Monsters and equipment

[Raze]

In an attempt to make monsters a little more interesting, I used FFTPatcher to allow them to equip armor on a case by case basis, however, it didn't seem to work when I went into the ENTD and edited a custom monster class I made to have a leather mantle. The monster didn't have anything equipped when I checked it during the battle.

The battle I edited was the first one involving Algus/Argath, with the monster in question being a Red Chocobo edit with all of the Chocobo family's skills and an additional one I added in place of the Red Panther you usually see there. Are monsters hard coded to be unable to equip anything?

[SolidSnakeDog]

This is hard coded sadly.
Imposible for em to equip anything unless someone make a ASM hack for em. But no one did yet.

[Raze]

I decided on a backwards way around that problem for at least the Chocobo class I had in mind: I edited the Undead Oracle you encounter later in the game by copying the Red Chocobo's stats and sprite set for it, unflagged it as a monster and flagged it male and, playing with it for a bit, it worked fine as an enemy for that battle, leather mantle and all. Would that work as solution for at least the special class 'monsters' like this, or would that cause some other sort of problem?

Thank you for the speedy reply, by the way.

[SolidSnakeDog]

The only problem is wen you gonna fight the undead oracle in the story line, there will be changed to chocobos.
But i don't think you will have any other problems.

[Wasabi]

Use the undead White Mage or Chemist. They're not used anywhere aside from test battles.

[Skip Sandwich]

better yet, use ALL of the undead jobs, and for those enemies that show up in story battles, give them normal jobs but equip them with cursed rings (innate: Undead, among other properties)

[SilvasRuin]

Wait, what?  I thought monsters were getting equips in Mercenaries.  There's got to be some known way to get it to work.

[philsov]

And I'm pretty sure that's how LD is doing it.  Monsters are getting reduced to one per family (IIRC), among other things.

[Wasabi]

Monsters in Mercenaries is like what philsov said, with the exception of humanoid monster sprites giving a complete sprite "redux" to allow certain animations, like weapon strikes and so on.

And I believe the "Na-shi" slots in Patcher are useable to some extent. Not sure if anything will go wrong if those areas are filled out through Tactext, but it's worth a shot.

PS: Perhaps I'm weird, but I do enjoy leaving the "undead" job classes from the storyline as they are with minimal editing, aside from buffing their stats and giving them better abilities. I enjoy seeing them float, looking purple, and wreaking havoc as enemy units in my patch.

[Jumza]

As i recall you need to check the male/female box in the entd to make a type 1 monster (skele goblin squid...) equip a weapon and actually show it.

[SilvasRuin]

Oh... that would explain it.

[Vanya]

As i recall you need to check the male/female box in the entd to make a type 1 monster (skele goblin squid...) equip a weapon and actually show it.

So you're saying that having all three 'sex' flags on will allow the unit to have equipment while still acting and sounding like a monster?

[Jumza]

no i think you have to change it to male OR female not monster. still not really sure tho im to lazy to check