I made an interesting observation on the Big Brawl issue. For me at least the animation works, but there is seemingly no damage dealt. Seemingly, because the damage doesn't "pop-up", but I never did check if there actually was damaged dealt without the popup. I no for certain that it did work for me, but stopped working at some point in Midgar. I think it might've worked during my first attempt(s) on the Curator, but on the latter attempts it didn't work anymore.
Then against the little tadpole-like enemies inside the northern cave, I noticed that even though there doesn't appear to be damage dealt, the KO does work. It's a bit glitchy though: The enemies don't disintegrated like they should, the fight just ends with a victory fanfare, there is no sound-effect for the hits, and no damage pop-ups (no numbers.). But the limit definitely works to some degree at the very least.
In case you're addressing this issue, I hope this observation if of some help!
Edit: I just found out that it definitely deals damage, it just doesn't show
Yeah I think it's the animation data is broken. Each animation has a hook to show damage numbers, etc. Big Brawl is supposed to have multiple but they don't appear to be working. If you set an attack that has no damage display hooks with actual damage formula, then it won't show anything but it will calculate the damage correctly. Same with adding multi hit to an animation that usually only has 1 hit in it.
Had an issue in the Northern Crater, the room with the save point after you go left and then down iirc, also has an added effect materia that looks really white??
Anyways, I couldn't get Cloud to jump back up after a certain point, no matter what I did. Any ideas?
There is a route back up, but it depends where you are. I would find one of the save points and disable random encounters while you look for the route up, it can be a bit of a round-about way to go. If you reach the bottom there's also a teleport NPC to get back to the Highwind if needed.
As for the white added effect, might either be a missing texture if field model mods are installed or the shine effect on the flevel code messed up.
tl;dr - Is there a way to confirm that I'm actually playing in Arrange Mode?
I'm certain that I picked Arrange Mode when I started my game. And various boss encounters like double Air Bombers and having to fight all three Gunners at once on the Shinra HQ elevator seem to confirm that selection. But I noticed a sharp drop in difficulty after leaving Midgar. At first, I attributed it to unlocking the Rank Up system. Then I got to Jenova VECTOR and was very alarmed when she never summoned her two Vector Node adds. I found an LP of the fight on Youtube that was supposedly using Arrange Mode and v1.5 of the mod where the boss did indeed summon the adds and also seemed to have much more HP than in my own playthrough (15k instead of 10k in mine). Although I noticed that the video I was watching was three years old which makes me wonder if the boss has been tweaked since then in some minor revision that the patch number wasn't incremented for.
So is there any way to be certain that I am indeed still playing Arrange Mode from within the game? Anything at all that would definitely be different? The only theory I have regarding how it could've gotten switched is related to the fact that I initially started playing on normal mode, decided I wanted more of a challenge, started a new save on Arrange Mode, and then shortly after leaving Midgar was right when I saved over those original normal mode save slots with my Arrange Mode playthrough. I have no idea how the mod tracks which mode each save is supposed to be so that's just the only wild guess I have about how a switch might have occurred assuming that the Jenova VECTOR behavior I'm describing isn't normal.
Besides this weird difficulty curve that may be the result of a bug caused by my own actions, I've been mostly loving how the mod makes the game feel fresh and even more polished than the original ever was. Based on what I've seen of Remake, I don't expect half as much out of that, especially given that it's gonna be a trilogy that won't be finished for years.
Some bosses were modified in the last few years and don't carry as much HP, etc. The nodes on Jenova Vector don't always spawn for some reason. Nothing in there would have switched Arrange mode off, so I guess the difficulty dip is to do with boss nerfs and just general flaws in the AI script I used to modify enemy stats on Arrange mode. When you reach Mt. Nibel,
Sega Chief,
Im sorry to dump more onto your desk but...
In the flashback to Shin-ra Mansion, Sephiroths dialogue windows are glitched as he reads up on his origins. Initially, no windows pop up and Sephiroth just paces with a book in hand. If one pushes a button the window(s) pop up for a frame or two and disappear.
I'm running a lot of the mods that come with the 7th Heaven 2.0 program. Please advise
EDIT: I've fixed it! I changed 2 thing so i dunno which worked but the 1st was change Enhanced Stock UI2 - Field Dialogue Style to 'Stock' and the 2nd was DPI compatability in 7th heaven's exe properties
PS the piano inputs, some wont work in this flashback. is that by design?
Yeah, that's the menu overhaul; not sure why it does that; for the patch I'm working on I've replaced the field with a vanilla one so that should hopefully be resolved.
The piano inputs should work; maybe some keymaps for the shoulders are off?