It's alive!
IT'S ALIIIIIIVE!
*whew*
Ok, at long last, here it is!
Is it perfect?
No... there are a few oddities that will be discussed below.
Is it really cool?
Well, I think so, but judge for yourself.
First of all, what's attached:
-ShadowMod.ips - This is the Mod, and nothing else
-ShadowTest.ips - This is the same thing, except the town of Baron has Cid standing right at the entrance. Talk to him, and you will hear the "cure" sound, then open your menu and you will see Edge has been added to your party. Talk to Cid again and you'll here the "Thunder" sound, and Edge is gone - added to the shadow.
You can change which character is added/deleted from the party by editing the events in Ff4kster (the events changed here are "Behemoth Battle 51" and "Behemoth Battle 52"). The Mod is, for the most part, compatible with Ff4kster,
but, beware that there are not as many Actors as there used to be, since adding and removing always adds and removes the same actor. This leads me to...
-actors.dat - replace the actors.dat config file in Ff4kster with this one in order to make sure you're adding/removing the right actors. Only the valid choices will appear as character's names, all other choices are marked "empty" and should be left alone.
Also, I say this is "compatible with Ff4kster," but this assertion is not fully tested. If I were you, I would avoid editing "Characters" or "Actors," as this mod does make specific references to those sets of data, and I don't know how changing them would affect how it all works (changing initial equipment
should be safe, though).
Now, what else is important to say?
Ah, yes - This mod
only implements the ability to smoothly add and remove all characters to and from the Shadow. I did NOT go through every event in the game and correct all instances of adding and removing characters. You'll have to do that yourself.
Once a character is first added to the party, s/he will continue to divide and receive experience thereafter. So, by the end of the game, all experience will be divided by 13 and every character will receive this amount, whether in the main party or not. Making a patch to undo this division among the shadow would be easy enough, making a patch to avoid awarding experience to the shadow party, not so much.
As mentioned previously, Child Rydia and Adult Rydia share the same shadow data. Adult Rydia will not load correctly unless Child Rydia has been added and removed at least once. Adding both to the party at the same time will cause confusion and/or glitches and is therefore not advisable.
Equipment
is saved and loaded. So, when Adult Rydia comes back, for instance, she will be equipped with whatever Child Rydia had equipped when she was removed (instead of the whip and whatever else she normally comes with). The same goes for Kain, Rosa, &c... any character who normally
did use the shadow and came back with new equipment, now will not.
Finally, and this is the least happy part of this story, while I did finally get TNLs to calculate correctly, the leveling up system is not perfect. A couple of characters - as I recall, P. Cecil and FuSoYa - will have trouble leveling up completely if they gain a ton of experience in the shadow. For example, if you get P. Cecil enough experience to level up to 99 while he's in the shadow, then add him back to the party, he may only level up to 32 or so. If you remove and add him again, he will level up further, but it usually takes about for or five adds and removes before he comes out right. I don't know why this happens, but it has something to do with the game's regularly programmed level up routine, so I can't really fix it.
A few other characters similarly will only level up to 98 instead of 99 (I think DK Cecil, Tellah, possibly one or two more). Those characters will, however, reach 99 after one battle (even with 3 Imps).
I think that's all there is to say here. If you discover any weirdness that I may have missed, feel free to let me know. I promised myself that I'd take a break from the Shadow hack for a while by the time I got to this point, but I'm not against the idea of making big corrections down the road if there is a need.
Have fun!
It's come to my attention that this mod and User Options are not compatible. While I don't plan on going back and checking for the compatibility of all of my mods, I do acknowledge that these two may be those of most value and interest to ROM hackers with larger projects in mind. In light of that, I've developed a patch that will ensure compatibility between the two.
Bear in mind that I can only guarantee this will work on a ROM that has no other custom code inserted (edited with FF4kster should be fine, though)
beforehand.
Follow the steps in
this order:
1) Apply User Options (this will work with versions 2.2 and later)
2) Apply the Shadow Mod
3) Download and apply the patch below, "UO-Shadow Fix.ips"
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