FFTA: Revisited 2.0 Beta

[mobo]

Leonarth made an experimental hack here and from what I've tested

What it does:
---All party members get mission AP except those who go out on dispatch
---All newly learned abilities are correctly displayed in the mission summary screen
---Cosmetic bug: A generic soldier briefs every mission summary

What it doesn't:
---Dispatch missions only give AP to the dispatched unit
---Clan battles only give AP to participating members

I did not implement this because I could not test it extensively.

Leonarth also made a hack which makes JP be used for abilities instead of AP and it was included with the previous versions. Then I encountered some cases where the hundredth digit of the stored JP would reset. So, I did not include it afterwards.

It would be awesome if it might be implemented in future but well your mod is already good in its pace of AP adjustments and boosts.

The next update is the one for difficulty and boss fights.

.
Looking forward for it.

[rrs_kai]

it's included in the engine hacks, unless you go out of your way to remove it.

I've only changed the ROMBuildfile.event. Good to know that it's present.

Montblanc has never been one of my strongest characters before... will give some feedback if you want after I've gotten further.

I have tried many classes for Montblanc, the most recent test made him a Nu Mou similar to Cid being a Bangaa in FFTA2. I'm still not sure what's best for him.
Take your time and have fun, report if you find any bugs.

I can't find a full changelog though. The google drive only goes back to 1.05.

That's my fault. I deleted the old version of the game two years ago, then redid everything and changed the mod's name.

Also, what if all growths were static and independent of class? That way you don't have to worry about screwing characters up and can play much more freely,

It's bad because all the enemies would be similar. Fighting a White Mage and Fighter would feel the same.

especially with someone like Marche

This is why I've streamlined the base stats and greatly increased the story mission's AP reward. By the time you reach the first boss fight, Marche should be in your desired class. Tell me if this did not happen.
Also, I've not changed how the shop upgrades work. So, if you just participate in 20 battles, you'll have access to the full shop.

[sekaipt]

Hello, i just recently downloaded this hack and didint even knew there where mods of
 ffta i'd like to first of all thank you for all you have done

#Here a Couple of issues i found out
#FireStream
Ardamaelch Fire Stream keeps freezing my game(had to keep cheating to get out of those situations)
#ReturnMagic
I Got errored when i got Returned magic by a flan casting Sandstorm from My blue mage Also froze the game
#BadBreath??
Marlboro freezes the game by randomlyc asting bad breath, after i got confused the marlboror suddenly did bad breath into an open random area
Random Ideas

#rounded Stat Growths for every profession Reducing the Rng Factor when Building a Charatcher
and what i mean by that is for example
Blackmage Matk Growth is 8 not 8.5 cause that means it has a chance to be 9 this way you can also impact the enemies as theyll always have max possible stats for their own class
# Last Breath could be changed to hit  the same but take ur life to 1 or self doom as would indeed be Your Last Breath
#Removing the Secret Characthers extra 4 lvls as as soon as u get one u must grind it out although also works as a pretty efficient Exp Trinket
Lunatic Ideas
#Add Extra Secert Characthers Like Mewt(as a Nu Mou Illusionist as he is living on a big illusion) And Marche's Brother(no one can't tell me that he dosen't like an animist xD)
#change ritz recruitable job to Red Mage( As the base is much less specialized than fencer making some professions no as viable)

[rrs_kai]

Hello, i just recently downloaded this hack and didint even knew there where mods of
 ffta i'd like to first of all thank you for all you have done

#Here a Couple of issues i found out
#FireStream
#ReturnMagic
#BadBreath??

Thanks for playing and finding those three bugs. I am a bit busy now, so expect a delayed update.

#rounded Stat Growths

I tried this and decided not to implement it because most of the enemies that spawn would be the similar. I always ponder about it, so it may happen.

# Last Breath

-I did think of self-KO and self doom, but both can be avoided with a ribbon
-I also thought of enemy getting auto-life if player misses, to deter player from trying again
-Reducing self health to 10% (self knife)
I don't have any clear solution to this, yet.

#Removing the Secret Characthers extra 4 lvls

I do not have any plans to reduce their special-ness

Extra Secert Characthers

I don't think I can. The only way would be to replace the existing special characters with newer ones.

Mewt(as a Nu Mou Illusionist as he is living on a big illusion)

haha, that's a good one Nice idea
I was recently trying to add extra classes and stumbled across a flan named the "Mamaflan". Then it occurred to me that the final boss looks very much like a female flan.

#change ritz recruitable job to Red Mage

Yes. If it works then I'll change her to a red-mage or an illusionist. I meant elementalist.

[sekaipt]

Im hooked into this game tring to find possible builds and stuff and while playing i stumble in another bug

#Control Bug
If You for some reason cast control when a  mob is on a water tile the monster becomes invisible when it reaches its turn it freezes the game

#1.062
I noticed the spreadshit with the growths for 1.062 has indeed fixed growth rates for everything but speed, Although i Do find them to be a bit to similar in some cases besides speed i don't think u should fear reducing the groth numbers to 5 on some stats or even lower and doing 8+ on others this way when 1 is building it can build a full magic powerhouse a full melee or a hybrid or a mp or hp losing meaningful stats
For Example
Illusionist mpower 10 mresist 8 atk 3 def 5 mp 20 hp 5
Solder Mpower 3 Mresist 6 atk 6 def 6mp 20 hp
This way if one makes  a mage with life he cant straiught lvl it as an illusionist or he could go for  glass cannon, this are just random numbers though xD gues some math could be involved

#Speed
It took me a while to equip some fairy shoes and noticing they give 30 speed wich made me think about something related to growths what if u make speed growth always 0 But is affected by the shoes you wear this way u could assure speed tiers adding factor in how you build and maybe even make some shoes job specific(if that is even possible)

#Gear
I do think the armors and helms lack diversity but just compared to how everything else is so diffrent xD

#Blue Mage
I'm really in love with this blue mage aproach it actually became a real blue mage cappable of going MAGICAL with sandstorm and meteorite,  id like to know if there is a list of learnable skills for blue
mage
PS: what you think of adding miasma to blue mage as a magical poison source dmg
?
#BeastMaster
Never have Beastmasters been so usefull, but i think they have to much skills and are to damn god usefull xD even their growths are pretty balanced

#Last Breath
What about adding self guard off after last breath or just reduce the hit rate making it only usable if the target is sleeping or stopped (fits assassination i think) and theres a bunch of 2 shot combos i think so it wouldnt be so dif from a double ultima shot or matra magic

[rrs_kai]

Im hooked into this game tring to find possible builds and stuff and while playing i stumble in another bug

#Control
Wow, it's bugged?
Control was one of the first changes I made in this mod and that was quite a while back. You're the first to even spot this.

#Rounded Stats
I stuck to just three numbers because it incentivizes job changing. You don't have to feel too bad for having a few mage levels on a fighter. Also, I keep pondering about rounded stats because of how easy it is to balance them.

#Speed
The idea of zero speed is good (dck's mod FFTA:Long Night has this, but with armor instead). Fairy shoes are back to 20 speed (they were mostly 20 except for the last path). I like the RT system of tactics ogre. Leonarth added support for negative number display and I gave some negative speed to a few weapons.
Yes, it's easy to make shoes job-specific. That's a very nice idea when coupled with zero speed. In the current state, my mod forces everyone to use a shoe. I might implement this and move the stats into helmets. Thanks for the suggestion

#Helmets
I ran out of stats to play around with.

#Blue mage
Glad you liked the magical spells. His skillset is pretty much same as vanilla. He only lost bad breath. The patch also includes Leonath's many QOL hacks, and that means you can view the full skill set before mastering. The learnable skills are also in the spreadsheet, although not as up-to-date.

#Beastmaster
Beastmasters and Gadgeteers are useful now Yes, they have too many which is why I am trying to make a new mod with less skills per job.

#Assassin
Believe it or not, on my two childhood-original hardware playthroughs, I never had an assassin. I am almost fine with LastBreath being as is because I don't care about it. Also, she got a small indirect nerf from concentrate being slightly worse and status defense of some units being higher.

First playthrough - I thought that the assassin was enemy only. My best unit was a Dragoon.
Second playthrough - Focoused on blue mage and 300 mission completion. I found out the hard way that blue mage skills are permananly lost. I also found out the hard way that you can very ealisy throw out some important mission items.

[rrs_kai]

The only job that did not have change in all of this mod's history is the morpher. I got an idea today: try morphing allies. It worked, but also on the enemies. Morphing your enemy into a monster is not generally beneficial...unless you have a lv.1 monster in the bank, then you could morph a lv.50 enemy into a lv.1 monster.

I had many ideas that I did not implenent because I always thought that an "ally-only" targeting byte did not exist. No skill in vanilla has such a targeting. So, I tinkered a bit with the nightmare module and tested the two unlabelled bytes 0x07 and 0x11 and here are my findings:

spoiler: 0x07 and 0x11, The alchemist is using Aero

1) In the ability effects nightmare module, two bytes were not labelled. I tested both and I think these are the two possibilities:
--- 0x07 - ally only?? (because it is placed after self-only)
--- 0x11 - non-enemy?? (becuse it is inbetween all the "non" types)
--- Now we can have skills that can properly have one effect on allies and another on enemies.

spoiler: heal HP and damage enemy

2) Other units can be morphed into monsters
--- You can even morph monsters into other monsters
--- You can morph multiple allies into the same monster
--- Coupled with Leonarth's morpher hack, your whole party would actually look like monsters
--- Morphing counts as an action. If you morph yourself then your turn ends.
--- Unmorphing does not count as an action
--- If you morph an another unit, then you negate the turn that they would have lost had they morphed themselves. If you don't understand this, then think of healing self vs healing an ally.
--- Allies are able to un-morph without any crashes and still perform other actions

[dck]

Man, this really makes me wish we had a better way to share small details than the forums, I completed the missing info from the targeting and effect lists on the nightmare modules like 3 years ago when I made the bulk of my abilities.
Never thought to mention the ally targeting stuff because it seemed clear to me, but sucks to hear you restricted ability design based off of that , the vanilla options are limited enough as it is without adding extra ones on top.

Great application with the morpher stuff, I tried morphing other targets before but it was prior to Leonarth's change so they stay morphed, tl;dr they looked really silly so I didn't care.

I wonder if monster targeting can be made to include morphed units, that would make it more fair to use monster stats since you'd expose yourself to more abilities like sidewinder etc.

[rrs_kai]

I completed the missing info from the targeting and effect lists on the nightmare modules like 3 years ago when I made the bulk of my abilities.

I would like to have known this a long time ago . Only recently did I try combining "self-only" and "non-self". I only thought of experimenting with those two bytes today because morphing allies seemed so cool that I did not want to lose this idea.
BTW, do you which is which? As in, what is 0x07 and what is 0x11? Both of them treat guests like allies.

Great application with the morpher stuff, I tried morphing other targets before but it was prior to Leonarth's change so they stay morphed, tl;dr they looked really silly so I didn't care.

I don't use the morpher much, so I never tried changing anything with him. I never saw anyone improve the vanilla morpher because every FFTA mod changed the him into something else.

I wonder if monster targeting can be made to include morphed units, that would make it more fair to use monster stats since you'd expose yourself to more abilities like sidewinder etc.

That would be proper. Have you ever seen an enemy use sidewinder/wyrmkiller? I don't think I did.

[Dual-Wielding Ninja]

Since you've discovered that the Morpher can possibly Morph their allies, perhaps there might be a way to adjust the animation so that the chosen monster can descend upon said ally instead of yourself if you target them?

I myself actually like the Morpher so would love to see that job expanded upon. Would also be pretty cool to rename it to Transmuter to give it that D&D flavor a little bit.

[rrs_kai]

Since you've discovered that the Morpher can possibly Morph their allies, perhaps there might be a way to adjust the animation so that the chosen monster can descend upon said ally instead of yourself if you target them?

bcrobert's abilityanimation module has mystery properties associated with animations. Morphing had 2 out of 8 set to 1. I changed all of them to 1 but it did not do what you asked. So, I'm not sure how to do it.
If you want to see an animation that looks like some soul-transfer then Sacrifice's animation might fit.

[dck]

@rrs_kai
Idk if you've ever opened long night to see what effects are like, but a lot of them are changed into different things and combine targeting methods like that- just mentioning in case there's more mixes you haven't tried before. The AIO effect display for long night is completely misleading.

Afaik both of those are ally targeting, I could never find any difference between them or at least none I can recall.

And yeah pretty sure I have some formations with allied monsters and AI targets them with sidewinder just fine.

@Dual-Wielding Ninja
Things like that would be amazing for sure, but currently ability animation editing is very obtuse outside of changing casting animations with some level of freedom.
From what I learned from Leonarth, ability animation is handled with a lot of shared code that draws the specifics of each animation. I understood it as something that's basically hardcoded for each ability without being able to make our own yet.

This is probably more relevant to kai since he's dealt with animation limits too but, if an animation template ever became available in the distant future...
Man just imagine, I've had to cuck the looks of so many abilities because of being unable to adjust others to display damage or replay the effect on all targets, governing sprite animations played on cast/hit reaction, etc. There's a lot you could do if given freedom over the particles already ingame, and that's not even accounting for how an EA system might be able to load external images to use as well.

But anyway that's all conjecture, afaik there's currently nothing that can be done even for simple changes like that monster sprite coming down on target, it's all 100% vanilla animations with fancy casting customization at most.

[rrs_kai]

@rrs_kai
Man just imagine, I've had to cuck the looks of so many abilities because of being unable to adjust others to display damage or replay the effect on all targets, governing sprite animations played on cast/hit reaction, etc.

I can relate to that. A lot.

The only one I found that went, ever so slightly, beyond vanilla's limit was the fire/ice/boltshot from gunner. Vanilla is single target, but AOE also works.
I think Zombify is the only vanilla skill that has a damage value but does display the number in the animation.

[dck]

Haha, for sure. I'm also convinced the elemental shots only work for more than single target because they  just reused the basic elemental spells and made them call weapon use animation first.

There's a few more like that but I don't remember specifics, didn't even remember zombify does undisplayed damage in vanilla since mine just KO's and applies undead on the target.

[matchet]

Long time lurker of this niche yet extremely talented community.
I even tried to start a FFTA hack project (twice in a decade, both times got discouraged).
/End of presentations.

The core parts of your hack for what I picked it instead of others are:
- Stat growth smoothed: vanilla gave me some anxiety because of this. If you recruit a new unit in late game and comes as a bad growth class, their stats were forever messed up. Also, minmaxing implies having to pick "level up classes" for most of the game until you amass enough stats to change to your real wanted class. Well, this is no more a major concern.
- Quest items: original idea was interesting but storage limitations and the lack of any kind of classification made them a painful puzzle for completionists. Also, removing exclusive artifacts meant to trade via cable link.
- Extint monsters and missable items' removal: for completionists, this means a less stressful gameplay, without having constant reminders of missable skills and items. Playing for fun without worrying at losing anything forever.
- Accesible documentation: via google docs. Is a very important feature, for the limitations of ffta hacking lets text strings sometimes outdated from which it really does now. Playing with this doc on hand, like old physical instructions manual, is essential
- A closed to vanilla hack: without any big changes like new classes or crazy abilities (aside from Morph now, XD), that might keep my nostalgia intact at the same time at giving a somewhat brand new gameplay to discover and enjoy.

That said, I will pretend to play it on a modified 3DS. I'm noticing it because afaik there is no reports yet of ppl using this mod on that platform, and take this post as a compromise of coming back here if I get any bug or glitch, or at least another future post claiming to end up the game without any issue (expect a very long report, for I'll take my time completing everything and minmaxing as much as I can).

[matchet]

My first report (and im gonna edit this post for future updates unless someone makes another post after this).

First 20 hours and just beat the first crystal boss. That Famfrit's team not only looks menacing, but are more than cappable of obliterate your will and hopes with their simple yet excellent composition. Must mostly thank rngesus for evading some meteors, berserker'd red floateye and dual wield mog knight attacks, because at this level of progression I barely have skills learned to adjust my squad. Lucky me, my beastmaster managed to keep himself alive enough to tame red floateye and use him as a high dmg battery ram against his team, famfrit included.
Epic and well done, thank you.

Another memorable moments were the Wanted! quests in which you face 1 on 1 or 2 on 2 against a well builded set of enemies. Unfortunately, AI in this game is very basic and random, resulting in enemy wasted turns (modding cant fix that)

Speaking of bugs, im still on the way of unlocking Ninja, to see if the so-called Water Veil can pose any freeze threat on my 3DS, but for now the only minor bug happened in Ulei river, when my beastmaster casted control on a red lamia that was in a water tile: she kept herself invisible-sprited even after death, but without any game change

[necrobinical]

Question! Have you listed the learned abilities that... aren't a-abilities anywhere? I looked in your linked documentation and I couldn't find the listing for that anywhere.

[matchet]

Speaking about documentation, cant find the changes for R and S abilities that are changed. For example:
- Absorb magic now works for every mp consuming ability impacting in the character, regardless being a positive or negative magic
- Last Berserk somewhat works the same as Last Quicken, dont fully understand how it works now
and so on :/

[1337Noob]

This is really fun, refreshing experience to revisit FFTA.

The game freezes kinda suck though which is unfortunate. I know you added some to fix in the patch notes.

Not sure if anyone caught this, but Adrammelech's Fire Stream is another game breaker.

Just my opinion, The ambition for change is great. But I would focus on getting rid of the gamebreaking stuff, so that the entire game could be played from start to end without drastic roadblocks.

Can't wait for more, if you continue to work on this project.

[rrs_kai]

Question! Have you listed the learned abilities that... aren't a-abilities anywhere? I looked in your linked documentation and I couldn't find the listing for that anywhere.

I haven't because they were mostly the same for a large portion of the this mod's development.

Lately, I've made the following changes:
Removed Shieldbearer, Doublehand, Reflex, Strikeback
Humans got MagPow+ and Moogles got Doublesword
Many have received Immunity and Absorb MP, and all races can equip shields

Thanks for reminding, I will update the docs.
Edit: Updated the documentation and here is the link to the tab named R and S abilities

Speaking about documentation, cant find the changes for R and S abilities that are changed. For example:
- Absorb magic now works for every mp consuming ability impacting in the character, regardless being a positive or negative magic
- Last Berserk somewhat works the same as Last Quicken, dont fully understand how it works now
and so on :/

I will document them, and those two are the only changes to R-abilities
---Absorb MP triggers for all MP based skills
---Last Berserk = Quicken + Boost + Haste (think of it as an adrenaline rush)

This is really fun, refreshing experience to revisit FFTA.

The game freezes kinda suck though which is unfortunate. I know you added some to fix in the patch notes.

Not sure if anyone caught this, but Adrammelech's Fire Stream is another game breaker.

Did you find anything other than Firestream?

Just my opinion, The ambition for change is great. But I would focus on getting rid of the gamebreaking stuff, so that the entire game could be played from start to end without drastic roadblocks.

Can't wait for more, if you continue to work on this project.

Which version have you played? The 1.0 is not the best one and will soon be removed; I've only kept it for archival.
The latest one is the one to get. I am planning for an update that removes a lot of the fancy skill effects which should iron out any chances of bugs. Might take a month.

Anyway, could you please post all the bugs that you've observed?