Materia: Possibilities

[xLostWingx]

I have been plaing through FFV lately and have had a few ideas about ways to alter VII.  I was wondering if anyone was aware of a way, or a theoretical means of restricting specific materia use.

For example:

Is there a way to make Cloud (or any character) incapable of equipping the 'Ice' (or any other) materia?
If not is there a way to make it so that Cloud cannot cast 'Ice'?

Any other means of restricting materia use could be useful (I could even work with a disabled 'Materia' command in the menu if necessary).

Ideally I want to be able to make groups of materia that could only be equipped by a specific character or characters.  The reason for this desire is to make a mod where only a character designated as a 'Black Mage' could equip 'Black Magic' type materia, a 'Knight' could only equip 'Knight' type materia, etc..

Alternatively (although I'm sure it would be a task I'd be unwilling to tackle), would it be possible to prevent certain characters from using certain attacks by changing the Character AI?  So that a 'Knight' type character would be incapable of actually executing certain commands even if they had the proper materia equipped?

In the Kalm Flashback you cannot add/remove materia from Sephiroth or Cloud; would there be a way to make that happen depending on the circumstances?

I'm just shouting out ideas as they come to mind, I just don't have the technical knowledge about such things and the best idea I've come up with for implementing something close to this is to modify stats and equipment compatibility to strongly discourage use of non-class materia, or figure out a way of disabling the Materia command in the menu so that each character's starting materia is permanent.  If anyone has any ideas or insight, please share.  Thanks.

[DLPB_]

I am guessing this is in the realms of a major code change...

I mean anything is possible... it is just the amount of coding that is needed to achieve it.  There is usually no "Set this to 1 and it will magically sort this out" method.

[xLostWingx]

That is what I was afraid of, but I was thinking of all the gameshark codes that enable menu commands; it should be just as simple to disable commands...right?

[Tenko Kuugen]

Nope
since they are not disabled to begin with
Well, technically you could play around with the code un lock out the whole materia menu, but then NOBODY can equip any materia
the same goes for the thing with sephiroth

[xLostWingx]

If I did lock out the whole Materia menu, I think that could be useful.  If I pre-designate every character to a class, and pre-assign all the appropriate materia to them, and design their weapons and armor to always have the same number of slots, and just set required AP to activate different skills - then I would effectively have a 'Class' that learns new abilities as it gains AP (FFV style). 

The 'Black Mage' class could start with all the materia required for all Black Magic spells, earning -ara type spells after 2000 AP, -aga type spells after 15000 AP, MP +20% after 10000 AP, etc. etc.  I could even set the equipment up so that for most of the game a "MP Turbo" materia is equipped on the character, but it is never paired to anything unless using certain armors. - - Can a materia be placed on a character in the Initial Data of the kernel without occupying a materia slot?  I think so...if it wasn't in a slot would it gain AP anyway?  Once again just thinking.  Like I said, I am interested in any ideas.

EDIT:  I think I may do this even if I can't figure out a means of restricting materia use.  A few dozen changes to the kernel over a couple of hours, just use my Lost Wing or Revisited scene.bin and voila.  Heh, here I am halfway through V (I've made it this far 3 times, but never completed the game) and I haven't touched Revisited in weeks, but I'm aready vicariously designing another mod that I don't have time for.

[DLPB_]

Have a look at script with Makou reactor.. that may explain how you get your materia option after talking with Barrett for example.

You may be able to alter script?

[Jenova's Witness]

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[xLostWingx]

This interests me.

I was hoping and thinking that it would interest at least a handful of people.

Ideally, I was hoping to make a mod where either a) You only gain HP and MP upon level up, but provide enough opportunities to obtain Sources that the player could effectively build a character's stats however they please or b) All characters gain stats similarly at a flat rate (i.e. Cloud - Lv. 10 [Str-20] [Dex-15] [Vit-5] [Mag-10] [Spr-5] [Luk-10] ---> Cloud - Lv. 20 [Str-25] [Dex-20] [Vit-8] [Mag-15] [Spr-8] [Luk-13]) or something like that; all characters' stats would grow as an unspecialized class.
Different materia would hold abilities that would be class-specific.  'Cover' would obviously be a 'Knight' ability.  'Ice/Bolt/Fire' would be 'Black Mage' abilities.  However, there is no way to prevent equipping black magic materia on a Knight.  Also, if a player could just use all the sources they find on Cloud and then equip him with whatever armor and materia he pleases and create a character exactly like a vanilla-VII character. 

I suppose I can do all this without restricting materia use, it would just be up to anyone playing to play by the rules.  I'm sure there are lots of people who will make a White Mage and say, "Well...it'll be ok if I equip Contain."  Anyway, I don't really have the time to do this, and Revisited isn't finished so I should probably stop thinking about it.  However, I am still interested in a way to restrict materia - DLPB, I will check Makou Reactor eventually, thanks.

[Tenko Kuugen]

Several issues with this
a) You cannot add / switch materia. This becomes a problem if for example you want to use mega-all, KOTR, ZB, and all that stuff. How would you justify having someone have that at the start of the game?  The same goes for a LOT of early-game broken but late-game essentials like 2x/4x cut, morph, full-cure, shield, ultima, most summon ( odin anyone ) and so on

b) it can end up pretty difficult. At some points you have only 1 variable member and if you, lets say, haven't used the 2nd locked one much, he'll be really weak because no materia growth as you can't change them. ever. What would you even do with all the materia that are found? would be pretty pointless to let them just sit there and then rot in the locked menu
This also makes double / triple weapons extremely overpowered. As there is, as far as I know, no script command to place specific materia in weapon slots, you need to give every weapon at least X slots ( X being the final amount of materia you have on said characters weapon )
Same problem persists with armor. They'd all need X slots from the beginning.
I don't even need to tell you how much of a problem I'd be if only Yuffie had "steal", right? No steal up to Junon? lol no thank you.
Or how overpowered it would be if each member had 16 materia at start.

c) buying / selling materia is entirely gone.

d) Yuffie wutai event anyone? That removes your materia and puts it randomly back. Unless you manage to stop her from doing that or find a way to put the correct materia back, this will break your whole game. And not being able to do Wutai? no thanks you again.

[xLostWingx]

Well it was just an improvised means of doing something.  However, you can set most abilities to be inactive until a certain amount of AP have been gained (you see this with Ultima and Shield).  Commands would be a little tougher.  Construct an appropriate AP reward curve through the game and it wouldn't be difficult to work through.  I would obviously modify weapons double and triple growth abilities.  Yes, it would require all weapons/armour to have the final number of slots, but if the majority of materia were inactive until say....100,000 AP, could work through this.  I wouldn't keep initial materia the same as it normally is.  Even if a character had 16 materia on at start, not all of them would have to be active.  Excellent point about Wutai, although Leviathan would be innately equipped on the Summoner and I could put the Weapons/Armor in other shops, but that wouldn't be fun.

I think that it is too complicated to restrict materia in my ideal way, and anything less is inadequate.

[Jenova's Witness]

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[nfitc1]

The materia system is supposed to be an open-ended unrestricted custom job creation system. There are only two restrictions to it:

1. Materia can be equipped and grows in accordance with equipment it is junctioned to
2. Support links only work in specific pairs (1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8)

Other than that you are never restricted. Trying to add restrictions to an open system is going to be a major undertaking.

You can disable the Materia menu and quasi-simulate classes, but you'd have to standardize all the weapon/armor slots and growths so equipping a five-slot weapon doesn't remove materia from an eight-slot weapon. Even if the Materia menu is disabled, can't you still access it by selecting "optimize" at the equipment screen?

[PitBrat]

This conversation brings to mind a fun game called -- Heretic Kingdoms: the Inquisition.
Each weapon has specific skills tied to it.
The weapons level up as you use them.
When you max out a weapon, your character acquires that weapon's skills.
It added to the strategy because really cool skills were tied to some weak weapons.
It was worth clobbering baddies with a wooden club just to get some super awesome skill.

But, it is an interesting idea to further enhance the functionality of materia.
I hope this develops into a full project.

[xLostWingx]

I was thinking more like, "You can't equip equipment/materia/whatever (n) if you have x, y, and/or z equipped.

This was my original idea until I realized it would involve far more than I'm capable of.

The most sensible idea I've come up with so far is too design everything the way I orginally intended and suggest that you construct pure classes, and if someone wants to do otherwise, so be it. 
A distant second is to lock the materia command in the menu.  NFITC1, in this scenario, all equipment would likely have 8 slots each.  Later equipment may have links that weren't in previous equipment.  After rejigging the Materia Levels/AP and the amount of AP available from enemies, I could just stagger all the abilities that could be gained from the materia (I know this works on Magic materia, tell me it works with summons too ).  Commands and certain Support and Independent materia would probably be problematic though.  I don't know of an "Optimize" option in VII PSX, and does the materia menu come up after you equip something?...that seems familiar, so that would break this idea.
And a more distant third option would be to rig the stat growth up on each character so you'd be stupid to make them into certain classes.  But this has a lot of problems too.

I love materia, I just don't like knowing that I could close my eyes and select virtually any 5 materia at random for each of my characters and probably still crucify the enemy.

[Tenko Kuugen]

Hm, is it not possible to "lock" first levels of command materia like with ultima or shield? Did anyone try this?
I mean it's not gonna work with summons and blue materia ( I guess ) but is there any reason it shouldn't work with command? In specific cases you could just add to powerful commands a 'useless' command like throw just to "delay" the actual command

4x Cut ->
Lvl 1 = throw
lvl 2 ( after 50,000 AP )  -> 2x Cut
Lvl 3  ( after 100,000 AP ) -> 4x Cut
Lvl 4 = Master

[xLostWingx]

That's a good idea Kuugen.  I know that a lot of materia have quirks, but in theory that should work.

=============================

So, I've been thinking about this a bit.  I will be writing up plans for a third mod.  I will likely use the scene.bin from Revisited - that way I'll be forced to complete Revisited, besides, Revisited's scene.bin will really be something once it is complete.  I didn't even want to make another mod, but I kept getting more ideas so we'll see what happens.  I'm thinking of having duplicate materia with different proerties, like a Cover for the Knight and a different Cover for a Samurai (maybe one goes 10%>20%>30%>40% and the other goes 20%>45%>70%>100%).  I just need to avoid a situation where each class has one optimum action.  After looking at my ideas on paper, it looks easy to get into a situation where once you have MASTERed all of the Knight's abilities, you would just 2x-Cut or Deathblow=Added Cut everything constantly.  This will require more planning.

[xLostWingx]

This is a longshot, but any insights on a) Making custom "Master Materia", like a 'Master Black' materia a 'Master White' materia etc? b) Making 'Enemy Skill'-like materia that have different sets of abilities?

Or is this significantly more complicated than I presume?

[DLPB_]

yup sadly it is..  anything which was not in original game of this nature requires rewrites and recoding...  usually a lot of it

At least...  there would be some obstacles to overcome in this case... and it isn;t a doddle.

[Dark_Ansem]

but I do believe it is possible (maybe it has already been done?) to unequip Sephiroth's materia in the flashback. he has a script that prevents this and displays a message, maybe you could do something similar to that, only that it triggers when a specific materia is selected.

[ff7rules]

Isn't this easily found? Its in Sephiroths AI. Surely if you were to copy it into each persons AI it would have the same effect? Having it for each character then wouldn't be a problem, but each Weapon would be a huge task. This reminds me of a Chrono Trigger like system with each character having there own element and weaknesses, something I would love to implement into ff7 and my patch as an optional challenge.

Ok after having a quick luck this is harder than I first thought If you delete the whole AI for Sephiroth you can control him and change his Materia, So I assumed it was in his main AI that makes it so you cannot change the equipment or Materia but maybe I am wrong. Found an easier way to enable elemental weaknesses for each character though.

[Tenko Kuugen]

As for the master materia thing
If you find a way to check which master materia assigns which spells to a character by equip and a way to change which spells it equips ( lets say, kill out all the healing spells ) the whole wall of text below is meaningless

In general, assigning duplicate spells / commands seems to be the easiest way
If you give your "Knight" class several commands the best way to "lock" them is to throw in a useless basic command you want enabled right away anyway. Like, anyone can "throw" and it's generally a pretty MEH command. So that makes a nice "filler"

uh, this is a longshot and limits you to 3 specific kinds of master materias but
edit: never mind, you'll run out of spell slots and so on, this won't work

Master #1 gives you X specific spells. Now you can freely assign spell IDs to normal materia but not to the master one.
Let's look at it like this.
You won't need all those summons, purple and blue materia. Whatever you won't use ( plan this ) you can use as backup.
That way, you CAN turn the regular green materia into what you need for a master black ( green master becomes black magic master )
of course that'd mean you'd need to duplicate some spell effects
This is likely easier to understand with an example

You need a Black Magic Master Materia ( a BMMM )
Now, the original Green Materia Master Materia ( GMMM ) assigns Spell ID 1 to 50 ( probably wrong but just for the example go wth it )
Now you turn the GMMM into BMMM by changing those 50 spells to black magic. Of course, you'd need to "backup" the spells you don't want the black mage to access. That means you'd need to dummy out all the spells of those [insert materia used for GMMM here]  materia you don't use. For example, Cure is assigned to the GMMM usually but you don't want that in your BMMM. You change Cure into another "Fire" ( for simplicity )
Now, that means you have to replace another spell with Cure ( You won't need all spells or all summons )  and so on until those 50 spells are entirely black magic.
That leaves you with a BMMM

[xLostWingx]

Kuugen, yeah thats what I was thinking before I decided it wouldn't work.  Which would be better:  Level ups do not increase Str/Vit/Mag/Dex/Luk/Spr, you must level up stats with sources.  OR  Players stats increase in a way that makes all characters very 'Plain', class distinctions arise upon equipping materia and equipment.

Frankly, I think it might be interesting for stats not to increase at all.  Fix them all at very low, but not unreasonable numbers.  Maybe allow Dex and Luk to grow.  Have a 5%/enemy drop rate for sources, or eliminate sources and allow minimal stat growth.  Which way would compliment this theoretical materia system best?

I think there are enough spells/commands & supplemental/independent materia to support between 7-9 classes.  That makes about 10 materia per class, and each materia can have multiple abilities.  I could even make some new spells or 'Plus' type materia if a few classes were lacking usefulness. 

[Tenko Kuugen]

I suggest you instead figure out how to make the game properly handle exceed_100 stat growth
You CAN adjust the stat growth rate such that it hits like 240 at 99 but the game ( I think it was in the .exe ) only handles up to 100
I DID try to change this before but it resulted in levelup=stats255 regardless of growth chart. If you find a way to fix that problem, you'll have a fine way to make specific character class stat growth curves.

[nfitc1]

I suggest you instead figure out how to make the game properly handle exceed_100 stat growth
You CAN adjust the stat growth rate such that it hits like 240 at 99 but the game ( I think it was in the .exe ) only handles up to 100
I DID try to change this before but it resulted in levelup=stats255 regardless of growth chart. If you find a way to fix that problem, you'll have a fine way to make specific character class stat growth curves.

I remember trying to get that to work a long time ago. I don't know why it wouldn't work the way I predicted.... Maybe I'll give it another shot after my cam delay patch is done.

[obesebear]

after my cam delay patch is done.

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