 P.M.
Curse distractions and my general sluggishness.

At this time, I have managed to fix the following:

• I eliminated the Innate Weapon Guards I had for all generic classes (minus Mime) and all five other Squires classes and moved Defend up one place just because I'm compulsive like that.
• I turned **** back to **** to see how much of a bitch this makes Bombs since I've **** so much already. I also wanted to test the percentage it was added outside of the obvious with ****.
• I think I've made all the appropriate JP cost changes outside of the second Bio 3 and the two test abilities for ****. (Though they're all test abilities, technically.)
• I gave Squire Weapon Guard over the ever useful "Any Weather" since all six slots were full. Weapon Guard is like it is in 1.3 IIRC: It costs 0000 to learn and has a 100% chance to be learned by the AI. **** got stuck with Any Weather now.
• I decided to finally make some changes to ****. I still need to come up with skills for **** and come up with the last class, though at this point, the only idea I have is **** despite there being only one useful formula at the moment.
• I've changed the three Bios are still staying as actual Bio spells to able to hit the caster.

I think that's it.

Oh, and I also forgot to note last time that I finally know how Monster Skill acts when given innately to monsters: they can use their Monster Skill freely. It's too bad getting monsters to use items doesn't seem to be nearly as easy.

4:47 P.M.
Okay. So I've fixed the few other things left, saved, and then decided to save the changed Threaten to my superfluous Test Test Patch.

Let's see how this goes.

5:17 P.M.
Okay. So I just finished one battle and it's going rather well outside of fucking Chemist still acting up. I guess it might be because I decided, like a genius, to use Magic as replacement when Teta's obviously dead the entire game (in battle, smart ass). Ugh. I'll try changing it to yet another skill that (enemy) generics can use before I give up.

Also, it would similarly appear that I was right about the ability slot acting up since Threaten refuses to do anything but "add" 100% of nothing. Lame.

Other than that, I'm very please to finally learn that it appears that Counter Tackle's reaction DOES appear to be affected by how you affect Dash. YES!

There remains, however, a bit of an oddity in Bombs refusing to Self-Destruct on me, but that may be because their HP is like half of mine at the moment despite the same levels. I'll have to look at Voldemort7's FFTPatcher data again to see if he actually upped Bomb's HP because it's seemingly like it.

(Also, my two test abilities for **** are still acting up. The damage from the Work formula is working fine now, though it doesn't add the status 100% like I thought. It's same for Bite and ****. Also, I guess I'll have to refresh with the Battle Mechanics Guide because I don't recall **** canceling ****. Perhaps I forgot change something...)

5:45 P.M.
Ugh. I just finished changing everything like increasing a few monster attacks' verticals, changing the formula for one of the versions of ****, taking the restrictions off of ****, and giving the special Squires Weapon Guard even though I'm going to get rid of them all eventually just to realize that I forgot to make another version of ****.

Sigh.

5:51 P.M.
Okay. So I've decided to have Sword Skill be the new **** since I KNOW that holds more than four skills. If it still acts up, then I think it's just something wrong with Chemist. (Fucking Chemists.)

6:05 P.M.
Yeah. It's the Chemist class. Ugh....

Everything else works except for that damned class.

7:30 P.M.
Okay. So I just needed to test something else after I grabbed Dinner. (It is written that Link shall defeat NO!)

I was correct in that the status order is goes inversely in priority from the highest number to the lowest. It is interesting to note that Crystal is the highest, even over Treasure, I guess because monsters can only drop items--hunh, I wonder how if I can have them box into something else when I get rid of Items or if I'll have to make them immune to Item in general. So, yeah, Dead (currently) supercedes everything except for Treasure or Crystal.

(I realized that I have to make certain monster immune to something else, which reminds me that I also have to check Voldemort7's patch. Ugh. Curse Work for doing damage to me in real life.)"

Longpost is looooooooong.

You are so helpful.

Anyway, I'm bumping this to tell others what's probably obvious: ALL Dance and Songs have hardcoded qualities to them, all of them.

These include, but probably aren't limited to, sex-specific Performing animations (Bard's singing and Dance's spinning), formula 64 being used for Wiznaibus & Witch Hunt (and Life Song and Angel Song?) regardless of what you replace the formula with (well, at least the affects HP or MP as far as I know), the various stat-affecting for the respective Dance and Songs, the CT-affecting of the useless Last abilities and the Nameless abilities by-passing of formula 1D's NS.

Fuck.

I want my sex-specific Performing animations, damn you!

men have all the dancing frames as well, as evidenced by male mimes mimicing dancers, or do you mean that you want the animations to STAY sex-specific?

I want the latter since the sex-specific animations seemed to be tied to those specific slots, otherwise the character just has the generic Charging animation even with Persevere.

Although, I honestly wouldn't mind if, a lot later on, Dancer and Bard became non-sex specific on the job wheel. Right now, though, I'm still have a lot of trouble just trying to get Lancer, Ninja and Chemist to work.

I just noticed something, while fooling around with sing/dance, while both the male and female dancing animaitons are the same, the male and female singing animations are DIFFERENT, the female singing animation has both her hands clapsed together in front, where as the male animation, as you know, has one hand raised up in the air with the other over his heart.

I would like to add (while still trying to read that long post), that the Ramza in the prologue, while being a chapter 2 Ramza, does indeed have random brave/faith. I can assure you of that, because I noticed the randomness myself, and when I went to that event (to make him a lvl 99 maniac for the purpose of getting through the battle in one turn, so I could test things in the first chapter 1 battle), I saw that he did indeed have random brave/faith instead of the 70/70 he usually has.