[FF7PC-98/Steam] gjoerulv's "Hardcore" mod (v1.0.7.2)

[gjoerulv]

I would suggest Touph Script (ts http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=11944.0) to easily change all text, but there seems to still be some problems with some of the opcodes in my scene.bin file. Also kernel2.bin have a wrong length indicator at the beginning. Most of these things are fixed, but not released. In other word: Don't use ts to translate my mod in this release (1.0.5).

You can change battle text with proud clod: http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=8481.0
Item, commands and summon text with Wallmarked: http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=7928.0
And field dialogues with Makou Reactor: http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=9658.0

Wall Marked and Proud Clod can only work on 1 file so they're pretty straight forward in this regard.
Makou reactoor too, however, inside the flevel archive there are several files. These will be listed once you've opened flevel with Makou Reactor. Here are a list of files where the dialouge is changed by my patch:

Code: [Select]

zz5
 zz6
 zz7
 zz8
 qd
 blin65_1
 trackin
 nvdun1
 nvmkin21
 farm
 convil_4
 gnmk
 slfrst_2
 anfrst_2
 anfrst_5
 hyou5_1
 hyou8_2
 hyou13_2
 trnad_2
 zcoal_2
 md8_32
 las2_3
 las2_4
 las3_2
 las3_3
 las4_0
 las4_4
 las4_42

It may look like much, but most of these files do not contain much dialouge.
Of course, translation takes time.

[Secret255]

I really love this mod even after a number of frustrating occurrences, but those are also part of the fun lol.

My main concern though is about missable things since I tend to be a completionist when I play this game. Are there any missables in this mod? I noticed that I was able to steal umbrellas from the monster in the gold saucer desert area.

[gjoerulv]

No things are "missable" concerning vanilla settings. It's pretty much how it used to be. One difference is that the materias in the final cave are moved to the materia caves.

The real "missable" things are my new random enemies. There should be one new enemy in most places.
Exceptions are, that is, areas without new enemies (from the top of my head):
5th reactor.
Train graveyard.
Mythril mines.
Wutai.
Temple of the ancients.
Ancient city/sleeping forest.
Glacier (the snowy maze-like area before gea's cliff. Not including gea's cliff)*.
Underwater reactor**
Rocket town

*In gea's cliff there is one new enemy as you climb. A new one where you encouter giants and black bombs. And finally a new one in the crater (red pyramid).
**Not in the reactor, but before the elevator to the underwater area there is one along with the sweepers.

New enemies on world map.

Beach outside midgar/kalm. Beach junon. Beach gold soucer or forest path costa del sol. grass area outside gongaga, nigelheim, rocket town and mideel. beach temple ota. outside icicle inn. And outside purple materia cave.

[AlbusJC]

I've seen all the new enemies you've done with kimera. wooh! You've created more enemies than I expected. Great job! Are you going to include some more? If your answer is affirmative, are you accept any suggestions? If your answer is the same, I had thought of a final boss like Ozma (FFIX) or Gilgamesh (he would be interested in the cloud's buster sword) Maybe some human enemy too? (with the same bones and animations that cloud or sephiroth) on that basis could include a character in crisis core (Angeal, Genesis ...) Well, are just some ideas.  I'm sorry for my bad english and again, great job with your mod.

[Secret255]

No things are "missable" concerning vanilla settings. It's pretty much how it used to be. One difference is that the materias in the final cave are moved to the materia caves.

The real "missable" things are my new random enemies. There should be one new enemy in most places.
Exceptions are, that is, areas without new enemies (from the top of my head):
5th reactor.
Train graveyard.
Mythril mines.
Wutai.
Temple of the ancients.
Ancient city/sleeping forest.
Glacier (the snowy maze-like area before gea's cliff. Not including gea's cliff)*.
Underwater reactor**
Rocket town

*In gea's cliff there is one new enemy as you climb. A new one where you encouter giants and black bombs. And finally a new one in the crater (red pyramid).
**Not in the reactor, but before the elevator to the underwater area there is one along with the sweepers.

New enemies on world map.

Beach outside midgar/kalm. Beach junon. Beach gold soucer or forest path costa del sol. grass area outside gongaga, nigelheim, rocket town and mideel. beach temple ota. outside icicle inn. And outside purple materia cave.

Sorry if I was a little vague   

What exactly I wanted to know was if the missables were similar to vanilla.

Ex: Enemy skills such as Trine, weapons and armor like Missing Score and Escort Guard, and Materias such as summons.

Things like that 

[Livesey]

Oh god please don't include Angeal or Genesis...

Also As far as I know there are no new enemy skills though some enemy skills have changed, as I'm sure you found out with "mighty guard".

[gjoerulv]

@AlbusJC I'm not sure how much I'm going to work with this further, but I don't mind suggestions or requests. Just don't expect them to be swiftly made.
Concerning the CC characters I have have no idea who they are. For me the original FF7 is the only one that really counts. The other ones don't exist.

@Secret255 As I posted above. There are no missable vanilla stuff. Except those materias I mentioned. No new skills or items have been added, but the master materias have been removed. Or replaced rather.

[luksy]

I've had another look at the scene again, the problem is indeed a dodgy opcode but it looks like a bug on your end, script 0 of enemy 2 (Atsel) in file 208 starts off with 0xFF, unless this is intended and I will modify touphScript accordingly.

Also files 19 and 230 have an extra byte at the end when uncompressed.

[smokaz]

Hi,

Just reached the chocobo farm on CD 1 and met the chocobo summon boss. This one seems to be seriously bugged as all it did was perform an attack which had the animation of the life spell, dealing 0 damage. After this its skilled power was used up, even though it has max mana? Very, very strange encounter...

Is this boss even finished yet?

UPDATE:
This only happens occasionally. If I proceed to give it an ether, it will start using the deathblow / chocobuckle / fat-chocobo attacks as normal. Seems as if this particular spell is bugged.

[gjoerulv]

@smokaz
The silver choc only counterattacks. The only action it does unprovoked is to restore it's own mp. If you attack it several times in one turn it may run out of mp before it gets the chance to restore it. The attack you refer to is a lucky spin for the player and is meant to do nothing.

@luksy
Yes the problem is probably at my end. I'm sorry if I gave another impression.
I have fixed the file sizes.
As I see it, at 1st glance, the Atsel AI looks correct. The pointer table (of atsel) points correctly. Script0 starts at 0x20, script1 at 0x2F and script2 at 0xAF. There is an adjustment byte (0xFF) before atsel's pointer table to make it start on an even byte.
Did you get the files I sent to DLPB? The files sizes are fixed in those (unless I sent the wrong files...). Or do you look at the 1.0.5 scene?
To clarify: The pointer table of atsel should start at 0xFE6. The Scripts at 0x1006. The 1st few bytes in the scripts are (hex) 10 00 00 60...

[luksy]

Yeah sorry this is all based on 1.0.5

anywhoo this is what atsel looks like to me:



Atsel AI script pointer table is 1 byte too long, proud clod seems to confirm

[smokaz]

@Gjørulv
I didn't know that this boss behaviour was intentional, seeing as a boss which does nothing is easily brought down. However, that being said, I so far find your mod very entertaining and challenging.

Is there a list of enemies/boss battles that were added to the game, besides the materia summons?

[Bosque]

I highly doubt the battle arena is supposed to be beatable in this mod. If you want omnislash, just add it with an editor, or earn it with the editor disabled.

I posted the best way to get Omnislash in this mod a few pages ago:

Head to the battle arena JUST BEFORE you fight Schizo at Gaea's Cliff. The enemies will be Disk 1 enemies, still tough, but you've got plenty of good equip by now (such as the Dragon Armlets from the Blue Dragons in the room before Schizo).

Give Cloud a Dragon Armlet , Enemy Skill (with the most skills learned, Dragon Force, Death Force, Mighty Guard, Bad Breath, Magic Hammer, White Wind, ?, Frog Song are essential), Counter Attack, the higher leveled HP Plus materias, Restore materia and Destruct materia for DeSpell, plus Mug+Added Cut (ghetto Double Cut). If you manipulate the slots (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGNYMHdE4ks) it will be easy to get 10k BP a pop. Also, be sure to buff up with Dragon Force and Death Force on the first battle of the arena, plus wear a Peace Ring, and have plenty of restorative items around (for statuses, Remedies stolen from the Velcher Tasks near Rocket Town are a must)

[gjoerulv]

@luksy
Hmmm... I must have fixed this sometime after 1.0.5 'cause it's correct now.
But It seems ts still stops encoding (hangs) at scene.bin with these fixes. If you're intrested I can send you a dl link in a pm with the new scene. These errors are from the time I hex edited everything. I still think a bad opcode is the culprit.

@smokaz
Most summon materia got a boss. Also the materia caves has 1 each. And there are 4 new story bosses. You should have encountered 2 already.
3 of the story boss encounters are against the SOLDIER trio. 1st in shinra HQ, 2nd on the corel train and 3rd after ProudClod but before Hojo (save before you go up the stairs). Also the boss in the flashback is obviously new. All new bosses are unavoidable unless you skip some of the materias.

[luksy]

Yeah please send that link, I'll try and figure out what's going on.

[smokaz]

The bio-sample in the kalm flashback completely obliterated my sephiroth (and young cloud obviously). I tried placing Sephiroth in back-row, with sadness status and regen, but even that defensive play was not enough. I'm really wondering, since it is a flashback, what exactly can you obtain from that boss, other than the glory for defeating it?

[gjoerulv]

Isn't that guy pretty easy? Stand by with Cloud. Cast regen with seph (only on seph) and attack (only with seph). Curaga when needed. But it has come to my attention that seph's attack animation sometimes skips, which is odd.
It's only for glory!

[storm20200]

Hi gjoerulv. I popped in to say hello and praise the mod yet again. I decided to go through the game with your mod and upload high quality videos of each of the boss fights in the game. I'm currently up to Venus, Locke and Theo at the Shinra HQ! I forgot how tough you made them, I just winged it and got completely destroyed on my first time. It took me six tries to beat them and steal all of the items and thought I would post my first attempt for everyone to laugh at. I don't think I've ever faced a boss that has wiped the floor with me so much. I just fear the Jenova Life fight on disc two, I remember you making that pretty damn hard too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L2k1A6jFfA

[DLPB_]

I am trying to improve compatibility with your patch and Retranslation Project.  Obviously 100% compatibility will not be possible until you have fixed scene/kernel.

Until then I am making the dialogue work. As far as I can see only the following have text changes (i almost wrote sex changes):

las2_3
las2_4
las3_2
las3_3
las4_0
las4_42
zz5
zz6
zz7
zz8

Can you confirm?

[gjoerulv]

Yup that's all.

I think all problems that could hinder ts are fixed. ts, apparently, can't encode AI that is heavily tweaked (if I'm not mistaken).  Luksy is making a workaround.

[Cozzer]

During the fight against Schizo, I found something strange. I don't know if it's a bug or it was intended, but I'll write it just in case.

Schizo's breaths remove a bunch of statuses, mostly positive but which include Stop (I confirmed it with ProudClod); but if a character absorbs the element of a breath (for example, my Tifa had a fire ring), the breath will inflict all those statuses instead.
I can't say if it makes the battle easier or harder (I found myself with a fully buffed character that was rarely debuffed, but she was also out of commission for a while because of Stop), but it doesn't seem "natural"...

[gjoerulv]

Thank you Cozzer, I'm aware.
I wasn't before 1.0.5 though. On the reason why that is. I will removed the status effect from those attacks, as it causes too much confusion. If anyone know a workaround I would like to know.

[eliwolfe92]

Backstory for my problem (skip if its boring you )

Hey everyone. this is my first post i just joined. I had a question though, I ABSOLUTELY love this hard mode (You're awesome gjoerulv!). pardon the comparison but I feel like im playing ninja gaiden its so tricky. My only problem is im at the end of shinra hq and i finish the bike mission every time with flying colors (thanks to my childhood ) but when i get to the hell roller thing at the end i get creamed on impact. my chars are around lvl. 17 which isn't good for this mod at that point im told? anyway he kills at least one person right off the bat and i have NO more phoenix downs. doesn't normally happen to me but there was only the one shop that sold them and that was only when you first arrive at the HQ. plus like no emenies i ran into there dropped them

Anywho, I was wondering if I use kranmer's trainer (forgive me if i misspell someone's name) would i safely be able to teleport back to a shop or a group of enemies who drop them, stock up, and teleport back and start the minigame? or is there a simpler way to simply add at least 1 maybe 3 into my inventory directly JUST so i can overcome this obsatcle and leave stinky ol' Midgar?

Thanks in advance, happy modding!

[Tenko Kuugen]

Use Blackchocobo to edit your save game
And I always end up stumped how people manage to run themselves into problems like this
this mods difficulty is far from ninja gaiden btw

[eliwolfe92]

Thanks for the reply, and the tip. and maybe its because its significantly more difficult than vanilla FF VII. and really? thanks, i didn't know that. I mean I've beaten both and that comparison came completely from experience. it's really not much different in difficulty unless you flat out suck at ninja gaiden.

EDIT: Also, doesn't this mod enable you to control sephiroth's actions during the flashback sequence? I just got to it and during the battle with the dragon he simply revived cloud twice as he died and then automatically attacked the dragon for like 22000 damage. I didn't even get a turn