Final Fantasy Hacktics

Made the WLDCORE edit for Beowulf and fixed the soldier office. All that's left is monster breeding into spaces 17-20 and handling guest flags.

Quote from: RavenOfRazgrizthe ENTD edits would only get overwritten if you're a moron.

Yes, that's why I'm planning on writing a small SCUS hack if it's not too hard, so it's usable by morons, and so it works with LFT/FFT 1.3/whatever with no fuss. Non-morons will still have the option of using the existing patch and doing it themselves, or maybe I'll provide an .fftpatcher file as well to speed things up.

That's great! I have spent a lot of time on this and gotten nowhere, so good show.

That's a good point, I'll do what you suggested and leave the current hack around for people who want to do the ENTD edits themselves. The WLDCORE edit should be fine to put in though, right?

This version removes nominal guest status from units 17-20 (e.g. you can dismiss them now). Just need to fix that soldier office display issue, and slap together an ENTD/WLDCORE companion hack, and I'm happy.

Quote from: Eternal248 on August 29, 2011, 04:42:26 pm
Soldier's Office units cost 3000 Gil flat, with no gear equipped.

Well, the gear edit is easy, I dunno why Razele didn't include it with his pre-raws:



The actual price of a unit is equal to the base unit cost plus the cost of its equipment, but the displayed price is shown regardless.

The problem with this elemental scheme is that equipping an item with Cancel: Fire when your job innately has Cancel: Dark suddenly gives you Cancel: Alligators or whatever. Plus you have to rework a ton of code all over the place, some in SCUS. In the grand scheme of things, eight elements seems like plenty to me? I'm not one to talk about wasting a ton of freespace for some added functionality but this is a lot of work for a few extra flags.

Quote from: Cheetah on August 28, 2011, 01:13:19 am
Actually I think I have the offset for where it draws the graphic from if that would be any help.

Yes, can't hurt. Getting rid of that guest stamp and inability to dismiss is the real issue remaining and I imagine they're connected.

Quote from: Glain on August 28, 2011, 12:03:25 pm
I think ENTD data is in the BATTLE directory in ENTD1.ENT through ENTD4.ENT. At the very least there's something related to ENTDs in there!

Thanks! I would have just checked Patcher but as you know it doesn't save ENTD modifications. So the necessary modification is just removing Load and Save Formation from all guests who appear in battle and don't join at the end of that battle, or what? (I haven't touched the ENTD much.)

Here is the 85% complete version of the roster hack. You will need to remove auto-join guests, as discussed previously. (Creating a companion hack that edits all ENTD data and fixes that Beowulf check would be a good idea - what game file is the ENTD data stored in?)

You can:
- Invite enemies up to spot 20 (and probably accept units who join after battle)
- recruit up to spot 20 from the soldier office
- bring party members from spots 17-20 into battle

You can't (yet):
- count units past "16/16" in the soldier office
- lay eggs in spots 17-20
- prevent these units from looking like malboro guts on the pre-battle (battle is fine)
- dismiss spots 17-20 or keep them from saying "Guest"

So basically... just cosmetic stuff left? Kinda surprising, and it feels like there must be some epic bugs hiding somewhere, but it seems to work okay.

EDIT: whooooooooooooooooa high five to Xifanie two and a half years in the past

Quote from: Xifanie, March 20, 2009
Forget it, I found it.

ATTACK.OUT
0x9BCC
1400222A
UNIT.BIN sprites loaded for the battle formation = 01-20

Now these units all look normal which was the major impediment! I'm going to tighten up those last couple ornamental details but this hack is... actually looking pretty good. If you could move it into the OP and maybe change the title to be more descriptive, Dome, that'd help trick people into testing it?

20 units is pretty much the hard cap. Doing this hack was like taking the rolled up paper out of a pair of new shoes before putting your feet in. Doing 24 units would be like building a new, longer shoe out of the existing shoe.

This data is readily available at all times from http://ffhacktics.com/instructions.php?id=B0. However, you will have to ASM it, as it's a bit out of the ordinary even for something like ALMA.

Quote from: Pickle Girl Fanboy on August 25, 2011, 06:23:17 pm
I don't mean the formatting: I mean the data retains its hexadecimal conventions, like 00 doesn't turn into 0.

It looks like Gnumeric did okay pulling in the values themselves, just screwed up the hex formatting. Looking at abilities.txt:
- enter the formula =dec2hex(hex2dec(A11),2) in cell A424
- copy that formula across the rectangle all the way to cell AB835
- copy the entire rectangle
- select cell A11 and go to Edit > Paste Special, Paste as Values.
- delete the lower rectangle

Quote
1. Having drop-down boxes organized according the order the data is in, not alphabetically.

Good luck. Excel does this automatically and I don't see an easy option. Personally I would label "01 Weapon" "02 Shield" "03 Head", still ugly but a lesser evil.

QuoteFinding a way to set every entry to its default value without having to do it entry by entry.

I'm assuming your setup is like mine - allow a selection from a dropdown list, use VLOOKUP to get the matching hex for that. So just invert your tables on another worksheet: put the hexes first and the associated selections second. Use the ROM dump as your source and get the matching selections, then paste them as values into your entry area. Maybe not lickety-split, but easier than hand entry...

Yeah, the first hack sets level down shrink = level up growth (suited to flat job growths patches).
The second hack sets level down shrink = level up growth, AND changes stat loss on level down to a job-independent 1/L of stats gained (suited to variable job growths patches), but is unable to completely preserve the minor HP/MP variation between units.

The inherent support limitations either don't apply to AI or are coded outside of my hack, so my adding them would only help the player, not the AI.

The randomized enemy unit generator, like passive abilities, is something I thought ALMAscript would resolve but I'm going to have to do a separate hack for, because I want the capability to just assign a flag to an enemy in ENTD and have the game spit out a random level-appropriate enemy that isn't embarrassing to look at. Likewise, I want the ability to have two mutually exclusive job passives ('specializations"), and while I can have ALMAscript to nuke both of these and refund JP when both are selected, it's clunky as hell.

Hmmm... hopefully this works fine with the AI's random equip options? One more thing to check.

Quote from: formerdeathcorps on August 23, 2011, 07:29:26 pm
Does it take +HP/MP on the two slots or A-PEV/A-MEV?

Once the item's type is changed to "hat", it takes HP/MP: A-PEV becomes HP, A-MEV becomes MP. Likewise, if you sort item 90 (Leather Helmet) as a Shield, HP becomes S-PEV and MP becomes S-MEV. Of course you can use ALMA to add whatever (...once I get that all running).

QuoteCould you imagine someone going into battle wearing a ruby slipper and a steelplated boot?  That seems like logically the unit would suffer (since his battle stance and mobility would be hampered), and he wouldn't be getting the benefits of either equipment type.

That's exactly what I imagined and I would personally explicitly permit it because it makes me smile, but new equip routines would be desirable for things like shoes. Alternately you could use item set bonuses in ALMA, e.g. two pairs of shoes add Can't Equip Shoes.

Quote
2) This also assumes an even balance between helmets, armors, and accessories.

Yes, you would need to rebalance equipment very carefully, especially if there's no routine preventing doubling up... Bracer x 2?

Quote from: RavenOfRazgriz on August 23, 2011, 06:30:18 pm
...What.

Reactions from equipment and job, three supports, three accessories... no, wait, default weapons based on job FFX-2 style and five accessories, definitely that one.

Here's the prototype equipment resorter. Unfortunately you have to do some Patcher work like changing item types, I will integrate that into the spreadsheet at some point. Plus the previews don't work since they're also based on item number, which I have to change to Patcher item type. Plus you can't whack people with throwables yet. But, you can put shoes on your head, which is what's most important.

Actually useful applications might be reclaiming the six throwing weapons and a few of the Chemist items as equippable.

After fixing the rest, going to try to rewire the slots so you can do something like hat/accessory/accessory if so desired.

Hm, what looked like a table was apparently dynamically generated. Not quite ready for prime time yet! It does affect what displays in shops, though, and I'm pretty confident we'll be there soon.

Once I have a version that can perform the offset trickery necessary to swap things besides head/body, I will release a spreadsheet.

ALMA doesn't strip equipment from enemies anymore (and give it to the player!). Things seem to be settling down now bugwise.

Quote from: Kokojo on August 21, 2011, 05:28:24 pm
(Remember that I know nothing about actual hacking)

I do think the hard limit is 20, 16 for non-guests. You are limited, AFAIK, to 4 guests and the games really WANTS that space.

Yes, while it should technically be possible to eat two of those spots because the game never actually forces more than two guests on you, I'm guessing that it's locked down pretty tight through hardcoding. Personally I haven't looked because I couldn't care less but apparently people really want this so maybe I will!

Pride and Raven, there's a "item less than XX?" boundary check that's reasonable, and then a set of weird reversal tables that has three zeroes at the end before the armors start. I just filled those three zeroes for now. I was too sleepy to go full 32/32 but since people seem interested I'll investigate.

fdc, the main reason body/headgear are the easy slots (besides that their item numbers are consecutive) is the "Second Table" lookup in FFTPatcher. They both share one table. With a short jump to freespace and some other edits, I think you could sort things into different slots pretty easily, but I'm guessing the old offset would be applied to a new table, so one entry would be looked up by two items and one would be ignored.

I haven't really tinkered enough to say for sure how this all works yet, I plan to take another look today. In theory, you should be able to manually shift the second table boundaries or just load the offsets as signed and have lookup spaghetti all over the place.

EDIT: okay, looks like it's just changing a value to shift where armors begin, so I changed the hack to 32/32. Might do a spreadsheet - with some work I think you could swap around shields/head/body/accessories as well as turn the throwables into actual weapons.

This changes the distribution from 28 hats/36 armors to 31 hats/33 armors, which I assume is preferred? I didn't go to 32/32 because it looks measurably harder than what I did. I might try and tinker more, but I'm not sure if there are any other pressing needs. Shifting between headgear and armor is definitely the easiest change to make.

As long as Weak + Absorb still heals 2x I think it's mostly academic. Mostly I don't want this to impact the relations I know and love, so don't get crafty and tell me I just ensured that Undead are immune to Cure now!

What you're describing depends on the patch. For different units, Weak could mean "completely exposed to" or "cannot exist in the presence of". At least from my viewpoint, Lightning Cure should heal double on a mechanical unit, Soothing Shower should do 50% damage to a Bomb, Hearth's Glow should do zero damage to a Skeleton, Holy Cure should do double damage to a Skeleton; but there's no reasonable way to implement all that.

If I had to choose I would say... 0 damage, honestly, but 10 damage works best of the poll options.

Quote from: RavenOfRazgriz on August 20, 2011, 06:17:15 pm
Does your new level down fix have any strings attached to it that you know of before testing?

Every time you level down, a bit of your natural stat variance will be muted.

Let's say you have a Level 40 Squire with above-average HP. If she gets hit by "Dischord" and has her level halved to 20, her HP will be reduced toward the average base female HP, not her own base HP. So she will become a little more ordinary when she levels back up. If she then gets hit with "Belittle" and loses 99 levels, she will become level 1 and have absolutely average female HP forever. The same goes for subpar units, which will progress toward the mean instead.

The previous hack, on the other hand, simply makes leveling up stat-equivalent to leveling down. It will preserve natural variation in HP/MP (and PA/MA for monsters).

Quote from: RavenOfRazgriz on August 20, 2011, 04:38:34 pm
Tl;dr - if I want to use flat growths and level downs and have level up/down work properly (ie, stats can't be farmed/don't get horribly maimed), do I want to use this or not?

Yes, this is the "level down okay with flat growths, go ahead and be a jerk to players" hack. I'm working on the general "level down okay" hack, but that will not preserve initial stat variance the way this does.

The undead/elements thing goes on the "later" pile because it's pretty core BATTLE.BIN. Obviously "status X checks/unchecks bit Y in unit data while active" would be nice to have but I'll wait until fdc is done.

QuoteI imagine this is as simple as

Oh I'm sure the eventual hack will look simple but it's been a painfest so far. Haven't forgotten though.

EDIT: Here is a comprehensive level down fix, which fixes both the level down stat slippage and the level up/level down exploit. It's in the OP .xml if you want to try it out, but I haven't yet tested it.