Maintenance/Finger Guard Editing

[Eternal]

Out of sheer curiosity, how hard would it be to edit Maintenance and Finger Guard to work on anything found in Battle Skill/Steal/Talk Skill's skillset without looking at the formula? If it could be done, that would be very useful for me.

[Glain]

It looks like the maintenance/finger guard checks are inside the formulas.

To circumvent that? It'd probably be something like this...
Before formula code is called:

Find ability ID
Check for Maintenance on target
If so...

Find Battle Skill skillset ID
Find pointer to skillset
Loop through skillset searching for ability ID
If found, set current action to 00% and branch over formula code

Do the previous section again but with Steal instead of Battle Skill
Check for Finger Guard on target and, if so, do that section again but with Talk Skill

It isn't trivial.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

IIRC, FDC's formula rewrite hack will tie finger guard activation to the talk skill AI flag.  That's a viable way to do it.  Maybe the same could be done with the equipment and stat breaks, and steals.

Check the wiki, maybe SA already disassembled the relevant routines.

Maybe there's a table somewhere that has a list of ability slots to which breaks and such things are hardcoded, so if that exists you could check the table to see which ability ID's to null.

This makes me wonder about improving the AI.

Mighty Sword may be different, depending on what you want to do with it (default to HP damage, default to no damage, never hit if equipment is missing,...).

[Pride]

We already know the routines for those two skills PGF, they're located directly into the specific formulas themselves. This is precisely why it isn't trivial work as Glain stated above.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

Glain posted while I was still typing my reply.  Or he edited his post.

[Glain]

I guess it's possible if you spent 6 hours typing your reply.

[Pickle Girl Fanboy]

Sorry about that.  I'm not paying the least bit attention to, well, anything, because i'm playing Cataclysm right now.

http://whalesdev.com/forums/index.php

http://whalesdev.com/forums/index.php?topic=1248.msg21925#msg21925
^I'm even modding it a little bit.  It is so awesome modding something via source code, I think I'm done with ROM hacking forever.

I plan to rebalance much of the game's items, traits, and mutations, so I'll be asking random questions about C++ code in the future.  After that, you'll probably never see me again, because ROM hacking sucks ass compared to this.

EDIT

haha, I don't even have to fuck around with Windows shit anymore!

[Glain]

It is so awesome modding something via source code, I think I'm done with ROM hacking forever.

The difference is remarkable, isn't it? I sometimes forget that people aren't aware of the leagues of difference between working with high level source code (C/C++ and the works) and hacking ASM. Of course, to edit high level code, we need to have it in the first place...