Final Fantasy Hacktics

I haven't been this optimistic in a decade. Hope you fellas work your magic per usual 🤙
Here's to hoping they dont drop a turd but actually do it justice this time!

Quote from: Nyzer on September 05, 2020, 10:09:46 pmDefinitely wouldn't recommend derping out Ramza's job description just for the sake of saving space. There are many better options for just outright deletion - jobs such as Duke never appear in battle, after all.

You misunderstand. No need to change the description at all unless you change the job. If you change his base job from Squire to say. Fell Knight. You just copy the description of Fell Knight from Gaffy and Paste it over Ramza Squire. The Fell Knight description is shorter so it wouldn't cause any problems. If you change him to some custom Job you just have to make sure the description is no longer than the original which is something like "This job serves as the foundation for all others, forming the first step on the road to becoming a legendary warrior."
So if you make him something like IDK an "Ultima Knight" or some other custom fabrication you just have to keep the description as long or shorter than the Squire description. "A knight harnessing the power of demonic magics" or something. Since this description isn't longer than the Squire description it will patch into the game and work just fine. But if I used "A knight harnessing the power of demonic magics. Using abilities learned directly through combat with demons and false saints. They drain the life of their enemies before obliterating them with powerful single target sword skills and spells" Since this description is much longer than the original.  It would exceed the character limit and the patch would either fail or have text errors everywhere.

Been testing the tools for WOTL heavily to figure out exactly what does and doesn't work and a sort of "Patch order"
From what I've read alot of people struggle with the text aspects so I thought I'd give some advice from my own experience.
First things first. I have 2 versions of the patcher suite. 0.457 which I use exclusively for text editing and 0.492 which I use exclusively for FFTPatcher.
I have noticed many people saying they have to constantly leave FFTactext open or they have to completely redo their work. I haven't had this problem. This is why.
First open Tactext 457. Click on ISO and import a fresh copy of your ISO. Mine was prepatched with the slowdown fix and doesn't seem to be a problem. Now the first thing I did was fix the Gem/Treasure crash in BOOT.BIN[28E5EC].
Then I saved this file as a .fftext
Now.
When you work on your mod ALWAYS. Start text edits by opening a fresh copy of your ISO. Then open your .fftext overtop of it. Make your edits then SAVE the .fftext file When you are finished but dont bother patching the ISO.
Then
When you use FFTPatcher open version 0.492
Go to file. New PSP patch and make your changes. I usually keep my .fftext file open while I do this so I can change text as I go. When you are finished save the patch.
When you are ready to patch the ISO open a fresh copy in Tactext 457 and open your .fftext on top of it. Open your patch in FFTPatcher 492.
Now patch the ISO with your FFTPatcher first. Then immediately patch the same ISO with your .fftext file. You should have no errors.
NEVER open the patched ISO in the Patcher or Tactext. If you change something change your .fftext file over a fresh iso and re-save it. Then change your FFTPatch separately and save it. Then patch them both over a fresh ISO again as above.
Some of these steps may be unnecessary but this is exac5how I have done it and not encountered constant errors.

Now. The hardest part about text is the limit. Think of character limits on a forum post etc. If you replace the name of a job with a longer name the overall character limit will exceed what is allowed and you will get an error when patching.
A quick example. Let's say I change Ramza from a Squire to a Holy Knight. Squire is 6 characters long. No spaces. While Holy Knight is 10 characters long plus a space making it a total of 11 characters long.
In order to avoid the error I need to free up 5 characters. Now. I'm unsure if this is 5 characters throughout all the text in the game or not. I usually keep it simple and just free up 5 spaces in Job names. Quickly I can scroll down to 142,143 and 146-149 and delete the Kanji in those 6 slots. That gives me the five characters I need and leaves me an extra. Typically if i make one job name longer I'll also try to make another shorter to trim space where i can and keep my text within the character limit. Just try to keep track of this and you should have no problems. Then repeat the process for the other 2 versions of Ramza Squire Job.

Now. With that done. I can go to the description. The description for Ramza special squire is pretty long. So I typically copy the description of Agrias Holy Knight and paste it directly onto Ramza which frees up quite a bit of space and since Ramza has 3 versions of his Job I can free up a significant amount of space.
If I make a custom Job that replaces an older one I keep the description as short as possible to save space. I do the same for Ability names and descriptions. Keeping everything as short as I can. If you're careful about this you can significantly edit the text of WOTL with little trouble.
Anyway. I hope this helps anyone that decides to work on WOTL having trouble.

Diving into this tonight.

Just wanted to let everyone know that real life has temporarily slowed me down but I'll be back to work on the patch in the next week or so. 

I talked to Xif because I was going to use the skillset x innate mod to make items usable by everyone but I guess it only works with normal type skillsets. No Item/Charge/Jump/Geo/Math so I'm toying with the idea of making a skillset for knight swordskills and making them learn on hit and making the skillset innate.
The idea would be that you will always have access to your knight skills regardless of job. Have to test it and see what happens

Quote from: Andre Pratama on February 08, 2018, 12:31:20 pm
I will also be a player Do not be sad, you know I'm the toughest final fantasy tactics fan and I'll try all the patches that are made by people whose idea is cool

Means alot. I'm not going to quit. I'm just working methodically on balance. With everything balanced around magic and physical damage reduction I just have to undo alot of changes I made. No biggie. I've made other mods for other games too. It's always time consuming and frustrating but worth it.
Currently I just spent the day going down the abilities list balancing everything with the formula I made adding CT and MP per range/area/status seems to be working pretty good.
I also took 9999 and divided it by 8 for the job/lvl requirements which I think will work pretty solid and give the a.i access to more abilities.
I'm also going to start the mod with a small job wheel probably 6-8 well balanced jobs and patch in more occasionally.
Overall this should work out good. The primary goal is to use this mods balance etc as the foundation for my own custom story later on. This is just a project to familiarize myself with all the tools available to me without jumping directly into a non vanilla project. Aiolon I especially appreciate your support and look forward to working on a collaborative project with you in the future.

Ran into an unfortunate hiccup. Despite my best efforts I couldn't incorporate damage reduction into the mod.
I tested it extensively after taking the time to change all the equipment in the game around and text editing all my changes only to discover that the asm doesn't work as intended :/ this was a pretty big center piece of this mod and threw everything out of balance. I'm implementing a different system instead. Unfortunately that means doing a couple days worth of constant work over again
The project is still a go. I just have a lot to sort out now to salvage the mod. I created a personal formula to balance every ability using Range/Area/Statuses inflicted or cured amounts to calculate the CT of the ability it's MP and it's JP cost. Nearly every ability in the game is now balanced, Evadeable, has a CT and MP cost.
Basic attacks will have fixed WP*WP damage period. Speed,MA,PA,BR,FA will effect abilities only and those abilities have been reduced to prevent damage spikes and keep balance. Also. My job system was a bit to ambitious and tbh I simply ran out of abilities to keep each job in the specific role I wanted it in while having a decent number of abilities. As a result some jobs had a nearly full skillset of abilities while others had 4-6 not counting R/S/M.
I had intended on keeping all of the vanilla jobs and just modifying them so they could still be used in the various cutscenes. I have decided I'm willing to overlook some glitches during interactions I've seen 1000+ times over the years I've played this game in favor of shrinking the job wheel while making every job very useful at it's purpose.
More later.

Not so much grindy as trying to keep leveling down. The higher level you get the more this games balance goes to shit so I'm trying to inhibit leveling a bit so you're not really high level by end game unless you serious grind your ass off.
A standard play through I'm hoping will be from level 1-30,35ish if that.
Making weapon breaks etc more common and buy/Sell prices higher and lower will be to force the player to work with whatever equipment they have instead of just buying everyone all the best shit Everytime it comes out.
I'm toying with a couple weapon formulas to balance the new
PDR/MDR mechanic I added. Spent almost 10 hours editing the item table and text yesterday.
Have a couple tweaks to make to a couple jobs still and then I should be ready.
Everytime I'm close my perfectionism kicks in and I start working on a bunch of other things lol.
It will be for the best though. I'm trying to be thorough and not have a ton of half finished ideas Incorporated. Usually when I started one particular balance I work at it and edit the text for it all at once and don't stop until it's done

ASM hacks used in QBS_Zodiac
Katana Break chance

Skillset Behaviors

JP gain hack

Experience gain hack

Counter tackle ability edit


Random Unit gear based on story progression

Random unit equipment more selective

Apply defense v2

Require materia blade

Guests in randoms

Remove targets faith from spell calculations

Inherant RSM Limitation hack

Unit rot without skipped turns

Learn on hit%

Equip X and gender equips

Individual weapon crit rate

Player starting inventory edit

Weapon proc rate

Weapon formula edits

Jump damage X/128*PA*WP regardless of weapon

AI attacks transparent

Wall loses hard coding

Special characters can do propositions

Mighty sword % break chance

Selling items at fur shop 1/4 price

Buying items at fur shop 1x price

Equip change innate all

Undead receive 20% max hp damage from pheonix down

Potions use fraction of max HP

Undead revival chance

Cross skip

2nd squad not mandatory

Blank support over short charge adds 25% skill hit

Divide gained EXP in 2

Divide bonus money by 2

Global C-Ev

X% crit

X% Knockback from dash/Throw stone

X% chance of procs

Selling items 1/4 price


Credits- The entire community at FFHacktics and all the fine tools everyone has contributed!

85% done with my armor/clothing rebalance
Incorporated damage reduction into the mod thx to Nates asm.
New stats PDR and MDR

Robes now offer high MP and have some magic damage reduction

Clothing has a balance of HP/MP and a mid-range of damage reduction against both Physical damage and Magic damage

Armor offers high hp and PDR.

I'm very close to releasing the demo. I had intended to have it ready Friday but was dead to the world with a massive migraine and to top it off some of the ASMs weren't compatible and I've had to shift some things around to compensate. Others are temperamental and only seem to work occasionally. Large headache tbh.
I'm trying to balance everything just enough to make the demo enjoyable before release. I'm also split very on a couple of the ideas ive been juggling and am still not satisfied with my current job system so I'm constantly tweaking it.
More tommorow.

I'm very close. It's a little delayed currently because some of the ASMs weren't compatible and I've had to shift some things around to compensate. Others are temperamental and only seem to work occasionally. Large headache tbh.

Definitely going to try it out but not until I'm totally finished with the foundation of my mod. I don't want to get distracted yet.
I'm curious for sure. Glad to see you picked back up the mantle!
I'm always up for trying new mods!

PA*(BRAVE/100)*PA
and
PA*(BRAVE/100)*WP
Already exist but has anyone made some to match that for magic?
MA*(FAITH/100)*MA
and
MA*(FAITH/100)*WP

?? If so could you direct me to the location of that hack if you know of it.
Thanks.

Actually. I made the decision to remove innates entirely.
TBH this new summoner class is good. I just got my ass handed to me in the tutorial because the chemist got Illusionist as a secondary and just kept spamming don't act and Poison while steady popping ether. Lol..

Summoning Magic became "Illusion"
They now cause statuses, have reduced Mana cost but no damage.

"Nature Magic" replaces Geomancy but retains counter flood "Natural Defenses"
Have to be learned on hit

Wave Around used by human
Just a couple of the learn on hits the Druid has.

Dark wisper used by human