Insane Difficulty: Started a Legend of Mana mod. - Insane Difficulty

Lurker here :-)
Kinda wanted to support you at least by a small post, like others (even overcame registration ^^), and say what im also follow this tread.
Well, just to say what this is really really interesting project to me, as LoM one of my all time favourite classic games, wish you good luck and good mod!

Oh hi.

https://dl.dropboxus...%209%202014.zip

This is the current unstable build. It should be /feature complete/, it just needs debugged and possibly balanced. I ditched the ST bar stuff 'cause it was too complex, and went with the combo multiplier thing.

If you want to play with this, it won't screw up your saves or require you to start a new game -- just make sure to reload from the normal load menu instead of from a save state.

Mechanics:

- Plunge attacks work differently.
-- By default, uppercut/thrust/back-forward plunges don't do damage but instead are meant to be used defensively, to push back enemies or move.
-- There is now a combo multiplier. With each quick attack that lands after L1, the multiplier increases by one. This multiplier increases the damage done by quick attacks AND the plunge attacks mentioned above, which otherwise would not do damage.
-- Moving decreases the multiplier, by about half with each step taken.
-- Doing a L1 quick attack resets the multiplier.
-- This means that plunge attacks should now be used as combo finishers, primarily.
-- Also, the plunges mentioned above won't build ST when the multiplier is set to 0.
-- The standing normal plunge does 2x damage, because it leaves you open. The skill/plunge combos do normal damage. Both of these reset the combo multiplier.

Re-balance ideas:

- I might make quick attacks a little weaker to increase the value of using combos and keeping pressure up. Similarly, I might have the combo multiplier affect plunges more.

- Might make an optional version that has the player's speed be normal, but multiplies the enemy speed by four instead of two. This might get hard to control, though. I sort of feel like the reduced player movement offsets the fiddly collision detection.

Future additions:

- I still want to find a way to reduce enemy respawns, although that's going to be a separate patch that doesn't rely on this one, if I do make it.
- I want to clean up the comments in my source. A looot.

https://dl.dropboxus...2014%202014.zip

New version. Fixed a few issues, mainly.

-- Combo multiplier definitely appears to work now.
-- Boosted damage output.
-- Hitstun is disabled again.

Still not totally happy with the enemy and player speed, but I have room to mess with that.

Anyway, this should be stable enough to play around with if anyone wants to give feedback on whether this is fun or not.

As an expert of the Devil May Cry series, it was nice to have some difficulty with normal fights. It's a bit clunky and hard to get used to at times. I would like to list some changes that I think would help the overall experience:

- Movement should be a little faster on both sides. I would say 90% original speed for the player and 125% for enemies. Also it would be great if you could replace the "sliding" with a constant move speed.

- Make plunge attacks always do damage. It should be slightly less than a quick attack. It would create an interesting dynamic between doing some damage and getting some distance, but also put a pause on them so they don't become too spammable.

- Enemy attacks do a little too much damage. Take out the 'leveled damage' or scale it to the enemies' level rather than the players. If I were to not grind, I'd prefer standard enemies to take me out in 8-9 regular attacks and bosses to take me out in 4 or 5.

- This has been a big one for me. Special techniques take way too long to charge when using them. This gives me a bad gauge of when to use them and it is extremely easy for me to dodge the enemies own ones. Perhaps take the player's invurnerability away to make it balanced. In numbers, it should take 1/4 of the time to use it.

- Counterstrike still massively overpowered, I can two-shot almost any enemy with it. It should be 1/2 the damage it did in the original. Also, it should knock back the enemy about 1/4 of what it does now.

I'm going to have to ditch this until I've beaten the game though. I've done it before but my comp was wiped so I don't have access to Nightmare or No Future mode.

Oh, and love the combo multiplier, by the way.

D MAS, on 18 June 2014 - 12:03 PM, said:

Enemies should be at 200% their original speed now. I'll bump it up to 400% and leave the player at their original speed and see how that works.

I don't think I could do anything with the sliding.

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I tried this earlier and it didn't work -- the knockback ends up acting like hitstun, and you it's too easy to spam uppercuts.

I wasn't able to find out what causes the player to stun after doing the standing normal plunge, so I wouldn't have any idea how to apply that to the other plunges.

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I think cutting the enemy damage output in half from what it is now would accomplish this. Also that would probably work nicely with the speed up to enemies you suggested above.

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I wanted to speed up enemy attack execution in general but I couldn't find any way to do it. That's why I dropped the player speed -- the original rate of movement made it too easy to dodge any attack.

I think there's a gameshark code that disables the enemy's charge time for doing special attacks -- I could look into that and see if it impacts ST attacks as well, and then reduce the time instead of disabling it completely.

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Changing knockback isn't really feasible. I've tried this too, and I couldn't modify it without it causing weird side effects. Specifically dropping the damage counterstrike does, though, should be doable. I'll look into this in the next version.

I could actually probably broadly halve all the plunge/tech combo and ST damage, if people want me to.

--- edit ---

Boss no-delay
E212323C 00A0
3012323C 0000
E2123248 00A0
30123248 0000
E2122D11 00A0
30122D11 0000
E21232E8 00A0
301232E8 0000
E2122D1D 00A0
30122D1D 0000
E2123254 00A0
30123254 0000
(Skips the flashing delay when bosses make special moves)

^- This was the thing that, apparently, removes wait time before bosses do their special moves. Courtesy of some guy on Gamefaqs. Check it out with PSX Emulation Cheater maybe and if that's what you're talking about I could PROBABLY implement it into the patch.

Yeah, the sliding bit was wishful thinking on my part. Honestly I should have re-read my post a little more instead of customizing the crap out of it(I've been using Google+ too much don't blame me). Also, I didn't tell you this earlier, but if you input a different plunge attack right after the standing one you can chain it. I always end up spamming quick attacks then finishing my combo with a good 2-3 chained plunges. But yeah, when I played my current profile I was level 28 and dying in 3-5 hits from level 15 enemies with pretty dang good armor. For those who want stats...

Armor Str Sla Prc Mgc
GatorArmor 21 8 12 1
SidiaMantle 0 1 1 5
DragonBone 0 0 0 12
Total 21 9 13 18

I think it's the leveled damage. Perhaps scale it with the difficulty? If possible, I'm looking for a little something like this:[/color]
Normal: Enemies HP: X1.2 Damage: X1.5
Nightmare: Enemies HP: X1.8 Damage: X2.4
No Future: Enemies HP: X2.5 Damage: X3.75*
*I haven't played No Future difficulty so you may know that one better than I do
[color="#C00030"]I would prefer a setup where on Normal you wouldn't need to use the workshops and stuff, whereas in Nightmare they would be preferable and No Future it would be a near-must. Also, there's some sort of charm in using a ST and blasting 3/4 off a resilient enemies' total health off, so I would prefer it to be the mainstay of your damage, although you could do without it.
I still want their HP to be kind of high because if you blacksmith you can make weapons of 200+ damage which would make even Draconis look like child's play. Although to be fair, this is somewhat because most people aren't as partial to damage sponges as I am.
It sounds difficult...but I would also like weaker enemies to stagger from your hits a little bit but still be able to interrupt you if you aren't quick enough, which would make fighting weak enemies 1 on 1 easy but harder if you got into a group of them because it's a little too hard to fight enemies without taking a single hit of damage.

Anyways, tried your code on Count Dovula and he still flashed... Hopefully you can figure out a way around that because I'm not half-sure of how the PSX works.

Hello, I just wanted to say thanks for your good work, as it makes the game so much more enjoyable.
IMHO Legend of Mana could easily be one of the best games around if it wasn't so easy, and had a better control scheme, and you made major improvements in both fields.

I also wanted to suggest a solution to a problem someone raised: Switching equips and skills on a P2 character.
So, I understand that it would be difficult to apply an interface to change these directly, and that currently we have to open up the character's game, make the switch, save the character and then re-open as P2 (correct me if I am mistaken)
My suggestion is to make a "dummy game", which contains only a debug room with a save statue and access to the shared stash. This "game" could run in the background allowing Player 2 to switch to it, make changes and switch back. Then, another program (GameShark?? I dunno, not really an expert in this area) could copy the values for skill and equips from the dummy game directly into the main game's memory.

steamyoshi, on 20 June 2014 - 04:28 PM, said:

Agreed. I am always forgetting to set my techs on a 2P game.

I'm liking the new changes to combat. I've had to keep my distance and bosses are scary now lol.

My suggestions, which are probably not possible are:

1. Can you remove experience gems and just divide the experience automatically between the party?
I think everyone finds it annoying when you are trying to get experience in the middle of a fight simply because the gems disappear and the rest of your party doesn't even acknowledge their existence. This leads to taking unfair hits or flat out dying. I feel like I'm calling a time-out in the middle of the fight just to pick up experience.

1a. If you can't do that, can you disable the timer that causes them to disappear?

2. Could you somehow allow the Player1 character to be swapped out with an NPC? It would basically function like two player2 characters. I just thought it might be fun (not essential or anything), but fun to play as some of the awesome duos such as Bud and Lisa, Elazul and Lady Black Pearl, Escad and Diana, etc. I know in the debug room there is a way to get whatever NPC you want in your party. Just no way, that I've found, to change yourself to an NPC.

2a. If this can't be done, would it be possible to instead add a way for a player to have two player2s in their party at once?

3. I don't know if it is just me, but isn't charging up the abilities and powers and magic kinda repetitive and silly? Maybe if there was a way to decrease the time it takes to power-up with a bunch of lights and such all over the screen, while nothing can touch you or do anything about it lol. Feels like Dragon Ball Z.

3a. If that can't be done, perhaps making it to where charging up doesn't make you or anyone doing it, invincible? Maybe even make it interruptible if you take too much damage.

4. I'm not sure if this would be a good thing or not, and I know how you have been balancing and removing a lot of stuns...but...what if you modded the game to make it more cinematic and action-feeling by keeping stuns in, but when you stun the enemy you also are stunned for the same duration. This would just be done to make it emphasize the blows when you deal and take damage, making it feel maybe more intense.


Sorry to make this seem like a shopping list or something. I understand if you aren't aiming to change any of these, they are just suggestions.

Thank you again for your work! I'm enjoying it.

https://dl.dropboxus...Less_Damage.ppf

- Made a variant with enemies that move faster but do less damage. I think this one feels better. I left the player speed low though so your mileage may vary.

Gotta be honest, I'm not really fond of damage sponges myself. If you want tougher enemies, though, you can scale the amount of damage that the player does down.

Also I hooked the HP calculation code for the stuff that sets thebattle flag, which is why I labelled that function, uh, Set Enemy HP or whatever.

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Wait, in my mod or in the base game? My mod is supposed to zero out the combo multiplier when you do a standing plunge.

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Dangit. It's possible that the code is trying to modify, uh, stuff in the memory range that program code is stored in, and Gamesharks don't change that for some reason.

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If I could find where enemy levels are stored, it would be pretty easy to do this -- if the enemy is ten levels below you, turn hitstun back on for the level 3 quick attack combo stage. Except I can't find enemy levels anywhere. IF I could get this I could get better damage scaling too.

... Although IDK if that's strictly practical, cause I think with enough level disparity they tend to die pretty fast anyway.

Base game, sorry I didn't mention that earlier. Yeah, but still find it annoying that enemies more than 10 levels lower than me can actually kill me. Oh yeah, can you make regeneration slower? I found the code for it.
80122CBC 00 -01(disabled) -00(Regens 1 HP per frame)
I nearly forgot to mention this, but how the code works is that it continually counts up one and once it reaches certain multiples it increases health by 1.
Just so you know this controls regen for ALL party members. It also makes Crouch basically useless except for techs.
As for the enemy level, it shouldn't be too hard to find. I think I've got the range for enemy stats.
Also, I think I'm pretty close to discovering the revival time code. Although I personally like it better for the retry prompt to show as soon as you die and I think it's fine for others.

Got around to playtesting the less damage version: it's better but still kind of annoying. I've largely noticed that the starting rabite at Luon hits me for as much of my health as a Dainslaif in an area where I would be about level 20. I looked at the enemy stats and found that they were all level 2?
Movement's still slow. I've got an idea though. Depending on which weapon you wield, you move slower. Instead of cutting player movement in half see how much each weapon reduces movement and multiply it by a factor of about 1.5. This would definitely make hammers need more power as well as 1H swords, axes and spears needing less for balance.
I know you said you don't know how to do it but bows should probably be about the same power they were in the original game but take about twice as long to shoot.

Well, that's my view. Hope you don't think I'm trying too hard to turn it into Devil May Cry. =P

Identified a logical error in my code which I may or may not bother fixing.

Basically when an L1 quick attack hits, the combo multiplier is reset. If you miss the first and hit with the L2 quick attack, it never resets. Meaning that if you got to like L3 in the combo multiplier, intentionally missed the L1 attack, and landed the L2, your combo multiplier would be at like 4 instead of 2.

Other issue is, I believe, if the player keeps whiffing a L1 attack and then comboing it into a plunge, they can keep the plunge attacks going without reducing the combo meter, since they don't move while doing this.

Fixing the second issue could be addressed by reducing the combo multiplier whenever a plunge is done. Fixing the first point would be a little trickier than it sounds.

But I'm not sure you could really exploit this in a practical sense anyway.

Also feel like I need to make sure I don't have any wraparound glitches from subtracting past zero.

D MAS, on 23 June 2014 - 08:32 PM, said:

The damage scaling is based on the final damage done after all alterations for defense are taken into account.

Having good armor is going to have a bigger effect on damage reduction than the stat gain you get from leveling up. Actually, it's not even clear if your stats in LoM are even used for anything -- they have some subtle effect from what I can tell, but the damage you do and take is 90% whatever your armor and weapon power is.

The enemy levels don't exist in the enemy stat blocks from what I can tell. This was the first place I checked.

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The game already does this, although the effects are subtle.

In particular to the player speed, as I stated elsewhere in the thread, I'm reducing it to be more in line with enemy attack speed.

If the player's moving at their regular speed, they can clear the entire screen before enemies get out of their attack wind up animation, and it's basically impossible for the player to ever take damage unless they're trying to. The ideal option is to speed up how fast enemies process their attacks, but I have no idea how to do this since it appears to be linked to the number of frames in the sprites.

I'm... not that big on making the player slower, myself, honestly, it's just something that the limitations of the existing engine have me stuck with for now.

Additionally, the player still has jumping/somersaults/etc at their disposal -- the speed of these are not affected.

Tweak to current system that I'm going to try out:

- Movement from walking doesn't change the combo multiplier now.
- Movement from doing skills or from doing plunges, which occurs in the same bit of code, halves the plunge multiplier now.

I think this is ultimately fairer. I'll test it out and try to upload a new version at some point tomorrow maybe.

-- edit --

https://dl.dropboxus...20Mode%20V1.zip <- This has a standard and reduced damage patch in it.

I'm also making a third variant with higher damage from enemies, the player moving at 75% speed instead of 50%, and I want to possibly reintroduce hitstun when the player hits a level 3 quick attack.

--- edit ---

Movement acts strangely if I have it set to 75% speed. It's fine if I flatly double/halve, but not if it's changed by some power of two value.

Also I think I'd rather make a version where there's not hitstun /at all/. Is getting permanently stunlocked fun?

-- edit --

Added the above version to the aforementioned Zip.

Any update on this mod? I just found this thread (been playing older games..i own LoM and totalled the crap out of it years ago with a nasty set of armors and a 230 power dagger..other game has a 400 2h axe) and i've been scouring the internet lately for mods. Cannot find a Saga Frontier 1 mod (god that game was enjoyable! I would just love to see a full fix for its glitches and the full storyline installed...SE refuses to consider it). Anyway, I would like to play this one, but I hate playing betas because I am horrible at diagnosing issues for development.

Last post here was over 5 weeks ago, so I'm just curious if its been abandoned or in the middle of a hard fix. If the latter, I will wait to play it til the next version is released

Thanks.

More likely that Eleg has a life. Do keep in mind that these are things that we do in our free time, and as such they can take quite a long time.

I know that..Its just that the updates were quite frequent

I quit updating it because it's pretty much done, unless I feel like making any other /arrange modes/ or tweaks, or if someone turns up issues (that I created -- the game already does some glitchy stuff that's NOT my fault ;V).

I don't consider it a beta anymore although I'm not guaranteeing that it's bug free.

I'd also like to note that the beta status just meant it was, uh, in beta -- I wasn't requesting people to beta test it for me.

this sounds really cool so far. I loved mana and haven't played it in ages. a change of pace would be very nice!

Hey I just wanted to say this mod sounds awesome! I am a big fan of the Mana series and LoM was one of my favorites. I just was thinking about it today and found my way here and am super pumped to play your mod! The changes seem great and look like they are going to add a whole new experience to this great game.

Some suggestions I have if you ever decide to work more with this mod:

Online capabilities!

LoM is built like a MMO. From the quests, the pets, the garden, the multi-player character loading, the scaling difficulty, it is essentially the shell of an MMO that never went online. Seeing as how there already are the options built in to load a friends character into your game, (AND THERE IS PVP TOO, WHAT?) it seems like it wouldn't be impossible to create a sort of system that encourages online play, like a web-based lobby or something. Diablo II is still a huge game because of it faux-mmo lobby/channel system, max of 8 people per game. Surely we could work with even just the original 2 that Square gave us. One could even dream big however and think of 30+ people online in the same game, traveling around Domina recruiting others to climb the Mana tree in No Future Mode or taunting fellow players outside Geo, trying to elicit a duel. Lets not get the better of ourselves here though, currently what you have done is awesome and I will be playing it ASAP! If you can do more, I am sure many people would appreciate it, and don't forget, think big too!