Final Fantasy Hacktics

Haha, sorry Toshiko, but I've never even played the PSX version of FFT. I started the series with FFTA, then picked up WotL later on.

As for the AI learning skills in order from top down: I'm not sure that's entirely true. As I mentioned earlier, ARGATH spawned with one of the last spells in Summoner learned in my limited testing. Maybe it works differently on the PSX and ALGUS would spawn with more of the earlier summons...

Ultimately there's no way for us to know. Whatever you did, or whatever you downloaded, has borked your game right up the ass. It's normally next to impossible to make Ramza leave the party, so whatever has been fucked up there is MAJOR.

If you have no idea what it was, it's probably time to wipe your patch entirely and start from scratch. Even the lady who made this site and built a synthesis shop mod from nothing doesn't seem able to help you at this point, which should tell you just how bad it is.

You don't necessarily need to disable the ability to recruit ALL human units. The ENTD has an Immortal flag that prevents crystallization, and that flag can also be set to block Traitor status (if it isn't already). You can also set enemy units to have Earplug/Finger Guard, as the only way to convert enemy humans is through the Orator skills anyway.

And yes, you could set units to have, say, Mime unlocked and set their secondary to Random - that would give them a VERY large variety of skills to choose from.

There are SOME battles that unlock over the course of the storyline. The ones that are present in Ch. 1 will be present throughout the whole game, so you won't be able to have them unlock more Jobs as time passes. But the deeper in you are, the higher the odds of having later battles unlocked for those same areas. The battle you get is randomly selected (though it also depends on which way you entered the region from).

You can also set units to a random spawn. I've never done this myself, but as I understand it, you could set an Archer, a Knight, and a Black Mage all to the same spot with random checked and the game will randomly pick one every time it loads that battle.

Fair warning: there is a hardware limit on drawing more than 9 unique spritesheets at once, and in random battles the game ALWAYS assumes your five combatants will all have unique spritesheets, so you'll never be able to put more than four different kinds of units in one battle. So, for example, a male Archer, a female Archer, a Knight, a Black Mage, and a Chocobo wouldn't work.
Thankfully, monsters in the same family all use the same spritesheet, just with palette swaps. So an enemy party of a male and female Archer, a Knight, a Chocobo, and a Black Chocobo would work.

You are correct about the Black Mage thing. It seems the game will stop auto-spending JP at a certain threshold, but in my tests, I was able to spawn Argath on Mandalia Plains with the Faerie summon, which was one of the ones near the bottom of the list.

I've never played FFT+, so I can't say for sure if that's the case. I do know that increasing the JP required per Job Level is a quick way of allowing the AI characters to know more abilities, though.

You can choose which skillsets characters spawn with in the ENTD, making it easy to pick which secondary you want your enemies to have.

You can choose one unlocked Job per character in the ENTD, and set its level appropriately. Every Job required to unlock that one will have at least enough levels needed to unlock that one, with the JP randomly pre-spent. So a Black Mage with Summon would be perfectly fine and have no bugs whatsoever. A White Mage with Summon would also work, because the Summoner requires a Black Mage, and the Black Mage is unlocked at the same time the White Mage is. However, the WM would likely have fewer WM abilities than the BM would have for their own skillset, because the WM wouldn't be required to be at any Job Level.
A Knight with White Magic might not have any of the Knight abilities, as they wouldn't be guaranteed to have Knight unlocked, unless White Mage was tied to the same level of Squire. In addition, you'd probably lose the ability to put them back in Knight if you recruited them, then changed their Job. (I haven't personally tested most of this.)

Something notable about this, though, is that by default the unlock conditions for Jobs are actually more than what their descriptions in the Job Wheel say they are. A Thief might be set to require Level 3 Archer, but it's also set to require Level 2 Squire, because Archer is set to require Level 2 Squire. So if you mess around with the job requirements in the Patcher, setting the Arithmetician to require nothing but a level 8 Summoner will cause Arithmetician units to spawn with level 8 Summoner, but without any levels in Black Mage, meaning they even can't get at their Summoner job in the first place.

For characters that can't be recruited, you have more freedom than normal. In fact, you can give them a Secondary skillset they wouldn't otherwise have access to (i.e. give Agrias' Holy Blade to a random generic) and that unit will automatically have access to every ability in Holy Blade. If that unit is a special unit themselves, then they also seem to automatically unlock their own entire base skillset by doing that. There are plenty of blank skillsets in the Patcher that you can make use of for this, and, in fact, Tietra has an unused skillset named "Magicks" (in the PSP version) that you could probably fill in with whatever you wanted with no real need to jump into Tactext to change any of the description/name text. I assume it's named something usable in the PSX version too.

Possibly because Jot5 only lightly touches upon the fact that Ramza has been cooperating with Delita's wishes with little fuss before otherworlders started arriving on his doorstep. Yeah, he's chafing under the lack of freedom, but he knows that his cooperation means a generally comfortable lifestyle for him and his sister, as opposed to needing to flee the country in case someone recognizes him and informs the Church.

Ramza's smart enough to see the sense in the plan and go along with it.

I can tell you that it took me like four different sources for FFT on the PSX before I could find one that was actually usable so I could patch Jot5 over it. Ultimately, if you have the ability to rip the game yourself, it should always be your go-to option.

Everything you described can be easily accomplished with FFTPatcher. You'll have to sacrifice some of the other Jobs if you want more ranged skillsets (I'd advise converting some of the magical jobs into mixed magic and ranged weapons - you could give white mages bows as a tribute to Rosa, as an example), though you don't want to mess with the skillsets of Chemists, Ninjas, Samurai, Geomancers, Dragoons, or Mimes because there's a lot of hardcoding there. (Thankfully, there are some ASMs that can fix this.)

You can also increase the JP required per Job Level for a stress-free way to ensure the AI opponents have more Abilities - it'll mean the difference between a level 2 Knight only knowing a couple skills versus several. It also works the same way for the Jobs that were blocking the way to the ones they've unlocked: a Monk will know more Knight abilities than they would otherwise, because they'll have had to "earn" more Knight JP.
Even if you think that would make Job unlocking too annoying for you, you can always just reduce the number of unlock tiers. Make the Dragoon unlocked via the Knight instead of through the Thief/Monk or something.
You can also go into the ENTD and adjust enemies' base levels. You can set the story battles to scale with the party level, and the random ones to be the party's level PLUS a few.

Knight Swords shouldn't be an issue. You're just using a bad mod of some kind.

That's really more of an Apple problem than a FFH problem, as it's the iOS software restricting access to your own files, but a quick Google search suggests jailbreaking your device.

And frankly you'd be better off running an emulator on your phone with the PSX or PSP version anyway, if you want to use mods with it. I bought the Android version of FFV after I learned of its existence, but I ended up going back to my GBA emulator because save states made Stealing less of a pain in the ass and the emulator has the speed-up function.

QuoteRamza's meant to look older and different.  He's incognito.

http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=9100.msg179230#msg179230

I'll say that I never found a random battle to be unbeatable after I finally pushed the 5 out of their initial Job/Chemist skillsets and picked up the generic that I should have at the first opportunity.
There was a battle with a blue Bomb, several chocobos, and a few Lamias at Mandalia recently that I found frustrating (they outnumbered and outleveled the party) but guarding my generic and Cloud as they laid down Faith and Death casts worked fairly well. Frankly, if I hadn't been training Ramza and Agrias in new Jobs it probably would have gone a lot easier - they both only had one skillset to work from.
There've been some fights with the tortoises that utterly destroyed me, but Float makes them an utter joke.

And on the other end of that scale, there's a fight in Araguay(?) Woods with nothing but a single Beastmaster enemy. He comes up to the group to fire a shot or two with his cute little crossbow and then gets curbstomped by the Five.

QuoteRamza's beard is actually a party member, complete with a backstory. Please look forward to it!

And it's so manly it comes with level 5 Monk unlocked by default.

*glances at the top of the page*

Toshiko's emulator recommendations are serious business.

Esuna has Random Hit checked. Without multistrike formulas (there are only three in the entire formula set) that means it'll pick only one panel and call it a day.

Arise has "animate on miss" unchecked (or "don't animate" checked, I forget which way it goes).

Fair enough.

I'd recommend starting off with just reimagining some of the more important fights in FFT, no worrying about the job system/world map/items until later.

Seeing the Orbonne Monastery battle in 3D, even on a different engine, would be pretty neat. And that still sounds like a lot of work, but far more doable as a starting point.

Yeah, it doesn't look like it, but I double checked: the background color is indeed a unique color (if only by a hair).

I appreciate the help with the gems. I'll openly admit that I'm not very good at making decent shading with only two colors to work with - or at making decent portraits in general, I guess! >_>

Is this topic about trying to port FFT over a new game engine AND changing all the character models from sprites to 3D?

You would have better luck just remaking FFT from scratch. I mean at that point it's not a "mod" project so much as literally developing a new game.

And if you want to know how involved that is, just check out the credits to FFIII DS.

I really don't want to crap on your hopes here but this is like watching someone write a story, then say "okay the hard part's done, now turning it into a game should be easy!"

Coding isn't the "main obstacle". It's the foundation, the core of what you want to do. You're trying to paint a house before the ground has even been dug out before laying the foundation to build it.
Or to build a car from scratch when all you've got are a couple wheels and no knowledge of engines.

Okay, it's been a few days and I've put together another setup.

For the purple in the sprite, I again went back to the Ramza Ch. 2 sprite, only this time I kept the colors far closer to Ramza's instead of changing their brightness. I also touched up the left arm in the defense pose.



For the portrait?  Muh colors!

But I eventually settled on two options for it.

QuoteJourney of the Five sounds like a complete overhauled till it's more of a fan game than Final Fantasy Tactics as I know it

It's actually set up as a sequel to FFT, except the multiversal concept with Cloud and a couple others from FFT has been expanded on. It's a lot more down-to-Earth (or down-to-Ivalice in this case?) than you might expect from a fanmade crossover sequel. Ramza's position in an Ivalice ruled by an increasingly-dictatorial Delita in the wake of the War of the Lions takes up most of Chapter 1's storyline. And it's generally more difficult than FFT was.

Personally, I think Jot5 has more of a place in the FFT series than FFTA2 (the DS game) does.

Though the GBA game isn't quite as bad as you make it out to be. The worst thing in FFTA is that the penalty for breaking Laws is ridiculously overpowered compared to the benefit of following them, and there are FFTA mods that disable the Laws entirely. Beyond that, it's a much easier game with a much simpler storyline compared to FFT, but not in a terribly bad way. If you disable the Laws and don't go in there expecting a lot of difficulty, you'll probably enjoy it quite well.

Crystal sprites wouldn't be a very arduous task. With no limbs or face... the vast majority of the sprite would just be the same image repeated ad infinitum. With any animation being just a lighting change/couple pixel offset.

If it's only one file, changing the palette wouldn't significantly change the base image, unless some parts of the image are blocked out with duplicate colors in the same palette. (i.e. a pattern down the blade of a sword uses a duplicate color in Palette 1 to be "invisible", but the color slots are filled with different colors in Palette 2, so the pattern appears). It's not a very practical approach in general because it forces you to limit your colors.