Final Fantasy Hacktics

Just thought I'd comment on the Control/Morph question. For Control you may have to use my Ability Effects nightmare module (not the main Abilities module, the other one). I'm not sure if AIO supports changing targetable race, but I'm 99% sure that one of my modules covered it. Basically you would be looking for the targeted race and just changing it to target all monsters. (The function already exists for effects like Sidewinder, no need for coding.)

As for Morph, that's a whole thing. Since it draws so much data from the Monster Bank, you'd want to essentially cut it off from its initial functions completely. The abilities would need to be rewritten to ONLY change your available A-ability lists, instead of reading a tamed monster's data and changing your stats and blah, blah. (Otherwise you'd need to eff with how the ROM interacts with monster bank data in RAM at every possible point, including making any monster that's morphable capturable. Which would ALSO be a whole thing. That's why I suggest just cutting it off of its original functions and rewriting the ability from scratch.)

"Unlocked" and "revealed" maybe?

Also another possible take on the invite ability: It could temporarily store the character in the clan data. So even though it mechanically is giving you the option of whether to delete the temporary character or not at the end of the battle, it would look to the player like it's just a typical recruit option. There would need to be a check that makes the invite automatically fail if the clan is full but that check should be there either way imho.

Huh. I always wanted manual sorting but it never comes up in conversation. Very nice.

Unrelated: I am personally against the idea of having an individual inventory for each unit. The game has plenty of micromanaging already.

Combos and totemas were too broken anyway. There's probably a better way to implement totemas and combos can be replaced with movement abilities or a second passive ability slot. The only thing that I'll miss about the combos is the really cool animation.

Do you have the address? I may not be hacking the game actively but I'd be interesting in adding that to the ROM map on the modding wiki.

EDIT. Never mind I see you've been all over the wiki already lol.

Ante and Post probably won't be OP at all. The player will generally want to limit their target selection to a unit very close or very far away from their next turn. This limitation passively balances the skill.

The use of Primed on magic units is a new one. The spell names also remind me of Harry Potter which is fun. But stat manipulation is pretty weak already, so I don't think I'd be willing to take damage for inverted -break skills.

The only overlap issue I can really see is the shoes vs the abilities. But that's as easy as removing the shoes or setting a priority check. I'm just excited to see new ability options. FFTA's short list of passives and reactions has been totally eclipsed by newer TRPGs at this point. Which makes sense logically but still sucks since I love the unique feel of these games.

@dck; Well damn. I'm glad you told me that before I got back into FFTA lol.

@Leonarth; I noticed the features you're working on seem to be thematically linked to porting FFT's mechanics forward. A version of FFTA that borrows more from its famous roots might be interesting.

EDIT. Actually I just realized the gria is obviously new. This could ultimately lead to a version with the best elements of all three games. The TRPG of my wet dreams is getting so close to being a reality. :p

Three? Four effects per ability. And instead of gambling abilities, why not look at an ability like Bad Breath? It actually has more than four effects. It only has "one" effect in the structure because each value essentially points to the ID value of a subroutine.

EDIT. Well technically it points to a structure that eventually points to subroutines. Can you tell I'm a little rusty? Haven't reviewed my notes in years. :p

The only use I ever found for effects like Descent or Friend was to effectively shove all of the Gadgeteer's crap skills into one big gamble skill lol.

On the note of movement abilities: I seem to remember the boots having "abilities" assigned to them that are unlearnable and hidden. Those might actually be fully coded movement abilities that were already buried in the ROM. I never looked into it though.

Changing the loading routine is a bold fix. I like it. There was a time when I toyed with the idea of removing races and race-based mechanics. Which of course would mandate all human sprites.

But yeah the awkward formats were...blech. I've had limited free time so I just gave up on that idea at the time. :p

In addition to the bottleneck, I also like how the grassy plains terrain can transition into a section without vegetation. Too many maps in vanilla are like, "Um...haven't I been here before?"

Any progress in map editing is huge because there are very few maps in FFTA that offer any strategic challenges.

Looks cool! On the topic of height maps, Advance Map faced a similar problem. Pokemon games have tiles with assigned values to mean things like surfable, not passable, etc. The program therefore has a separate tab just for editing those values, which in this case would be height, in which the tiles are displayed as a visual aid for the modder.

Of course I know that making something like that for an isometric game offers some more challenges but...closest thing that came to mind. Good luck!

The damage modifiers for support abilities are handled in-formula iirc. You won't find a table of them, and would actually need to study the assembly itself, most likely near where the accuracy formula was.

Iirc that limitation was on purpose because that's where the structure ends unless you manually repoint it.

Probably? I first tried thinking of it the way moves are programmed in pokemon (set background a, execute animation d, summon particles c, etc) but the animation data contained here seems to have more nuances than just summoning generic pieces of animation.

When I replaced some segments of Cure with segments from Fire, I noticed a behavior indicating that these structures might even share some responsibility for GENERATING the animations, rather than just calling them. The particle effects I produced purely by accident didn't readily look like anything in the game.

So my assumption, as an example, is that it calls a baseline effect (particle, background, etc) and then some of the other values might actually correspond to elements of the effect (size, shape, etc). But this is very, very loose conjecture. It would be super hard to actually break down this data if it operates similarly to my theory.

Huh. Well that's awkward.

EDIT. So...if DA is walk on water, DC is ignore elevation, and DD is teleport...what is DB?

It would probably have something to do with that gap. The game frequently reads 00 as "end of list." But without more details all I can say is fill the gap and play with the start/end values.

Aha! That's clever. It never occurred to me that gadget formula without AoE is ultimately just a 50/50 hit or miss either way. I always got hung up on the friend or foe aspect of the formula.