Hello I am Rich McGrew, someone who earlier combined together 47 Final Fantasy VI patches (mostly bugfixes, hardly any that change things not considered bugs) into a mega-patch, available at my website (the server is sometimes down though):
http://www.richmcgrew.com/downloads.htmlIf you have trouble accessing my website it is because I use a free web-hosting service, and there are some problems with server downtime and also I have been unable to change the contents of my website for a few months, but I haven't updated my Final Fantasy VI mega-patch since November 2007 anyway.
Early on you looked at the list of patches I had used in my patch, and it seems you are using many of the same ones (and many more).
Anyway, I want to congratulate you on the good work you are doing, and clearly you have progressed further than me.
I have been playing the game again recently using the version with my own patch and would like to warn you of a few bugs that may occur, which do not occur in the original game... these are bugs I did not know about when I last updated my patch and the website, but are obviously introduced by some of the patches I used, so since you use mostly the same patches, you might also have them:
1) In my mega-patch version, the ThiefKnife does not steal, it just does damage like a regular weapon. I know for sure that this doesn't occur in the original game.
2) There seems to be some problem with certain characters not being able to learn the Ultima spell from the Paladin Shield (it may also occur with learning other spells from other shields but I have not tested that yet). I encountered this problem when using the Paladin Shield on Relm, Gau, and Setzer, and there might also be other characters it can't teach Ultima to besides those 3 (I was teaching Ultima to half my characters with the Ragnarok Esper and the other half with the Paladin Shield at the same time, so I didn't manage to test it on all of them, although I did confirm that the characters who can't learn it from the Paladin Shield can learn it from the Ragnarok Esper), or it might be different characters in each game, who knows. I'm pretty sure the Paladin Shield didn't have this problem in the original game.
3) There seems to be some graphical glitch at the beginning of a battle if Gogo is in my party, where Gogo flashes between looking normal and being black all over. I am not sure if this was in the original game or not.
These seem to be the only 3 bugs I have noticed so far, and some of the patches I put into my mega-patch have newer versions now (for instance the Gogo and the Cursed Shield Fix has a newer version from earlier this year of 2011... my patch used version 0.6 but now the version for that is 0.9), since I made the mega-patch back in November 2007.
Anyway, these bugs MIGHT also occur in YOUR project, but they DEFINITELY occur in mine, and if I ever manage to put out another version of my mega-patch I will try and track down the cause of these bugs to get them fixed. Meanwhile I suggest that anyone playing the game with your patch check for these bugs... it won't be until the World of Ruin that you can get Gogo or the Paladin Shield, although the ThiefKnife does occur fairly early in the game, so that one should be easy to check. I haven't looked into your project in as much detail as I want to, but clearly you are combining all sorts of bugfix patches from all over the place so that's cool.
Also, there are more bugfix patches available from different people now than before (for instance, Novalia Spirit's and Mblock129's patches were not in my mega-patch because they apparently hadn't been made yet), and I am not sure if you know about all of these bugfix patches (and some that are not bugfixes but more mods), so I will post a bunch of links here (you probably already know about all of these, but just in case you don't know 1 or 2 of these, take a look):
Assassin17's own patchesAssassin17's hosted patchesDrakkhen's patchesImzogelmo's patchesLord J's patchesManuLöwe's patchMaster ZED's patchesMblock129's patchesNovalia Spirit's patchesPhantasian Productions' patchesRomhacking.net's patchesRPGOne's retranslation patchSlick Productions' patchesTerii Senshi's patchesZophar.net's patchesAnyway, I am very glad to see someone else doing something along the lines of what I was doing, namely combining together all the bugfix patches in order to have one patch to fix ALL of them. When I put out my mega-patch, the only person who had done anything similar that I knew about was ManuLöwe. My mega-patch is rather out of date and I have found 3 bugs in it that I listed earlier, and I just listed them in order to warn you that you might also suffer some form of those bugs too, maybe. However, if you are going to be making changes to the game that are not bug fixes, like renaming monsters, renaming items, renaming commands, etc., maybe you could have 2 versions of your patch, one that just has the bugfixes but doesn't change things that aren't broken, and another that includes all the changes that you wish to do to mod the game. The goal of my mega-patch was to mostly only include bugfixes and things that would make the English game more like the original, but without renaming any monsters, items, commands, or anything, and I wanted to maintain the Psycho Cyan glitch and the Vanish-Doom Bug so that players could still count on those if they wanted to take advantage of them. I did include a few things that could be considered new features or improvements, such as the alphabetized rage list, the Slot command being unrigged so you can get any outcome with enough skill, the color coded MP digits, etc. And while I did consider changing the fonts as I had done with my patch for Final Fantasy IV (editing them pixel by pixel for that game to get it just right, as a nice, large serif font), I decided I really liked the Final Fantasy VI fonts just the way they were (FF6 fonts are based off the Chicago font from Mac OS) and didn't modify them. While I am not against editing fonts, and actually enjoy it, I do find FF6's default font on the SNES to be the best looking font for that particular game, although for FF4, I designed my own font, which you'll get if you apply my FF4 mega-patch available at my website (when my website's server isn't down, that is)!
So sorry for rambling, I really like what you've done here, and while I haven't play-tested your patch yet, from what I've read so far I'm pretty sure it's way better than mine, although it goes further than I would go in changing the game, because the 1 thing I won't do is rename stuff like items, characters, monsters, commands, etc., as that will make things confusing for people who use walkthroughs or other guides, and I just like things being a straightforward IMPROVEMENT that mostly just fixes bugs and where the names of everything are the same so nothing will confuse the reader of a walkthrough. And I wanted to warn you about the 3 bugs I know about SO FAR from my mega-patch, just in case you have them in YOUR patch too, or in case anyone is thinking of playing with my mega-patch, so you know to expect those bugs. And of course I wanted to list all the other sites that have patches just to make sure that you didn't miss any, since you have taken up the mantle of fixing this game after people like me who didn't go as far.
One last thing, you are now linked to from the Final Fantasy wiki thanks to my edits (along with all the makers of other patches):
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Bugs_and_Glitches#Final_Fantasy_VII didn't include my own mega-patch on the links in that wiki because, honestly, I think the quality of my FF6 mega-patch is not good enough, given that I alone have found 3 bugs in it and others can probably find more, and I have not updated it in a few years (I last updated it in early November 2007, which was when I publicly posted it on my website after playing through the patched game on my own, and I can't remember if I noticed any bugs in it back then or not... I noticed the 3 bugs I told you about in the last month or two).
Anyway, good job!
- Rich McGrew (a.k.a. General Public and various other names on different websites)
We have EVEN MORE themes now, but some old ones are gone...