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darknil

Final Fantasy VI: Meltdown

20 posts in this topic

Pretty clear that I am incapable of finishing projects, so this is probably dead. I may not even be alive to finish it soon anyway.

Edited by darknil

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This definitely seems interesting.  When you get to the point of beta testing let me know and we'll carve out a spot in the downloads section for you.

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You are far more knowledgeable than me on the asm aspects but let me know if you ever want any input or help on the lighter content like plot, map editing, AI stuff, etc.

 

Now that I am thinking about it, have you been able to make any substantial changed to anything related to battle AI? I mean new conditions, or whatnot. For some reason I feel like you have, I know we have had a few general conversations but I can't remember the specifics at the moment :poker:

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I'm actually working on making space to expand the F1 targetting command's jump table. I've substantially expanded the miscellaneous command to include a lot of stat manipulation stuff, and have added a few conditionals, but that's it thus far.

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I may have to talk to you some more in depth about this in chat sometime.  I'm interested in what it would take to do edits like this to expand the AI commands.

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When I think about how long many projects like this one and mine have been in development, I always remember there is also Pandora's Box.  That allows me to tell myself that mine hasn't been in development THAT long. :lol:

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PB's in a situation where its creators all have lives outside of hacking now and struggle to find the motivation or time to work on it on any regular basis. My project isn't too much younger than theirs, I believe.

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Regarding steals. I recently came across a thread on another associated hacking site that expanded steals to four items. I figured you'd appreciate a link to it, if not for your own use, then for figuring out how to make your own version.^_^:P

Here's the link for that. https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3173

First Edit; And here's another link related to that one. ("Multi-Steal-Fix (Version 1.01) by Imzogelmo") http://assassin17.brinkster.net/hosted_patches.htm

Second Edit; Actually, according to Imzogelmo it's a pain to steal multiple items due to how the vanilla coding for items stolen works. Imzogelmo goes into more detail in these posts here. https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread-3173-post-30496.html#pid30496 & https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread-3173-post-30499.html#pid30499 & https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread-3173-post-30503.html#pid30503

 

Also, the user Catone made an Auction House improvement I also think you may find usable as well (the fact that it's smaller code wise than the original is a nice bonus in its own right). https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=2784

Edited by GLH
spelling errors, bleh, also, another link and details

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Damn, this looks fantastic. It's always amazing seeing what can be done to FF6 now days while I'm still like mentally thinking of Pandora's Box as The FF6 romhack (*grumble*), yet BNW and this clearly go above and beyond. Can't wait to play!

2 hours ago, GLH said:

Regarding steals. I recently came across a thread on another associated hacking site that expanded steals to four items.

Not sure I like the idea of there being so many steals. My biggest complaint with FF9 is the amount of time spent in boss fights that can't dream of killing you while you just sit there failing to steal. Either the items are crappy and not worth the time finding out what they are, or they will generally be too good and then it just becomes routine to have to bring a thief. Hell, if I'm being honest I hate Locke as a character anyway (battle wise he is great) and would love to see steal spread out to more characters, maybe even a spell form of it.

On 5/9/2017 at 5:08 AM, darknil said:

A successful rare item steal will blank both items on that enemy and you will no longer be able to steal from it.

Given you plan to blank out the common when obtaining the rare, how feasible would it be to make a visual to show the difference between a common and rare in the event that we get the rare first? I'd love not having to waste a turn using an attack that will just outright miss.

On 5/9/2017 at 5:08 AM, darknil said:

There are only 48 rages, and I'm considering removing the leap mechanic entirely. Nobody likes rage grinding.

Excellent. On that note, how many people like hunting down all the shit that Strago can do? If there was a way to guide the player into finding the skills that would be great. My first thought was maybe scripting in a reaction from Strago mid battle if an enemy could teach him something but I have no idea if it's possible to add scenes like that to random fights.

 

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One thought I have with Gau and his Rages is darknil could give him 'everything' at the start, weaken him (as he is a child left to die in the wild, so he's going to be malnourished from that alone), and then replace the Leap command with something to round out things.

However, that brings up balance issues, which I think could be solved by making sure that the Rages are varied but mostly 'weak'ish' compared to alternate 'late game' options in vanilla, but I'm unsure if I should suggest Gau's rages being limited-time before player regains control of him. If Gau has 'everything' at the start and Rages are a certain time or number of turns, it makes Gau incredibly powerful given 'what' he could potentially do with all of that. If Gau's stats are made too weak, then an incredible amount of time will have to be spent on building that up in order to make him usable. If Gau requires the really powerful equipment in order to survive, then he's really not going to see much use until late-game (some players would make a list of what rages to use to get around that sort of thing, but those aren't casual gamers and players). If Gau can't equip some of that stuff, then it becomes very difficult to keep him alive until damn near the end of the game.

Of course, that then brings up what Gau's second ability would be. Amusingly something akin to Runic and Control would be easy fits without much issue, but that has the potential to make him game-breaking in places (though now I can't help but imagine Gau using his Magic Bone to work Runic abilities. It's amusing to say the least). Throw might work, ensuring that there is always at least one character with the ability. Thematically it's also in character with how Gau grew up, throwing shit (both figuratively and literally:P) at monsters when and where needed in order to make them go away. Only issue is the "Scrolls" are kind of 'ninja-only', so those might be problems there if trying to keep everything 100% thematically accurate (which I doubt is the case here, but had to bring up anyways).

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23 hours ago, GamingFiend said:

Your ideas for the Espers are especially intriguing!

Indeed. Espers are now essentially equipable equipment with stat AND spell bonuses that disappear once unequipped. "Raiden" will have to be replaced due to the issues its existence causes, but that's no big deal. Just means we'll get something like Leviathan, or Gilgamesh, or Diabolos, or Cactuar.

This is good as it means players don't have to worry and fret about keeping as low leveled as possible in order to get the most stat bonuses, as 'stat bonuses' are now tied to how the player grew the Espers more than anything else.

Given the creater's statement about new relics, it's also likely that he's doing what Sega Chief did with his FF7 New Threat mod and making restoration items that cover a minimum of two or more statuses ("Echo Drops" for example) to make room for new relics.

I wonder if he'll also take some of the broken and unused commands and reuse and/or remake them. Like a fire or ice flavored version of "Shock" as an example, or a means of keeping full access to the Magitek commands. Still, this is pretty well thought out and interesting.

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Frankly surprised there's still interest in this hack given the amount of time it's remained stagnant. Unfortunately I've discovered irrecoverable bugs, and my development cycle has become such a haphazard mess that I'm likely going to scrap it. I have ideas in mind for a replacement hack, utilizing a lot of the secondary mechanics I'd built for this, but using a different main mechanic (think SaGa). I'll make a thread for it and have this one closed once I have more hammered down. I can say there will be some major changes though. For instance: Elements will be recoded to utilize a % damage variable which can strengthen or weaken a spell's damage. Defense is also being recoded to produce diminishing returns at high numbers. I'm undecided what to do with espers. I may implement a stripped down version of Meltdown's esper system, which I'd kind of been wanting to do anyway.

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20 minutes ago, darknil said:

Frankly surprised there's still interest in this hack given the amount of time it's remained stagnant. Unfortunately I've discovered irrecoverable bugs, and my development cycle has become such a haphazard mess that I'm likely going to scrap it. I have ideas in mind for a replacement hack, utilizing a lot of the secondary mechanics I'd built for this, but using a different main mechanic (think SaGa). I'll make a thread for it and have this one closed once I have more hammered down. I can say there will be some major changes though. For instance: Elements will be recoded to utilize a % damage variable which can strengthen or weaken a spell's damage. Defense is also being recoded to produce diminishing returns at high numbers. I'm undecided what to do with espers. I may implement a stripped down version of Meltdown's esper system, which I'd kind of been wanting to do anyway.

Out of curiousity, will you eventually be releasing some of the mods (in ips or asm format) you have done for this (dead/failed) project, along with some of the others you have helped with? And hell yes a lot of us are interested in what you're doing, even with projects that seem to have stalled, as you do damned good work.

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I actually plan to release a few once they're cleaned up and made presentable. Natural Magic for the whole party was to be first on the list, but that needs rewritten entirely because it's horribly coded and unoptimized.

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1 hour ago, darknil said:

I actually plan to release a few once they're cleaned up and made presentable. Natural Magic for the whole party was to be first on the list, but that needs rewritten entirely because it's horribly coded and unoptimized.

Thank you.

And yeah, I'm starting to learn this sort of stuff myself. I'm starting to learn how to code, and it's annoying as some of the patches publically available are either for unheadered roms, or are coding messes, and that's before most of the tutorials being so shoddy (am making progress though, slow as it is, but I know I'm a damned newb at this point with this sort of stuff right now). I want to make a few easy-to-use patches to address gameplay issues all at once. "Fire and forget" type stuff (the Evasion issue, fixing the fact that vanilla has Seizure being made more powerful the more Stamina a character has, Sketch, the issues with Dark, etc.), make it easier for other newbies like myself getting into things (half the issue was just finding some of those old patches). Making an 'all-in-one" bugfix patch would likely also be of use to a lot of other modders as well.:P

Still, I look forward to what you have to offer, and am damned thankful to you for it.

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There is an all-in-one either on ff6hacking or slickproductions.org. Not sure of its working state though. The problem with something like that is that so much has changed the disassemblies would only be barely relevent. Meltdown became a massive patchwork mess partially due to that. I also started on it before I understood the concept of building a hack, so I have a lot of things I can't fix now like text assignment and a weird black box on the overworld which I can't fix with any amount of map editing. I'm basically at the point that I can't conscientiously continue to work on it and produce it in the this state. I was also losing motivation due to balance issues, such as dealing with esper stat distribution (which is why I plan to simplify it to something closer to BNW, with two options per esper) and damage formulas being wonky. Other bugs were also frequently popping up as I worked.

Edited by darknil

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Huh, must have missed that. I know there is one that does a text and script fix, but I wanted to avoid that one as it essentially turned the 1.0 rom into the 1.1, and that was not what I wanted.

Also, ouch. I figured something must have messed up, but I did not realize it was that bad. You have my sympathy.

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