Final Fantasy Hacktics

Well, the mining event is very nearly done, finally! All I've got to do at this point is some minor wrap-up, and wait for feedback from the rest of the team.

For reference, I started planning this event in January 2019. After restarting from scratch multiple times, it's great to be within eyesight of the finish line on it.

Quote from: Nyzer on September 23, 2017, 07:41:47 pmOh, Raven - I was running into an error shortly before I left on my vacation, but in my haste to get an event done before I had to go (I did not succeed) I failed to report it.

If you turn on the offset option, the compiler displays the offset message long enough for EVSP to report an error with compiling. I closed the offset display and hit try again, and it closes like normal, with the event compiled & functional.

Also, the previous issue of having the textbox jump back to the top when you Compile to Savestate without commenting out the offset is still a thing. Pretty sure I was using the newest version.

You should be able to edit that in. The edit button is at the bottom of the post for me.

Yeah, I think I'll do some tweaks to that scene later this weekend now that I've seen it in game. Runs a bit long for a battle-end scene as is, IMO.

This is the best you've got, really. I assume if it was easy then the Valhalla author would have made it do so.

The problem is that ideas that cannot be used aren't useful at all. An entire job being impossible isn't a "detail to work out later".

You should spend some time playing with the Patcher to understand what's even possible before proposing a huge list of ideas about remaking Jobs (as, aside from the DK hack, we can't add new Jobs to the wheel; they'd have to be special units or replacement jobs only.)

Better to edit the ATTACK.OUT to immediately jump to your event after the first event of the game. Then you don't have to change the offset of your event later. You can also just instantly end the first event of the game to skip to your new event right away.

Savestate editing is how you easily test events. IIRC it helps to save your savestates right there in the EVSP folder. Start your event with Pause() and use that moment for your initial savestate.

Mid-battle spell unlocks are not feasible without major ASM hacks, I'd expect.

Literally the only skill possible in your Ifrit Knight's set would be the one-inch-punch. IDK what the "ignite" status is supposed to be, unless you're talking about an FFTA2 status that I've totally forgotten about.

Traps aren't possible, again unless this is an FFTA2 mechanic I've forgotten about. (Does ring a bell in that case.)

Mastering a job to unlock another job isn't a requirement we can set without ASM hacks that no one has done AFAIK. The WotL jobs don't use normal unlock mechanics.

I don't want to discourage you from coming up with ideas - but I'd say there isn't much of a point in coming up with job ideas that simply can't be used anyways.

Quote from: Elric on May 10, 2020, 11:22:40 pmWho did this??

Bwahaha.

Also, just to clarify for anyone who might be wondering: the current (and hopefully final) major roadblock is the complicated set of gathering minigame events. I actually had a nearly complete version of the mining event ready back in September; IIRC all that remained was to get it all to fit in a single event and then bugtest it to be sure. At the time, the mining event was going to be done through dialog box choices, such as "go to which deposit, mine it for how long, are you looking for any specific gems?" etc.

But I failed to save the file for too long, and when my laptop died, lost a decent chunk of progress, which discouraged me for a while. When I did take a good stab at trying to pick up where I'd left off, I found out that I couldn't even tell where I'd left off, and that the event seemed ridiculously broken in a lot of ways that I was sure hadn't been a problem during any of my previous tests. All in all, I was totally lost at this point.

But then at one point Xifanie and I got to talking, and planned out a fair few ways to implement button presses rather than choice boxes, giving the player more direct control over what was going on.

Once I was past some personal developments in my life, I restarted the event completely from scratch.

And, honestly, so far, I can assure you the event is much more enjoyable this way. Going through choice box after choice box after choice box was... functional, but bland as shit.

Also, a lot of the stuff these events require are commands that aren't seen in normal eventing. At all. So there have been a lot of new concepts to learn and bugtest going into them! One of the reasons it's taken so long to get any good progress on them, even before getting screwed by a failure to save or restarting from scratch because we came up with a much more engaging way to do it.

QuoteBut when do you expect to release Ch.2

Eventually.

Quotecould you please make an Easy Mode for Ch.1

There's not really an official one yet (it's planned for the rerelease) but here's a quick and dirty Easy Mode that just buffs the Five a lot via the Patcher.

That's still a very specific kind of monster setup that doesn't even exist in vanilla. No generic monsters are immune to the status effects that would lock them down far more effectively. Someone would have to be designing generic monsters with the clear intent of preventing them from being CC'd in any way before it would come down to trying to "exploit" the fight by draining their MP, and then, well, yeah, just give them sky high MP and maybe Move-MP Up and that solves that.

Quote from: Biospark74 on May 06, 2020, 05:17:08 pmIt works well, but I think choosing stats in the middle of a fight would break the flow of the game and lock the player is a singular path for the character... :/

You could always just give them points they could spend after the battle's over. Or they could just stockpile them for some time if they so chose.

I'm not sure how this would lock the player in a singular path any more than many of the other options discussed. It actually seems to be more forgiving than basically anything dependent on just character/job progression, as at least the player would get some choice on point distribution.

If you really want to avoid feeling like a character is locked to a certain path at all costs, then there are a couple ways to go about this.

One is to allow players to refund their growth in some way. You could simply keep a total number for the character's bonus stat points, to allow them minor tweaking while still retaining the base stat increases with each level, or you could reset/refund their levels entirely. Though I wouldn't recommend resetting levels if you have a high number of them and no quick way to regain them.

The other is to go with something like the system nitwit suggests, which sets you up so that a lot of your stat gains come from job mastery, and simply have it set so that you don't cap your stats at a character level, but at the mastery of all jobs. Kind of like how FFV would just keep making the Freelancer job more powerful the more jobs you mastered. You can mix this with character levels if you so choose, just keep the base character level stat ups more neutral. It does sort of send characters down a path, but that's only if you add all the bonuses together - instead, you can simply do something along the lines of adding the job stats from both the current job and the secondary skillset to the base character stats.

Quote from: old school on May 07, 2020, 04:47:30 pmI'd be concerned about the exploit @yamish pointed out, "Osmose"-ing a monster to 0 to cause it to avoid using a skill.

Why would anyone ever do this in the first place, though?

Under those circumstances, it would take multiple turns of draining a monster's MP to prevent it from being able to use a skill. Those same turns could be spent inflicting Disable. Or Sleep. Or Stop. Or Frog. Or Chicken.

Or just stabbing it to death.

And assuming the skills are set up the way Jot5 does them - one physical attack shared across the whole species, one blue magic attack shared across the whole species, and one monster-specific attack - draining their MP is going to prevent them from using one of their skills.

I can't imagine someone doing this even for the novelty of it, because it doesn't change enough about the fight to really matter.

The skills don't need to be 0 MP. Monsters won't consume the MP, but the AI won't attempt to cast if their MP isn't high enough. You just have to give them better MP multipliers.

And no, you would have to figure out which innates to cut if you wanted to give them Non-Charge.

Renamed the topic for clarity and moved it to the Lounge subforum as it seemed to be a better fit.

I actually strongly dislike the Fire Emblem randomness when it comes to leveling up units. Some RNG can make sense, but it's all too easy to end up with a useless level up.

Character based level ups lock the character into a specific kind of path.

Job based level ups can kind of do the same, only at least the player gets to choose the path.

Player input for all stats can be a bit of a paralyzing choice at times - especially when it isn't quite clear just how useful each stat is. And even if you know "okay I want this character to have max Strength", the question then becomes, what is max Strength? Most systems have diminishing returns on this kind of thing. And what if you need to keep it balanced with Dexterity or something along the way?

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You know the leveling system I've liked the most out of any RPG I've played? The one in the Mario and Luigi series, in which Mario and Luigi's stats automatically raise in certain ways, and then the player gets to choose one of their stats to add a little bonus to, with a roulette wheel determining just how big that boost is. Pumping a single stat too high lowers the range of the bonus on that stat going forward, but you can still keep boosting it.

Ultimately, I'd go with something like that, mixing RNG, character stats, job stats, and player choice. The character innately starts with a specific kind of stat loadout. Stat boosts from leveling are then based on the character's current job. And finally, the player gets to choose a small, randomly determined bonus to any stat after the level up.

So you want it to work exactly the same but with fewer spells?

Pretty sure each Patcher spell just has a flag for whether it can be used that way.

Editing the first post's title is how I do it

You should. IIRC there is some hardcoding with the Charge slot though so you may want to switch Charge and Break's skills, since Break skills never use CT.

You didn't change Charge's Action Menu type?