praetarius5018

I tried that for half an hour with no results.
Any specific enemies? Area? Anything else?

Can you be more explicit what caused the crash?
Just snowman status didn't suffice to reproduce it.

No, people have already downloaded it so even if that link wasn't there anymore they could still pass it around.

31 minutes ago, rpschamp said:

Is the +25% attack, -50% defenses listed in the documentation correct? Your comment above leads me to think it may be +50% attack, -25% defenses instead.

It is +25% atk before defense so the actual damage increase will be much bigger.
Simplified imagine:
400 atk vs 300 def = 100 damage
500 atk vs 300 def = 200 damage, 25% more atk but 100% more damage

...I'm not interested in further discussions of a patch I wish I'd have never made in the first place.
It wasted a lot of time, attracted some annoying people which wasted even more time and didn't produce anything I care about at all - I shoulda learn to say no, really...

If I had any say in the matter in the matter I'd just make that fix-only version disappear completely.

On 5/3/2020 at 7:11 AM, hmsong said:

I released a balance patch several days ago

I'd have been ok if the no enemy counter thing was a small part of a proper project
but as it turns out I did 100% of the work
which I'm NOT ok with.

12 hours ago, hmsong said:

LOL!!  Shields ultimately don't have any actual practical purpose in the game? (due to bug)  Yikes.  But I loved your sarcastic comment.  Thanks for that.  That was funny.

I'm not sure it is a bug really, like crits I suspect their effect was removed on purpose since physical combat was obviously OP enough and having near god mode shields vs most mono-elemental endgame bosses with no drawback is obviously too powerful.

12 hours ago, hmsong said:

Regarding Energy Ball critical hit, I know that after the bug fix from your patch makes the crit to 50%, but how do does that work?  I know that you made Sin of Mana into 10%.  I'm guessing you adjust the crit at $D19BF7, but I also remember you telling me that Energy Ball ignores what crit rate you had before, and sets it to 50%.  So let's say I adjusted D19BF7 tp 0A (which is 10%, which is the same as Sin of Mana -- I don't know where you adjusted for Sin of Mana, since it doesn't seem like you adjusted anything in D19BF7).  Now, let's say Hawkeye has Luck of 18 (so your bug-fix patch will make his crit rate to 20%, right?).  So, if I were to cast Energy Ball to Hawkeye, would his crit hit rate actually go DOWN to 10%?

Vanilla energy ball sets a derived luck value to 50, by default it is same as luck, not sure if a few weapons had a bonus for that or if that was my own creation at this point.
This value is never used anywhere but it is likely that that was the intended crit rate.
In the fix only patch I changed that to base luck value+10 so that luck investment has a purpose again.

I've no idea what $D19BF7 is supposed to be, that is so far off the mark as to not even be funny. Like millions of bytes.

12 hours ago, hmsong said:

I don't know what that means.  Were there cases where you can reach max level stats early or something?

Oh that is one of the BEST glitches in vanilla - hf fixing that >.>

The game tracks TWO values for your level. One for onscreen display, one for internal use.
The later goes up by 1 every time an enemy dies and you have enough exp to level up.
Take a guess what happens when you kill 2-3 enemies at the same time and the first was enough to trigger the level up.
Your current stat cap is determined by the internal value.
This cap is supposed to only go up by 1 every 3 levels but this glitch makes it possible to take e.g. STR all the way to the hard class cap without taking useless stats in between.

12 hours ago, hmsong said:

So, does the bug-fix patch (not Sin of Mana patch) fix any of the Kevin bugs?

It should prevent the attack stacking.

12 hours ago, hmsong said:

Which auto-power up are you talking about?  The one where Kevin can stack his werewolf powerup?  Or the one you mentioned as "(I removed it in the regular hack)"?

When Kevin transforms the game gives him the power up buff for free.
He doesn't get the attack increase yet, that only happens when the game feels like updating character stats, e.g. after taking a hit that could potentially inflict stat altering flags.

40 minutes ago, hmsong said:

Are there any quick fixes for the following bugs?

• Critical not working
• Dex not working
• Spell casting wait time can be canceled with the Pause button.
• Burn status effect not working

No, functionality for those doesn't exist and would have to be added, so nothing simple as just uncommenting the call for the ASM equivalent of checkAIreaction(); as above.

41 minutes ago, hmsong said:

Also, do vanilla shields do anything, other than raising the EVA stat?  I heard that they resist certain elements or something (all the element shields sold in Forcena), but I couldn't exactly test that.  Or maybe they're supposed to, but that's not working due to yet another bug?

Vanilla shields actually have 2(!) functions:
-they waste your money
-they change Duran's sprite (technically the game checks if there is anything in the shield item slot, not necessarily for a shield)

9 hours ago, rpschamp said:

One question on how Beastman Collar interacts with Warrior Monk's final weapon: When casting Heal Light, would his tech points count towards his healing power, or would they get removed by the Beastman Collar prior to the Heal Light calculation?

It removes the TP when calculating the cast time so way before the point the game checks for the WM weapon.

3 hours ago, hmsong said:

Could you please help me with that?  What do I do to fix that?

You'll have to get busy with a debugger for that, there's no quick and easy solution for that.
What I did was to force a stat recalculation on screen transition. Should be the part where the game checks for dead party members and revives them to 1 HP if necessary.
That circumvents most of the issues with those 2 bugs as they last at most until the end of the current screen.

39 minutes ago, Kei said:

One question about element armor, if I have a weakness to an element and equip the armor/accessory that resists that same element, they cancel each other out and the character becomes neutral to it, right? So if I wanted to take a character that's weak to an element and give him resistance to it, I'd have to equip both the armor and the accessory. Is that how it works? 

You get both, 1.5x from weakness and 0.5x from resist for 0.75x total.

what I was getting at with the savestates:
something (I don't know what) causes some "damage" in the SD3 RAM: fills certain regions with garbage or dead events or something.
This damage persists through savestates (or rather when you load the state you revert to the damaged state it was in back then) so at a certain point when RAM is needed for the next new event or spell animation or whatever it has none so crashes, freezes or glitches happen; in some soft cases it only deletes enemy AI.
So it is encouraged to use the ingame saves and load from them every now and then.

This isn't really new to this hack, I once managed to print the menu character sprites unto the battle screen in vanilla.

questions for the crash stuff:

did you use savestates or regularly reload from an ingame save?
the game has an issue with a memory leak or something similar.

what console/emulator do you play on?

any additional info you can provide?

sorta, I forgot to exclude the dummy data of the not-yet-gotten allies from the level calculation there, so they default to 1 until you pick the 2nd partner

Bosses also scale to your level though their stats/gimmicks are ofc. optimized for their intended level(s).
At least one godbeast is 100% unbeatable if you never class change.

10 minutes ago, rpschamp said:

I did say that I thought Heal Light should be "upgradable" to Sudden, but this was just to keep the terms straight, since Sudden is listed in the skills file under "Possible Upgrades". Although with Sage Stone, this would also obviously be a tradeoff :-)

Nah, Sudden is only intended for buffs; I'm not a fan of "easy healing" since that leads to stupid situtations where it doesn't matter if the boss deals 1% damage or 99% damage with an attack.

4 minutes ago, Serafie1999AD said:

A question about this new property for Wendel-class weapons: "strong attack can use 5 MP to have regular cooldown". The documentation claims this can be done, but it doesn't explain how it can be done. Do you need to press a certain button during a strong attack, or is the cooldown automatically lowered if you have at least 5 MP to spend?

It happens automatically if you have 5+ MP and do a strong attack.
I mainly made this effect to give Angela and Charlie something to do before FMH.

That is not an upgrade but a tradeoff!
You sacrifice a use of a tech to get spell X out ASAP.

Might be useful with the 3xTP = crit rate weapon to hold unto the insta cast for when you need it and until then enjoy the extra crits to compensate for the lack of techs or something.

Nope, sorry, that's one where you'll have to work a bit more with a debugger.

Also don't forget that Y will be used when battle ends to enter the menu so you have to change something there as well or players will be annoyed when they try to use a tech, and AI ally kills the last enemy and they enter the super slow menu.

9 hours ago, hmsong said:

I can't help but ask.  How do you know all this?

nearly 6 years of work with a debugger on the game.

9 hours ago, hmsong said:

Btw, which program do you use to create IPS files?  Right now, I use hex editor (HxD) to open up a ROM, and manually change the codes, then use Lunar to create the IPS, but I have a feeling that it's a very ineffective way to create a IPS file (and way too many possibilities of errors).

exactly the same.
once you do bigger code changes you might want to pickup something like asar.

You could try replacing $D0/C62B 20 65 C6 with EAEAEA - that is no jab at a certain company for once - to skip the whole logic.
At least I think that was all that is needed.

I doubt either of those two are something that hasn't happened in the first half of the game so there must be more than that.

can you be a bit more specific?

highest in party, all enemies and bosses

1 hour ago, rpschamp said:

New mini-boss in Seashore Cave? Could this be the missing octo-boss?!

I wish...

1 hour ago, rpschamp said:

Great idea on the mob-scaling patch.

That was technically only an accident

Because of how it is programmed, Gildervine can only have one level for its mobs for all places he can be fought (middle of the game + potential refight) which makes it impossible for me to set a good level, it'd either be OP for the first fight or pointless for the refight, so I set their level to 127 = scale to player level.

1 hour ago, rpschamp said:

One criticism: Black Rain and Shuriken still both cost 8 MP. Please explain to me your thinking on this. I would have corrected this by bringing the Black Rain cost up; at 8 MP, it's way too powerful, especially with the element-cancelling armor. However, perhaps its utility will decrease now with your corrections to that armor in terms of absorb/reflect.

Shuriken is basically physical type earth jutsu so it needed comparable cost to that.
Black Rain... hmmm, no excuse here.

34 minutes ago, Kei said:

Can I apply the new patch to play a save file from 1.050 without any problems? Since there have been spell changes to classes I'm using (namely Dervish), will the new ones replace the old or will I keep both?

You'd keep what you have and add the new ones. Ofc limited to 12 spells total per character.

My plans for the near future are:
take a break from SD3, try to fix the bug Cainen found on Kevin (who else...) and replace the weapon with high base attack/poor scaling.

2 hours ago, dawnbomb said:

PS: Any plans to incorporate the new patches for SD3 released recently on romhacking.net?

No, which ones?

Fireblaze only lowers p.def, Skull Disect lowers both defenses, but either way they stack with themselves and def down/mind down.