Thinking of doing a PSIV hack.

I think that one's a shield. It wasn't available when I did my testing on the NOTHINGs back in the day, but I've been told since then by others that it was a shield.

To be precise, its stats say that it can be equipped by everyone besides Seth and that it adds +20 DFS and +10 MDFS to the user, but it's classified as a plot-related item (not a head, body, or arm item), so it can't actually be equipped at all.

Point is, any of those properties can be changed if anybody can think of a good use for a new item.

EDIT: I've been looking at the effect tables for attacks and items to see what it is that they can do. Here's what I've found that's already used in the game in some form or another, if you want some ideas:



An asterisk denotes an action that no item currently performs. For example, no item decreases either the user's or the target's ATK stat (value 03) when used in battle. You'll also notice that there are some gaps in this list (05, 10, 11, and other values are not shown here). This is because there are no attacks (either player techs or enemy techs) that use these effects either, and someone would have to play around with the ROM a little to see if these values do anything. At a glance, I would assume value 05 would decrease the target's MDFS (based on the pattern from 09 to 0C). It'd be kind of annoying if some bosses had a skill that neutralized Wren's BARRIER, eh? (Well, besides CANCELING, anyway.)

I'm also not entirely sure what some of the attacks do, so I have them listed by name. I don't remember what specifically distinguishes MEDIC PW from other revival techs, for example, and I don't recall the effect of some of the enemy attacks. I'd wager that one of the effects for BLACK WAVE would be "end the battle immediately," as when Zio uses it on Chaz in the first encounter. It'd be interesting if you could apply that sort of effect to an ESCAPIPE so that you could use it in battle to run away without fail.

EDIT 2: The ordering makes me wonder about FEEVE. When used in the game, it targets the entire party and produces a "has slept" message with no apparent effect. Judging by its position on the effect list, it makes me wonder if it was supposed to be some kind of restorative tech that healed the party in some manner in exchange for putting everybody to sleep for a turn or so.

EDIT 3: Hell, somebody needs to get around to figuring out how dungeon and encounter data are stored. I'm thinking of restoring Acacia and ShadeMirage to random encounters but don't really know how to go about doing that. I figure I could try some hex compares with the final ROM and a beta and look real hard for specific changes, but that would take a lot of work.

Been a while since I've posted anything in here, but that's cause I've been busy lately and haven't made much progress.

Anyway, I spent much longer than I probably should have coming up with very specific experience curve formulas and all kinds of other crap to determine what stats characters should be assigned at levels lower than which they start. I'm knocking down the starting levels for characters that join you mid-game, and since they don't have any preset stats for those levels, I have to write them in myself. (FYI, Chaz, Alys, Hahn, and Rune start at the same levels. Gryz starts 1 level lower than normal. Kyra and Seth start 5 levels lower than normal. Rika's experience curve is bumped up a bit for every level to compensate for her quick level gain, as she already starts at LV 1 and can't be brought down any further.)

The obvious issue with this is that I have to make more room for extra level data in the ROM, but this doesn't look like it will be the problem that I thought it might be. Turns out that you can just append extra data to the tail end of a Genesis ROM with whatever you like and it'll work. To test it out, I tacked on an extra 128 KB of zeroes to the end of my ROM, moved the combo attack data to that offset (deleting all of the information from its original offset), and then changed the relevant pointer to lead to the new offset. Works fine, so it seems that I can add extra high-level permutations for Triblaster without having to delete any existing combo data.

So now I'm looking for relevant pointers for character level data and seem to have found it at 0x4074. Curiously, each character's initial level data appears to be stored here as well even though initial level stats has another section all to itself. The first 2 bytes are Chaz's initial level (0001). The next 4 bytes are the offset for his level 2 stats (002856B0). After that comes Alys' initial level and the offset for her next level data, and so forth.

This makes me curious about the level 99 glitch and if it can be fixed by messing around with some of this stuff. I've never bothered to check it out for myself (seriously, if you need to be higher than level 40 to beat this game, you need practice), but I've heard that it causes some stats to be applied to the wrong character, so maybe it's just an issue of the game retrieving stuff from the wrong part of the ROM or something.

EDIT: Just finished adding like a billion different combinations for Triblaster (all versions of FOI/FLAELI + WAT + TSU). Works like a charm, and it doesn't screw up any of the other combos.





Aw yeah.

I wonder if someone knows how to edit events and such. I would like to add a new hunters mission and maybe do something fun and maybe bring Alys back for the final battle >.>

From what I've heard from people who have looked into the level 99 glitch in the past, it was a pointer problem. I can't say that for sure, but that's what I've read.

Quote:

EDIT 2: The ordering makes me wonder about FEEVE. When used in the game, it targets the entire party and produces a "has slept" message with no apparent effect. Judging by its position on the effect list, it makes me wonder if it was supposed to be some kind of restorative tech that healed the party in some manner in exchange for putting everybody to sleep for a turn or so.

I always thought it might be something like that, too. Maybe they decided it didn't work so well (it ignores the androids, I think?).

I'm impressed at the things you've figured out, Sixfortyfive. Again, I never really tried hacking yet, but that's great if you can modify the experience and level data to that extent.
How are you with traces and/or disassembly?

FreshFeeling wrote:

How are you with traces and/or disassembly?

No experience with either. I've never really bothered messing around with anything more than text, pointers, and simple game-specific scripting that other people have already figured out for me.

So my earlier assumption about item pricing seems to be correct: simply assigning a Meseta value to items that don't normally have them allows you to sell things that the game would ordinarily prohibit. I just ditched the Land Rover, no harm, no fuss.

I think I will assign a MST value to every item. This runs the risk of allowing some hapless player to get himself stranded or having to go up against Zio without the Psycho Wand, but I would imagine that the main audience for a PSIV hack would be familiar enough with the game and have enough discretion to not box themselves into such a corner.

But on that note, I'm thinking of bumping down Zio's stats slightly anyway. Normally, he has a factor of 0 (complete immunity) for all 14 elements until you use the Psycho Wand, upon which his affinity for most of them changes from anywhere between 1 (resistant) to 3 (weak). I'm thinking of changing his initial element associations to 1 (resistant) instead of 0 (immune). He'd still be a total pain in the * to fight without the Psycho Wand, but it wouldn't be suicidal to attempt it.

I'm also thinking of lowering Re-Faze's stats a little as well. You still wouldn't get a reward for defeating him, naturally, but it'd be an interesting solo challenge for Chaz.

That will be a very welcome change. The land rover is just useless later on. It'll be nice to have a moon dew or something else in that spot.

Some of the supplementary weapon effects are going to be more restrictive than I thought. It doesn't seem like it's possible to make the Laco-Rod's Efess effect target a single enemy; it always seems to hit everything because Efess itself always hits everything.

Some of the animation values cause drastically different effects for different items, too. Assigning animation 06 to different weapons can cause some of them to act like BINDWA, VISION, or LEGEON depending on the specific weapon. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it so far.

At any rate, I've made most of the changes I want to the player and item stats. I plan on adjusting some of the boss stats and then releasing what I've done so far.