øAslickproductions.org/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=5f0fck550j2m4m2fpbtkj2vkm1&action=profile;u=383;area=showposts;start=45e:/My Web Sites/Slick Productions - FFIV Message Board/slickproductions.org/forum/index1a66-3.htmlslickproductions.org/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=5f0fck550j2m4m2fpbtkj2vkm1&action=profile;area=showposts;u=383e:/My Web Sites/Slick Productions - FFIV Message Board/slickproductions.org/forum/index1a66-3.html.zxƒ¿h^ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÈ .å³OKtext/htmlISO-8859-1gzip0|Öå³ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿWed, 11 Mar 2020 10:54:19 GMT0ó°° ®0®P®€§²ð®‚¿h^ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÛ*å³ Show Posts - Kea

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Messages - Kea

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46
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF4A (E) Hacking Notes and Mod
« on: November 08, 2015, 10:08:30 PM »
Currently, back row compatibility is determined by item type/icon. I've fixed the out and out bugs with that system, but it would be nice to have a more robust way to determine back row compatibility. Or I could rework how attacking from the back row works in the first place. Make it halve your Attack Multiplier instead of your Precision. Basically become even closer to FF5.  :happy:

I don't remember what I was thinking giving undead Scarmiglione 15 defence; that's going to get reduced. He is double-weak to Holy, so Porom with the Holy Arrows gets quadruple attack against him. Still, no reason to make attacking with her any less effective. I still think I might make Bluff a one-time buff, but increase the bonus from 16 to 20 Intellect and allow it to go beyond 99 Int. That would be pretty easy to code, just have to expand the Bluff routine. Party stats for all characters are stored in a separate place from their in-battle stats like in the SNES version, although all characters have their stats stored permanently unlike what I hear the SNES version does with its 'shadow party'.

Making the Knight's Armor turn Defend into Guard would be possible in some ways: I can simply edit the physical damage routine to additionally check for Knight's Armor equipped when the target is defending, and reduce damage to 1 or quadruple effective defence in that case. Making it change the command's text to Guard would probably be possible too. That's already done by the Lunar Ruins equipment, after all. Might be a little OP, but it's worth a shot.

47
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF4A (E) Hacking Notes and Mod
« on: November 08, 2015, 12:06:12 AM »
Hmm, the Healing Staff has 80 accuracy already. It can't hurt to put it at 99.

Seems like stacking Bluff with Palom is even more effective than I had supposed. Short of making the bosses straight-up immune to magic (which I definitely don't want to do) or having them all be races against time there's not much you can do to stop that. Maybe I can recode Bluff to only work once per battle...

It's difficult figuring out the right balance between equipment, especially for Cecil who has such a diverse selection. It's definitely true that reaching an additional attack multiplier is worth more than a few points of defence, especially early on when an extra multiplier is much more significant. I was leery of giving the Knight's Armor too much defence since I worried it would make Cecil practically immune to physical attacks that would take huge chunks out of the squishier characters, but maybe it's worth giving it a go anyway.

Could always give it status protections. Blind or Curse immunity would come in handy later...

e: Thank you for the criticism by the way. I try to look at my changes from several different angles, but inevitably you end up missing something.

48
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF4A (E) Hacking Notes and Mod
« on: November 07, 2015, 05:16:01 PM »
The GBA script is definitely odd in places, to say the least. I've been thinking about making changes to it actually, but that seems to fall outside the scope of this hack. Maybe it'll be a separate patch.

Quote from: Grimoire LD on November 07, 2015, 02:35:00 PM
Alright, let's get back to it then! It's been a while and I will probably be a bit rusty.

Whoa, whoa, what? Augments Ice Magic when equipped?! I had no idea you added in FFV style rods! That's been a desire of mine to do for FFIV for a long time, good thinking!
Hah, coding this was much easier than I'd feared. Specifically, element-boosting equipment increases the base power of the appropriate element by 33% when castin. Attaching elemental boosts to the fire/ice/bolt rods makes them worth buying, since casting basic magic for free loses its lustre pretty quickly.

Quote from: Grimoire LD on November 07, 2015, 02:35:00 PM
Hmm, Healing Staff has no Spirit boost, hah.
Hmm, the Healing Staff says it casts Cura but it's still the useless 20 HP Heal from the original.
It's a little confusing, but the Healing Staff functions like its FF5 incarnation; it casts Cura after attacking. IIRC the extended description mentions this, but the second line never shows up on the Equipment menu.

Quote from: Grimoire LD on November 07, 2015, 02:35:00 PM
Hmm... were there always Zombies in normal fights outside of Mt. Ordeals?

Bloodbones are definitely a tougher customer with seeming resistance to Ice and Lightning and normal damage from Fire (or just high Magic Defense) and their Absorb attack can be tricky. A Decent-ish chance to drop the Venom Dagger though.

Alright, onwards to Mt. Ordeals!

...The Souls know Summon? Oh that will make this quite a bit more annoying, thankfully they can be Silenced, that doesn't stop them from using Summon however.

The enemies here are rather brutal. I may want to head back to Mysidia to buy a Crossbow and Holy Arrows for Porom. The Hand Axe can at least deal some physical damage but the Souls have high Physical Evasion so it seems almost a necessity to use a Level-2 spell to take them out.
The Zombies outside Ordeals are new, the idea is that the whole area has undead running about.

The Souls only use Summon when all other enemy types are defeated (there's a new-ish encounter that takes advantage of this, he he), so you can stop them from doing that by just killing them first. They're also vulnerable to Tellah's Stop.

Quote from: Grimoire LD on November 07, 2015, 02:35:00 PM
Alright, went back to Mysidia and got Porom equipped with the Crossbow and 50 Holy Arrows with decent precision (thank you for making that viable option by the way)  so maybe now it won't be so resource costly to defeat Bloodbones and Souls.

I can't say how useful Tellah will be with his Level 1 Spells, but his high level White Magic like Cura, Blink, and Life will definitely come in handy!

Seems like Porom can really pack a punch with those Holy Arrows and Crossbow, you've really managed to make the Twins the stars of the show here, even Tellah is support.

Bio is now quite expensive. Good. It needed balanced.

Oh... Bio deals 1 damage to Undead... reasonable enough.
Bio is now a Dark elemental spell and the undead monsters here are immune to that element, so it's not as useful as it normally is. All of the undead monsters here except for Souls are highly resistant to magic, but they're also doubly weak to Holy so Porom with Holy Arrows can sometimes OHKO Revenants. Alternatively, Palom casting Fira with the Fira Rod has enough power to punch through their magic defence, since the zombies here are also doubly weak to fire.

Quote from: Grimoire LD on November 07, 2015, 02:35:00 PM
Instant Game Over Quake from Scarmiglione... hah.

 :edit: Alright, found a bit more time to play this and I managed to beat Scarmiglione, I feel kind of stupid for not realizing it before that Bluff is key otherwise time will elapse and he will insta-kill the party.
I don't know if you never encountered this or if it's bugged somehow, but if you kill all of the Skullnants, Scarmiglione will switch to a different pattern without Quake; that spell's there to discourage leaving just one Skullnant alive while you beat on the boss.

Quote from: Grimoire LD on November 07, 2015, 02:35:00 PM
Hmm, sort of surprised that Scarmiglione 2's Cursed Elegy doesn't really do anything but Slow still.

Few, fully Bluffed Palom (4 turns of his) and two Fira's finished the job. Overall I found the second phase easier than the first. But that may be because I wised up to the proper strategy.

I do sort of feel I wasted 8000 GP on the Knight's Armor though. The Gaia Gear's Strength of +5 seems much more preferable in most respects than the plus extra 5 defense that the Knight's Armor provides.

But this seems like a proper stopping point! I'll end it here for today.

Cursed Elegy slowing the whole party is a pretty serious debuff, it makes it harder to keep up with his offence, especially his Lightning -> Earthquake sequence...or at least that's the idea. Maybe I should make it turn your party Undead. Now that would be debilitating!

As for Gaia Gear vs. Knight's Armor, I just forgot that Cecil can equip the former. Don't forget that the Knight's Armor gives +3 Spirit - with all of his Paladin equipment Cecil has a little more Spirit than even Porom (sans a Ghouls Ring) has.

49
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: AI condition flags / AI commands F4,F5
« on: November 06, 2015, 07:27:07 PM »
I believe avalanche is documenting vanilla commands used by FF4's AI scripts. So FFHackster probably already does this, but figuring out how the command is read by the game code is useful in and of itself.

For me, seeing how the AI script format differs between the SNES and other versions is always intriguing. For instance in the Wonderswan/GBA versions, monsters have their own conditional flags, and adding to or subtracting from the flag byte is not possible - only 'set' is supported. Or at least I haven't seen anything else.

50
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF4A (E) Hacking Notes and Mod
« on: November 06, 2015, 07:19:45 PM »
You should be good to go from Fabul; there shouldn't be anything that breaks.

And thank you. The way the custom equipment ASM works is that after setting elemental and racial attributes from equipment, my new code runs through ever piece of equipment and checks for a (formerly unused) index byte in that item's item data, then uses that byte to index to a pointer table to ASM routines; so any item with an index byte of 1 will run he same code.

51
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF4A (E) Hacking Notes and Mod
« on: November 05, 2015, 04:40:31 PM »
Well that took quite a lot longer than a week.  :blush:

But I've finally finished up to Cagnazzo, who has the most complicated AI script of any enemy so far - 352 bytes in all. I had a lot of fun designing his and Scarmiglione's fights, so I hope you have just as much fun battling them! :finger:

In engine news, I've implemented a system for equipment to run custom ASM routines at the start of battle; this allows for equipment that sets status effects like Reflect, Haste or Image, or makes the wearer Undead, and things like that. I haven't figured out how to make permanent status effects for a 'true' Reflect Ring, but it's getting there.

Regardless, here is the patch. Complete up to beating Cagnazzo and looting Baron Castle. My next task...is to play Threat From Within, because it's looking really cool from what I'm reading.

52
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Element Indexes
« on: November 04, 2015, 11:25:11 PM »
It would indeed; you'd probably also have to find space in character RAM data in-battle for 1-2 extra bytes of data representing Immune and Absorbed elements in addition to rewriting all spell routines that read the resistance byte, the physical damage routines, and routines that handle reassigning resistances when swapping shields.

Finding the extra space in RAM would probably be the trickiest part though, unless there's unused space we already know about. Defining absorb/immune/resist separately in the ROM data for equipment and monsters might be an issue too (just speaking generally here, not having gone into SNES FF4's data structures in depth).

53
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Baby Zeromus?
« on: October 23, 2015, 05:45:10 PM »
It's funny, that graphic's still in the GBA ROM - it's placed in among the summon graphics, after Asura's alternate sprites.

54
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Final Fantasy II: A Threat from Within (Version 0.4.2b Available)
« on: September 05, 2015, 05:08:30 PM »
Yeah I skipped the Fat Chocobo, I thought he was for storage only like usual. But since Chocobos are an optional feature I think it's alright if they're potentially missable.

What emulator do you use to play FF II? Both ZSNES and SNES9x's latest releases give me issues with text boxes; ZSNES cuts away the lower border, and SNES9x sometimes omits the bottom line of text.

I also ask this because attempting to leave Mysidia takes me back to the House of Prayers, and I'm wondering if this is just me or what.

55
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Final Fantasy II: A Threat from Within (Version 0.4.2b Available)
« on: September 02, 2015, 10:49:20 PM »
When Porom isn't looking, Palom writes pamphlets about himself:

56
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Final Fantasy II: A Threat from Within (Version 0.4.2b Available)
« on: September 02, 2015, 09:53:06 PM »
Just finished the initial Agart sequence and made it back to Eblan. Some thoughts:
-Edge reacting to using Steal is a nice touch.

-As is the slight modifications to Eblan to make it look more like a place people might live in.
-The ninjas sparring in the training room was a pleasant surprise, I didn't know you could do that sort of event.

-When I ran into Chocobos in the forests, I was confused initially on what to do with them, and tried killing them for exp.
Eventually I hit on using a Firebomb to bypass their magic defence, which is how I discovered that you're supposed to kill all enemies except the Chocobo.

-Neat feature, allowing Choobos to cross rough terrain. I assume the Agart chocobo is just a demonstration of this.

-The Cockatrice lookalike in Agart is called Dummy. Not intended I assume?

-Jinn battle was basic, but it's the first boss battle so it kinda has to be. It was cool that stealing Ice darts and Ice Shards from enemies was rewarded in being able to take him out more easily.

-Furio's (in-battle) all-red ensemble could use a secondary color IMO. It's hard to make out what his clothes are supposed to look like, as opposed to eg. the Ninja recruit's getup.

-I like the idea behind the temporary recruit system...it lets you experiment with party members of varying abilities without having to write around them in plot.

57
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Final Fantasy II: A Threat from Within (Version 0.4.2b Available)
« on: September 01, 2015, 11:33:19 PM »
Hey, I'm trying out this hack, but I'm getting stuck early on. When I try to leave the throne room of Eblan I'm blocked by an invisible thing. When I interact with it this dialogue box shows up:

Dialogue box shows: Furio: I'm back, Pop!/Mission accomplished!

An event flag gone wrong, I assume? I'm using a fresh unheadered 1.1 ROM with SNES9x 1.53.

Edit: Ah, but leaving and reentering the throne room via the secret treasure room makes that blockage disappear. Well at least I can continue on from this point.

58
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF4A (E) Hacking Notes and Mod
« on: September 01, 2015, 10:18:27 PM »
It's been a while, but I'm not quite dead yet. I went on vacation and isolated myself from computers for a while, and after I finished up the Scarmiglione battles took a break from this game to avoid getting burned out.

I should have the mod up to Cagnazzo or the Dark Elf finished in a week or so.

59
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: 4bpp Graphics Backport
« on: August 13, 2015, 06:55:52 PM »
This is very impressive! Especially since graphics code totally stumps me.  :eek:


60
Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: FF4A (E) Hacking Notes and Mod
« on: August 11, 2015, 10:56:03 PM »
One small thing while I work on Mt. Ordeals....

The routine at $09C304 handles charge times for all abilities, based on a byte table at $0F94E4:
Code: [Select]
$0F94E4 - One byte per command; 0x21 bytes in total
-Bottom nibble is base charge time
-Top half is bitfield:
00 - Use (ATB time)/(base charge timel), modified by Agility divisor
10 - Use base*(ATB time)
20 - Use base charge time
40 - Use spell's charge time (Magic, Summon, Ninjutsu etc)
Of all abilities, the second part of Twincast has 0x14 as its value, the only command that has bit 0x10 set. Its unique formula to determine its charge time looks like this:
Code: [Select]
Charge time = min((500 / (Agility*10),1) * 4 At the point when you first recruit Palom and Porom, Twincast will have a charge time of about 20-28 units. That's over twice the charge time of Meteor, applied to both twins! :scared: Twincast will have a not completely insane charge time (of 8 units - almost as much as Meteor) when you get the twins back at the endgame, but by then Comet and Pyro are laughably weak.

This formula is used for both twins involved, so whichever one has more Agility is the one that will cast the spell (so, Porom usually).

My mod will likely make Twincast have a fixed charge time, so you might consider using it sometime.

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