Topic: Developing FF4kster: a comprehensive editor for FF4

[JCE3000GT]

The demon of real life claims us all at some point. Take your time.

Truer words were never spoken.  Life's been up and down the past 12-16 months.  Seems to be going up at the moment.  I hope all's well for everyone else!  :D

[Grimoire LD]

Things are going swimmingly for me. Glad to hear you have everything working properly now PinkPuff!

[Dragonsbrethren]

Hi folks, I know it's taking a long time but I am still working on this. Everything is displaying correctly as far as I can tell, and I'm working on the editing part. I messed up something logistically with the AI editor component so I need to rethink the structure of it, so it still may be a while before the next release.

Anyway, just thought I'd check in and reassure everyone that I'm still alive ^_^

Thanks for the status update. I'm really stoked for the monster editor and once it's ready for release I'll probably start working on this game again.

[Pinkpuff]

That's exciting!

Right now the condition set editor (allows you to edit what conditions are in each condition set) is giving me a headache. I understand the structure but it's just one of those things that happens sometimes where you're reading the code and going "this should be doing X" and can't see any possible way it couldn't be doing it, yet it isn't. Once I get past that, the rest of the editors should be very straightforward to code, and then it's just a question of the saving routines and how much trouble those give me, but often the problems with saving don't become very pronounced until after I release it and people start reporting issues.

[chillyfeez]

I've had (probably) similar problems trying to edit conditions:
I wanted to make a monster that reacts in a particular way to being attacked by Edge's Dart command, but it wasn't working.
Likewise, I wanted a particular reaction to a character using the Item command with a particular element (say, a specific reaction to lit-bolt) but it seems the game treats elemental attack items as spells in that respect, so the condition has to be an elemental spell in order for an elemental item to trigger a reaction.
Other custom conditions (that I can't remember at the moment) didn't work either.
I was kind of hoping that once the monster editor was released, you would have figured out whatever it was I was missing.
Maybe the game isn't really capable of observing all of the conditions the human mind can conceive?

[Pinkpuff]

The problem is definitely with my own code. It's currently only dealing with the in-memory abstractions that it creates when reading the rom, it hasn't even been writing anything monster-related to the rom.

Thanks for bringing that to my attention though, I'll be on the lookout for it when I get to the saving part.

[Grimoire LD]

Hmm, Chillyfeez may have an unfortunately correct thought. FFIV's AI Routines seem very limited compared to FFV and VI, As I recall the only thing special about the Crystal item to start the Zeromus fight is that it is Dark Elemental, not that it is a specific item or anything of the sort, that does not speak very highly of the AI's coding structure to me.

[chillyfeez]

Does that mean that, in theory, the Zeromus fight could be started by an attack with a Dk Knight sword? Well, from a plot perspective, that contradicts the whole reason Cecil becomes a paladin. How delightfully stupid!

[Grimoire LD]

Plot perspective it is absolute nonsense, yes. From a programming perspective... it is still rather silly. I mean they could have (I believe anyhow) used the Immune elemental byte as something special and unique to give to the Crystal and have a special exception to have Zeromus react to it.

[Dragonsbrethren]

The Zeromus transformation is triggered by a dark elemental spell from Paladin Cecil specifically.

[Grimoire LD]

That makes more sense. That's actually kind of neat in some ways. So a Dark Elemental Weapon wouldn't do it, only a Dark Elemental Spell? That was kind of my worry with letting Paladin Cecil use Dark Swords, glad to see that it wasn't a worry after all.

[Pinkpuff]

Finally smashed that bug after 

It was a stupid off-by-one error... 

Anyway, back to plowing ahead!

[Grimoire LD]

Wonderful to hear you got it fixed! I am looking forward to the next update.

[vivify93]

Hello, Pinkpuff. I had a question for you: will the editor ever support editing of the final scroll of the Mysidian legend? The full one that scrolls past the shot of space.

[chillyfeez]

... will the editor ever support editing of the final scroll of the Mysidian legend? The full one that scrolls past the shot of space.

I'm thinking that that is a visual effect and not an actual display of text. I'm not home so I can't do the necessary research to back that up, but a) I don't recall ever seeing the full legend in any known dialogue banks, and b) if I remember correctly, it's presented in a different font than everything else that's written in the game (of which I'm less sure because it's been that long since I've watched the ending). If nobody who actually KNOWS replies before I get home this evening, I'll look more into it.