Messages

1396

Game Modification Station / Re: New FF4 Hack Announcement

« on: January 25, 2009, 02:15:09 PM »

just beat octomamm, so i think i'm done with this until the next beta.  also, have you made any changes to goblin punch yet? it still seems to do almost no damage.

I made zero changes past the desert @ Kaipo...

Goblin Punch was changed, but to properly take advantage of it, you would have to increase Rydia's attack power.

also, is warp meant to be castable as an instant death spell? i know it's been discussed here before, but i was wondering because i could target enemies with it but it didn't seem to do much of anything.

Yes. It does work, but it's intentionally neutered to have the same hit rate as Piggy (10%).

1397

Game Modification Station / Re: New FF4 Hack Announcement

« on: January 25, 2009, 01:56:06 PM »

It's the Magic Arrow spell.. and it's always been there. I prefer to call it Magic Fists because... that's what they are visually. 

that's right! i always forget that that exists.   since it replaces chocobo in the call menu, will she be getting that at some point, or no? although, it looks like it's a little stronger than chocobo, so it really doesn't matter.

Ah crap, that wasn't intended. When I posted up that stuff, that was probably when I started tinkering with the initial spell lists... which have been reverted to the defaults (for my current working build). Event spell driven additions with spell learning lists will be the primary method of inserting new spells.

 
I have considered reworking some of the initial spells, but that's gonna require some thought.

1398

Game Modification Station / Re: New FF4 Hack Announcement

« on: January 25, 2009, 01:24:09 PM »

monster healing etc etc...

i was just making the suggestion about using  monster healing ability for octovamp for the sake of drawing out the battle. i was looking at octomamm's stats and figuring in the 1/10 healing, though, and it doesn't seem like it would be enough to do that anyway.  you might as well just add the drain ability.

Healing only makes sense when the monster has nice counter scripts.. which the Octomammoth uses a lot of.. but there are more amusing methods of lengthening the battle that doesn't strictly involve healing.

[spoiler]
hang on, quake doesn't end the battle vs. rydia anymore? you have to defeat her? this is pretty damn cool.

also, btw, quake9.5 does no damage to anyone.  is that supposed to happen?
[/spoiler]

You can still lose the battle and continue on with the story. It just happens that you have the option to win it (and some other battles to boot).

Quake does work... it's just part of a linked attack. You need to see FF4ET's Red Dragon in action to fully understand what chained attacks can cause in terms of visual errors. You see Rydia "making the attack", which is a side effect of a character-battle and linked Quake-Fight.

interesting change to the officer/soldier battle. will more changes be forthcoming for that?

Absolutely not. The battle itself is just Fight-Fight-Fight.. I just wanted the Officer to take a greater role in the fight primarily because it seemed rather lame. I believe I'll make a slight change to Rydia's battle, but that's a result of making the TinyMage more difficult.

2

magic fists? is it the same as chocobo, but without the animation? the damage seems about the same.  hmm... and it's free?

It's the Magic Arrow spell.. and it's always been there. I prefer to call it Magic Fists because... that's what they are visually. 

1399

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Armor Modding Info

« on: January 25, 2009, 09:19:54 AM »

I'm pretty sure this isn't new info, but I started to mess around with some of the armor data, which I've found a lot more meaningful now..

Note that the most significant/leading bit in this info is bit 0.

Byte 0:
Bit 0 - Metallic
Bit 1-7 - Magic Evasion value

Byte 1:
Bit 0-7 - Defense value

Byte 2:
Bit 0-7 - Evasion value

Byte 3:
Bit 0-7 - Magic Defense value

Byte 4:
Bit 0 -  Shield Bonus? (Defense Multiplier += level/16)
Bit 1-7 - Elemental/Status table

Byte 5: Race Resistances

Byte 6:
Bit 0 - Ring
Bit 1 - Armor
Bit 2 - Shield
Bit 3-7 - Character Equippability table

Byte 7:
Bit 0 - Str
Bit 1 - Agi
Bit 2 - Vit
Bit 3 - Wis
Bit 4 - Will
Bits 5-7 - special table that dictates bonuses

Note: When any of the bytes 0-4 = 1, the bonuses are positive. When any of the bytes 0-4 = 0, the bonus is 0 or negative.

1400

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Initial Spell List

« on: January 25, 2009, 07:18:08 AM »

As an aside, you can stuff/insert more spells to be learned from events right? I hadn't really looked over that code too much, but I wanted to see if there was some trailing FFs so I may be able to update my spell learning patch to include the missing spells for Tellah when he comes back from Mt. Ordeals.

I'd also like to know I can make those changes w/o starting a new entire game (this is very important to me). I have no plans of worrying about the other characters that won't benefit here.

1401

Game Modification Station / Re: New FF4 Hack Announcement

« on: January 25, 2009, 06:38:02 AM »

well, i like it so far, and i think that adding drain to octovamp is a good idea.  it's tough to add something to the early battles(when i'm used to just holding down the a button), but i really think that what you did helped. 

Well, you'll still end up holding the A button for most of the Soldier-Officer battle, but that can't really be helped... (even if Dark Wave was there, I don't see that as an improvement anyways).

on the other hand, is there any way to give the octovamp one of the "monster" remedy(general healing?) abilities, and have it use that? do any of those abilities heal like 1/5-1/2 of enemy hp, or do they all heal a lot(75%-100%)? i think drain is a better idea than this, though, because it also damages the party.

I did write a spell list and algo doc  I tend to refrain from regular Cure spells because it has to be applied against magic defense (so, you'll never find Cure3 helping a Behemoth out for instance) and the monster healing comes to 3 different versions..

1) Overpowered - Cell monster healing (instant maxHP) or the hidden Zeromus version... same idea. It has some application, but it is best left for bosses late game to have effectively increased HP pools.

2) Fixed, but mediocre constant - Remedy (renamed Recover IIRC).. always 1/10 of  the monster's max HP. So, the healing tops out at 6500+.

3) Variable, but current HP dependant - Absorb always heals 1/3 of the monsters's current HP.

So, if you were to apply that to your characters, you would need a current HP of 7500 to heal to the max if you had 9999 MaxHP.. for monsters, they have a higher threshold, so they would need a minimum of 30000 HP currently to start healing at 9999 and decline from there. This has promise, but when you've played ZeromusEG in FF4A, this gets lame to a point.

Remember that #2-3 avoids Magic Defense calcs.. and I'm sure I could use Cure3 or Cure4 (although, I don't know how that code is screwed up in Cure4 in JCE's hack) but that goes through magic defense... something that I'd rather avoid unless I tweak it manually.

Right behind you Bond. Is Octovamp vulnerable to Lightning or you gonna make all bosses immune to elemental spells?

It will be still be vulnerable to Lightning, but from prior experience, that isn't the strongest spell to use against the boss. Spell effectiveness won't be neutered, but there's no sure bet to relying on them since I have a few devious tricks up my sleeve.

wow, that's an interesting direction to take the floating eyes... 

The theme of that monster is instant death, but the reality is that the monster has limitations... forcing the issue of death is a nice plus and future possibility.

is the mist dragon supposed to drop things?  i got a summon spell for rydia from it... 

hmm... after checking in the editor, it seems that the mist dragon does indeed drop 2 different summons.

This is to give more play to the summons, but the only promising summon that should benefit most from the changes is the Imp/Goblin summon.

1402

Game Modification Station / Re: Crazy FF4 Hack Idea

« on: January 25, 2009, 06:24:30 AM »

No monster sprites will be added.. mainly because I don't know how, but I'm not attempting to try that at all because it serves no value to me. I'd rather have monsters do nastier things than give them a new image.

1403

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / List of Unused Monster Formations?

« on: January 24, 2009, 11:15:40 PM »

If someone's not done this already... a list of unused monster formations (well, particularly ones that involve regular monsters, not the special boss case variety), that would be appreciated.

1404

Game Modification Station / Re: New FF4 Hack Announcement

« on: January 24, 2009, 09:06:10 PM »

I need an answer to this idea..

I was thinking of doing two major things to Octomammoth... other than renaming it to OctoVamp...

The idea is two pronged...

I love the idea that the beast will have the Drain attack property.. in addition, the beast will counter with Drain vs counters. The Drain spell won't be powered up, so the damage will be relatively minimal. The purpose is to keep the battle running longer, if not make the beast more annoying.

However, it may be that I'm going overboard with this drain thing, but the healing has to come from somewhere... it has to be drain or monster healing induced.. and that will be unavoidable for the forseeable future. Does anyone have some creative ideas to spice the battle up, but w/o changing fundamentally the battle itself?

As you can see from the changes so far, a lot of the tweaks are nothing dramatic, but make the battle far more interesting. I'm wondering out loud that these changes are right on, or it needs to be better somehow...

Besides, I'm not going to mention the best part of the OctoVamp changes are going to be...

1405

Game Modification Station / Re: New FF4 Hack Announcement

« on: January 24, 2009, 06:39:18 PM »

The most notable changes are the revamped spell learning list and the changes to some spells...

I'll have to bring out the hex editor to edit changes in the equipment bonus for part of the next update... up to the Octomammoth.

1406

Gaming Discussion / Re: best sega emulator/s?

« on: January 24, 2009, 03:11:15 PM »

Kega Fusion's fine as is... I don't try to tinker with too much to get stuff done.

I avoid using Gens, primarily because of the obvious forced color-depth switching.

1407

Game Modification Station / Re: New FF4 Hack Announcement

« on: January 24, 2009, 02:43:44 PM »

I will have an update that redos Rydia's mini-battle. That shouldn't be a big deal though..

Also, I'll have the Officer-Soldier battle do some different drops to boot.

There's nothing majorly serious about it though...

1408

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Initial Spell List

« on: January 24, 2009, 02:16:23 PM »

How would that system deal with spells that are not normally initial for Rydia (speaking of monster/enemy spells)? Remember she starts with 3 different lists....

I think it's a little more fuzzy that what you're saying...

This list is based off FF4's internal listing...

0E FF FF FF FF 35 FF 0F 03 04 12 13 16 FF 1D 20 23 2C 2E FF 0E 01 0D 07 17 FF 1D 20 23 29 1C FF 0E 01 0D 07 17 FF 01 .. 30 42

The stuff in bold are the terminators, the last value in italic is not separated due to a filled spell list.. however, the list doesn't read that way you say it is...

First spell is Cecil's (though, I wonder if that's inserted as a DK or Paladin), followed by Rydia's.. but it has three preceding terminators instead of 2 (for White and Black magic).. which has some wondering if Kain was supposed to have a spell list.. anyways, that's followed by Tellah's White Magic, then Black Magic.. then Rosa's White Magic (most likely), then Palom's Black Magic, then Porom's White Magic, then FuSoYa's entire spell list, then Edge's only initial Ninja spell.

It could not possibly be that FuSoYa is ahead of Edge in the character ID order.

 

Similar stuff occurs with the spell learning lists.. at least in regards to the format... the terminator that comes from the middle of nowhere really makes it all the more confusing at times.

1409

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: Question about the Event Data?

« on: January 24, 2009, 07:46:23 AM »

Rydia learns Fire1 @ 0x91B16 (headered, FF2US 1.0, 1.1, FF4ET), 0x91AFF (headered, FF4)

Rosa learns Exit @ 0x93234 (headered, FF2US 1.0, 1.1, FF4ET), 0x93226 (headered, FF4)

Edge learns Flood and Blitz @ 0x9446B (headered, FF2US 1.0, 1.1, FF4ET), 0x9445D (headered, FF4)

1410

Final Fantasy IV Research & Development / Re: The Back Row

« on: January 24, 2009, 07:22:59 AM »

It looks like monsters do actually adhere to the back row rule themselves... this excludes the GBA port though.