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Topics - secondadvent

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ok, as of right now i am just at the beginning of my mod, though it will take a long time before each new release will come out, one, due to the amount i am changing, and going solo will take a while, but is what i prefer :P, two, it will be worked on side by side with my ai compression mod, since i will need a smaller base to work with due to the amount of ai editing going on.

i had a release of my compressed ai mod out (up to air buster), but since people weren't really that interested, i decided to start on this instead. if anybody wants a newer version of it, please let me know as i progress, because i doubt it will be posted here otherwise (unless many people become interested in it).

things i plan on adding to this mod are:

1. adding a level-up method for enemies, so that they will continue to grow over time as you do, to keep the difficulty up throughout the game. i already have the base for this, all that needs to be done is to balance out the growth of the enemies, so that they start slow, then gradually get much stronger. the only bad thing is that it is likely that they will not level as well as the party does, smoothness wise, because it already takes a good bit of ai space with the current method, but if i have plenty of space near the end of the project, i will make them progress much smoother. also, it is possible for enemies to go over the lv 99 cap, and if you yourself level that high, pretty much everything you fight will be past that cap, and the damage output increases greatly at that point.

2. on top of the leveling method, they will also be adding more moves as they grow (some enemies are limited, due to me not knowing how to add animations to enemies in the battle.lgp file... if anybody could help me here, it would make many enemies much better in the end), some gaining auto statuses as they level, such as auto haste, or even auto life (still working out the kinks, but so far it will work once a battle, which is good ;)). elemental resistances will also increase, such as gaining immunity or even absorption from certain elements. this will also include manipulate moves if/when i can find the location in ai.

3. if i can find it in the ai, i will be adding status immunities to them as well, and even causing some of their attacks to inflict immunity to your party, coupled with a bad status, such as death sentence, and immunity to it, to stop removal of it. it will also be possible for the enemy to make you immune to, or absorb restorative spells/items, making phoenix downs miss, or cause instant death, depending on the resistance given, though this (zombification) will be a rare thing to be used, since it can be very bad, very fast, though death could be made to work on those killed with these resistances, unless death immunity was added as well >:D.

4. if i can find this as well, i will be adding more drop/steal/morph items through ai, as well as removing the older drops and such, as they progress in level. for now though, i can at least make them drop a new item when killed in the same way the vice enemies give back your stolen items when they are killed: a dialogue box is shown, and the item is automatically added to your inventory, though this allows you to use it in the same battle if it is usable in battle, when it should be a end-of-battle reward. i can still make them be dropped at random, and have multiple different items that can be gotten, but they will still possibly drop their regular item, and it will have the possibility to be used in the same fight, which is why i want to find the main info in the ai. i cannot currently change the steal/morph items either, but definitely will if/when i get access to them.

5. all party stats will be reduced, and sources will be made a lot harder to come by, made as drops instead of morphs, and i can also cap off stats at somewhere under 255 if i wanted to, so even if they were plentiful, they would still not offer the same amount of help as usual. i will try to make the party members have more unique stats, but i am not sure how it is going to be yet... the first release or so will only have enemies tweaked for the most part.

6. all weapons and abilities will be modded as well, to weaken some, and strengthen others (ultimate weapons will NOT have their normal attack mods, since they are too broken). KotR will take a big hit, being massively reduced, but still being the strongest summon overall (will not be reduced to a pitiful state, but it will not be reaching max damage per hit either :P. the cumulative damage will still be much greater than bahamut zero). some enemy moves will be boosted though, and may gain extra benefits as they level as well.

7. as i go, i will also try to make less things missable, especially summon materia (possibly add things to the field files, to make them appear elsewhere if missed, or as limited supply battle square prizes like omnislash). by the end, there should be very little you cannot get if you missed it, if anything (have to do something to get them though, not going to be handed to you if you missed them the first time).

a lot to read, as usual from me, but i hope people will actually have some interest in this mod, unlike my compressed ai mod  :x.

if anybody has any experience in adding animations to enemies, i would like to have your help in that part, because as it stands now, unless the enemy has direct access to magic, they will be unable to use magic in a normal way (have to use a physical animation, which doesn't show the magic animation, though damage is still done). even adding new physical attacks has to be done on older physical animations if no new animations are added, which gets repetitive.

on the same note, but less needed for now, if anybody could make it possible to have new enemies added, i would like that as well, because extra optional enemies are always nice, and adding new battle square enemies could be fun too  :-P.

when i do (if people want it) make a release, i plan to make an excel spreadsheet showing all enemy info, such as stats, moves, items, etc. since it will not be able to be seen in an enemy editor like hojo (moves for all levels would be shown though), because it will only list the base stats, and even at the same level (except the base level), enemies can be greatly different stat wise, and even resistance wise if i make them at a random chance to happen, so i think a little spreadsheet to show the min/max stats, and all possible things they can have would be a good thing to have.

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this mod will attempt to keep the enemies acting as close to the originals as possible (with some small additions as necessary), while rewriting the ai to be as small as possible, to shrink the overall size of the scene.bin, and to make the code as optimized as possible, all while fixing ai bugs :-P. This is not a hard/balance mod, but rather something that can be used as a base for other mods and such, or for those who just want a bugfixed version of the original.

the size is being made smaller so that other mods will be able to safely add to it without having the space issue the psx version has, allowing for more people to use these mods. the size should become small enough over time so that you should not be able to make it become too large for the psx iso unless you were to add a massive amount to the ai, and i mean a LOT.

Current Release: v0.1, with changes to enemies up to air buster (game order, so the first two reactors :P). here is the link: http://files.filefront.com/13875177

Current Size: 256kb, but quickly approaching 248kb

each release will also have an updated kernel.bin (only for if you are not using a modded one), a list with the original/current ai sizes of the enemies, and a file to help people test the ai (if they wanna help me out  :wink:), showing every possible outcome the enemy will have, as in what it will do in one turn, on who, etc.

as of right now, 21 scene files are now empty (as in filled with nothing) that had no enemies used in-game, such as dummy enemies used during testing, as well as an enemy from a scene that has enemies that are used in-game. it is likely there are more to remove, but i haven't checked too far into this yet.

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Troubleshooting / FFVII starting problem (solved)
« on: 2009-04-28 21:43:46 »
ok, to start off, the game will start up, but remain black, no sound or music. if i press enter, it sometimes makes a sound similar to that of an error message (i think a dialog box is popping up with an error of some kind, but i cannot see it to figure out the problem, even setting my desktop's resolution to it's lowest, to try and see if the box was just outside of the resolution's view didnt work), then continues to play the eidos/square/credits movies.

the thing here is that none of the buttons work at this point, except the right mouse button, which acts as the enter button, and kicks me to the new game/continue screen, where i can advance no farther, even with a save file (the pointer hovers over continue at the start, and no buttons other than the right mouse button works, so no progress can be made). I even have a numpad on my laptop's keyboard (like any regular desktop keyboard, no fn button required to use them), and none of the buttons will work in the game, but do outside of the game, with or without num lock on. i have tried the laptop patch, to no avail. also, i cannot initially alt+f4 out of the program, until after i press enter to see the eidos movie, and if i press ctrl+q, the quit screen comes up, but i get stuck there, and not even alt+f4 gets me out, but alt+f4 works fine to exit.

ok, here are some things i have tried to solve this issue:
1. removed all codecs, and started from scratch, first only using the truemotion 2.0 codec, then adding the k-lite later and trying then.
2. removed gabest's avi splitter
3. tested out the game with lowered hardware acceleration, as well as sound acceleration in dxdiag
4. reinstalled ffvii multiple times
5. tried running in software, as well as in every combo of the nvidia setting in 1.02 config
6. tried the original (not 1.02) exe/config
7. put all of my movies on my hard drive, and had them successfully run (still with above issues, but they DID run)
8. tried pretty much every key combo possible, and only the ones to exit the program (after pressing enter to get rid of the dialog box), and the right mouse button work
9. all the movies play in MPC, so i know all the movies work, and in-game shows that as well
10. tried to run in windowed with cetra, to see if the dialog box appeared so i could see it there, but oddly the box didnt appear, and the game ran on its own, but black bars occurred in the movie, and keys still didnt work
11. tried various nvidia settings, such as disabling sli/physx, using rivatuner to disable 8-bit palletted textures, and disable AA
12. added the upside down patch in the hopes of somehow fixing the problem
13. multiple other things that i cannot remember off the top of my head

note: i have had this game working before a while ago, but with things constantly being added, such as newer drivers, my current ones being needed for performance in other games, many things could be at fault (probably drivers though, or some weird codec issue, though the movies and sound runs fine, and as of yet no graphical errors).

Before i resort to downgrading my driver to one that i know worked with ffvii, i was hoping for some more ideas on how to fix this problem. no patches were added at all, other than the updated config/exe, but that is all. i had originally thought it was from the PRP patch, which i had added before (put on all of my normally added patches, except for the PRP, which i had substituted for the reconstruction one), but after uninstalling everything and then starting from a clean install, the problem remained. If you can give any insight into the solution/cause of my problem, i would be thrilled, since i am trying to hack ffvii to be harder, yet the scene.bin file became too big to import back into the iso, and i cannot figure out how to make it so i can add the larger file and still run the game (got it to run once, but battles wouldnt start >_>), so i fell back onto the pc version.

PC specs:
windows xp sp3
intel core2 quad q6700 @ 2.66ghz
4gb ram
dual nvidia geforce 8700m gt (dox optimised 185.68 drivers), sli capable

my computer is definitely capable of handling ffvii, but since somebody did a craptastic porting job, as well as nvidia's lovely old game support (not), i have had, as well as many others, a super phun tyme solving all of it's problems. if you could fix this issue, i would make you my hero of the week >:D

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