Insane Difficulty: Lufia 2 - Age of the Sinistrals - Insane Difficulty

pretty simple: the game throws away the 40 bit of the spell id while saving

now to see what interesting side effects this will have...


edit:
that looks... not really possible
great, I forget one thing and it is an absolute deal breaker...

the "missing" 40 (and 80) bits of spells are used to construct the spell id of every x-th spell slot in the savegame.
3 bytes = 4 spell slots since 2 bits each were not needed.


You'll probably already get "morphed skills" when you save since the skill data is modified then...

This post has been edited by Praetarius5018: 27 December 2016 - 04:03 AM

Then there's only one way... Ask rainponcho.

Praetarius5018, on 27 December 2016 - 02:00 AM, said:

Well, the skills only morph when I reset & reload a save. If I just keep on using save states, I'm just fine. Just to clarify that a little for ya.

EDIT: I suppose while I'm at it...should I hold off on publishing any videos for this hack (I have four ready to publish when I get descriptions done for each one) until you figure something out regarding this? I can always use save states to keep saving at proper save points so I don't have any skill morphing shenanigans happen to me.

Anima Zero, on 27 December 2016 - 09:34 AM, said:

For me they already morphed when I only saved in-game.

Anima Zero, on 27 December 2016 - 09:34 AM, said:

That's entirely your call. What I've planned for the next version should work w/out save&load, and only affects the very end, so I don't see why not.

Also, I *think* I can fix this, but that'll take a few days before I can even try.
I "only" have to change the save game size, move the starting addresses around (which invalidates all old ingame-saves anyway) and rewrite a good portion of how save and loading works - I've never before worked on save/load mechanics, so it should be absolutely perfectly fine.

Praetarius5018, on 27 December 2016 - 10:17 AM, said:

As long as I can just rely on save states, sure. Thing is with hard saves, loading a save state loads whatever version that save state was made in (I think. Someone would need to confirm this for me). If that's the case, then the potential fix you may attempt won't really help me out. Then again, as I just said, if I can use save states, that's fine.

Though if I may ask, what do you have planned for the next version for the very end? Curious minds want to know ;p!

...Oh yes, I should also mention I'm using Snes9x 1.54.1 to play this.

Anima Zero, on 27 December 2016 - 12:29 PM, said:

I've no problem with loading a savestate from "version x" when the ROM is "version x+1" and have everything still work as if it was made with "version x+1" natively. Usually, the emulator only saves the entire RAM and the like in a savestate, not an identifier for the ROM, but that may be different on emulators I've never used.

Anima Zero, on 27 December 2016 - 12:29 PM, said:

-couple AI&stat edits for the finale on Doom Island (and by extension Gades and Amon on Shuman and Strahda as a much needed rehearsal)
-sprite for the fight with Guard Daos after Daos
-complete replacement of stat potions from random drops of regular enemies with other items; that means e.g. Stinger drops no longer Speed Potion but in his case Flame Fruits

Praetarius5018, on 27 December 2016 - 12:55 PM, said:

Alrighty. I may have been thinking of ZSNES where that was the case where it loaded the version you were playing when loading a save state in previous version.

Praetarius5018, on 27 December 2016 - 12:55 PM, said:

Hot damn, I approve of all those changes, especially the last one ;D. Can't wait!

Praetarius5018, on 27 December 2016 - 12:55 PM, said:

I still don't get what's the deal with the sealed towers and their boss battles - both storytelling-wise and gameplay-wise.

Are they supposed to be a challenge? And what do we gain dramaturgically by letting us smack down gods left and right here? Well, whatever, we even pwn Daos in a cutscene - that's a really good job to build up the final villain, eh? However, there's so much wrong with the dramaturgic aspects, I better don't even really start...

So, gameplay-wise, will it be the same battles as a Doom Island?

Artemis, on 28 December 2016 - 12:55 PM, said:

Maybe they wanted to wrap the game up at the Dragon Mountain and only afterwards remembered "shit, Lufia 1's prolog exists! how do we get the party on Doom Island now? and why couldn't they have used that method, which we have to think up now, sooner?", and then 3 boring towers happened

I've no idea.

Artemis, on 28 December 2016 - 12:55 PM, said:

For now - yes.
Simple reason, really; we have a boss rush with 5 bosses. 2 of which (Gades and Amon) are imo a bit too hard for the target difficulty, so getting to "test" those before is not a bad thing. Maybe I'll just make clones with higher stats for the real run.

Daos is 2 fights back-to-back, so already plenty challenging.
Erim... is your downtime, she doesn't feel like fighting and will on average only kill one person per turn.
Gades has a few tricks that may wipe the party in one go.
Amon... plain cheats.

Amon has a spear. He automatically gets to cheat because of that, heh.

Anyways...considering you're going to be switching out any stat boosting drops enemies have with other items...should I hold off on doing Tanbel SE Tower tomorrow since the purple crabs there drop Power Potions (not that I'd use them on virtue of honor, but still)? Depends on what kind of item you'll give them.

What's the target difficulty, anyway?

Anima Zero, on 28 December 2016 - 05:46 PM, said:

All stat potion replacements are CM fruits, except in one case I gave it Ex-Potion instead.
Should be nothing serious.

Artemis, on 28 December 2016 - 06:56 PM, said:

On a scale from 1 to 10
with vanilla Lufia 2 as a 2 and Kureji as a 12
I'd say 8-9 for the main game.






edit1:
the good news is: each in-game save is $800 bytes long but half of that is just dummy values, so I can just move it a tiny bit to fit the missing bits for the new spell ids

the BAD news is of course that old savegames will not be compatible. at best they crash. at worst you get missigno town. in your home room.



edit2:
seems like it might not even be possible to save if old (=incompatible) save data is present... so update from vanilla/v1-3 to v4+ would not even be possible, unless you keep it restricted to savestates.

this is getting fun >.<

This post has been edited by Praetarius5018: 29 December 2016 - 07:31 AM

There's no helping it, if you want to use ingame saves with this hack, you have to delete the old .srm file and not start from a savestate. Any try to mix them will inevitably lead to crashes.
So either savestates-only or restart fresh.


v0.4
-final boss got his own sprite, a rename (Frue Daos -> Guard Daos) and minor AI edits
-edited Gades (3)'s AI & stats (Shuman Tower & Doom Island)
-edited Amon's AI & stats; he finally has a use for his insane ATP
-edited Erim's AI & stats
-edited Daos's AI & stats
-Dualblade is now Anti-Sea instead of Light and the final battle Sinistrals are now type: fish
-Cokatoris can now drop Ex-Potion instead of Life Potion
-Spinner can now drop Dark Fruit instead of Life Potion
-Green Dragon can now drop Breeze Fruit instead of Life Potion
-Bone Gorem can now drop Earth Fruit instead of Spell Potion
-Lunar Bear can now drop Earth Fruit instead of Power Potion
-Big Crab can now drop Secret Fruit instead of Power Potion
-Armor Nail can now drop Charm Fruit instead of Power Potion
-Hades Chariot can now drop Dark Fruit instead of Power Potion
-Red Dragon can now drop Flame Fruit instead of Power Potion
-Necromancer can now drop Holy Fruit instead of Mind Potion
-Stinger can now drop Flame Fruit instead of Speed Potion
-Medusa can now drop Breeze Fruit instead of Brave (Potion)
-Demise can now drop Magic Fruit instead of Brave (Potion)
-Resist and Exchange can no longer trigger "Mirror" animation, effect ignored mirror already
-raised TwinBird's base power from 42 to 120
-edited savegame handling to fix wrong spells after savegame loading
-as a consequence vanilla savegames are now incompatible and will crash the game, delete the .srm before upgrading

Nifty! I don't mind starting from scratch to catch back up to where I was with my recordings (Just cleared Tanbel SE Tower, ran into Ruby Cave to grab Blaze).

Also, are you aware of the Pearl Brace reducing fire damage just by wearing?

Yey, you already mentioned that earlier, why?

Because this is quite soem game changer I'd say. Especially considering that fire spells are the weakest line of spells.

I'm not too concerned because of the way I changed DFP.

Let's construct a rediculous example:
attack with 2k raw attack power
hero has 1k effective damage reduction (vanilla: 2k DFP or MGR, this hack: 1k DFP or MGR)
so neutrally that is 1k raw damage in both vanilla and the hack
if it was resisted, raw attack power is halved, so vanilla ends up at 0 damage.
but for the hack it is not so simple;
with the defense-change it should come out to 250 raw damage, so it was "only" quartered instead of completely neutralized.

Considering how many attacks even are elemental in the first place... not too concerned for now.

Praetarius, I cannot see the spells index you send with the patch. Do you have it on a different format?

I used the same format as before .ods
any format that would be more preferable for you?