So I've been playing FF8 and looking around at different mods etc.
FF7's Limit Breaker mod caught my attention and I began remembering how FF10 also broke the 9999 limits.
As usual an Overrated game got the attention another deserves.
Basically I'm aiming to find out if there is a way to increase the damage limit anyone can do to "99,999"
(I'd like to boost HP up there too but it's not as important)
Can't happen without almost a complete re-write of the current battle damage system (this applies to 7, 8, 9, and I think 12, but I'm not very far in it yet). Currently it uses two bytes to express damage and health (well, three bytes for enemy health). That gives it a scope of 0 - 65535 if it's made to be unsigned. Two (maybe three, actually) of FF8's attacks have a special flag that tell it that it is unsigned damage. Under this condition, it cannot be a curative attack or any kind of elemental. Healing, in the case of elemental absorption (which is all healing is) is negative damage. If you try to express any healing greater than 32768 then the data goes out of scope and will usually get truncated. This is what causes the overflow bug in FFVII that has yet to be seen in FFVIII (I believe).
This happens a lot in FFVI if you cheat enough. The damage gets so high that it overflows and any damage above 32767 gets subtracted by that amount. Like if someone with 255 magic tries to cast Ultima, most of the time it will calculate to over 33000 damage, but because this is out of scope it gets reduced back into scope, but not very well. It doesn't become the maximum damage, it becomes 33000 - 32767 damage (233).
Moral of the story: FFX uses four bytes as is fitting of the PS2 so it can do up to several BILLION damage per strike if it were modified slightly. Making FF7 and FF8 do 99999 damage would require the damage calculations to use Int32s instead of the Int16s that they use now. It might be possible on the PC because it's all in Int32s anyway, but it would require more than a slight modification.
