Edited techs?

[FaustWolf]

It'd be great to sprinkle a few in as gameplay surprises. We have full command over Layer 3 spell effects, with the exception of ones requiring special "Black Hole" coding, which hasn't been figured out yet to my knowledge. I'd be willing to do a run-through with the sound effect values so we can get all those ID'd as well.

How far do you guys want to take tech editing in CE?

[Agent 12]

Currently the edited techs are a bunch of magus techs (they are safest to edit), and I think I made Lucca's protect affect everyone.  I may have made provoke affect everyone too.

The primary reason I haven't edited more techs is just cause I'm scared to haha   I had another tech edited at one point and it turned out it made some random double tech totally freeze the game   But I'm all for adding new techs if someone (mainly you probably FW ) is willing to :

Make the tech on a fresh CT ROM.
Check that Every single double/triple works
Send me the raw data so I can duplicate it on the CE rom.

--JP

[Chrono'99]

Oswego del Fuego made a very nice re-balanced tech list for CE back in 2005 (here). There's obviously no way we can hack all that in the game due to time considerations and because, unfortunately, Oswego had forgotten to take double and triple techs into account when making that list. I'm just showing this list for...information purpose (and because it was so damn nice ;_;).

Anyway, what we could do is fix Magus's ShadowBolt; it works fine but makes the enemy flash green in a way that looks slightly glitchy.

[FaustWolf]

Sure, I'd be happy to do that. json, I think you managed to give Marle a "Haste 2" if I remember correctly, a whole party haste, which would be rad if some bosses require that sort of thing. I worry slightly that enemy difficulty may have to be tweaked if we start giving characters uber techs, so gameplay balance will have to be kept in consideration.

As some examples of simple tech edits I've done in the past, here's "Doom Blaze" and "Curse" for Magus. I also did some techs called "Thorhammer" and "Maelstrom." Let me know if you'd like to see any of those in CE. I think we can do something really awesome with Black Hole, since it has extra coding that's compatible with certain Layer 3 spell effects.

Also, any particular favorites from Oswego Del Fuego's list? And are Magus techs already altered in the CE ROM? I haven't seen ShadowBolt yet, but I could work on it if it's in there.

[ZeaLitY]

Yep, it's in there. To see it, just load up, select chapter...I forget if it's one or two, and take Magus to the Beast's Nest.

[FaustWolf]

I'd like to change the way "omnishield" looks if that's cool with everyone. I'll post a patch and a video clip of the change here.

EDIT: Actually, I'm not going near it in the CE ROM itself, I'm too worried about screwing up adjacent tech data. Instead, I'll post a reconceptualization of OmniShield in a fresh ROM and the CE team can decide whether adopting it is worth the trouble.

[FaustWolf]

This is what I had in mind for OmniShield. However, I guess I'm warming up to the way it is in the ROM currently. What bothers me the most is that the sound effect sounds cut off, which conflicts with the sheer polish that's in the rest of CE.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri-EKngmmrg

[FaustWolf]

Now, this is OmniShield! It retains all the character animations, but has the palette suggested above and better sound. I didn't change anything structurally in the tech (just swapped a few bytes), so this patch can be theoretically applied to the latest CE ROM build without a hitch. However, I'm playing the rest of the game with this in place to be sure.

[FaustWolf]

So, yeah.

Pretty soon we should have the ability to hard-code Ayla tossing out Naga-Ette's "Slow" spell, Magus using "Geyser," Frog casting "HexagonMist," etc. etc.

How far is the CE team willing to go with tech editing? I'd like to stretch it to the absolute limit and execute a whole bunch of ideas. Players will be expecting the tried-and-true tech sets, then CE will just totally blow them away in that regard too.

If you guys have new ideas for techs, post them here and give feedback on the following potential implementations:

Crono
1. "Invading Light" for damaging and slowing down enemies. Problem is, "Invading Light" has a Layer 3 effect that only affects the bottom half of the screen, and I don't think it can be changed (not easily anyway). Some other "Slow" inflicting attack might be nice though.
2. Giving either Spincut or Confuse the "confuse" status effect.


Frog
1. Some kind of low-level Poison-inflicting tech, whether it be a spell with "acid drop" or "acid bubble" effects used by enemies or giving LeapSlash a Poison property.
2. Hexagon Mist. This would have been great for a hidden double tech with Magus. That might be doable too, but not as quickly as mastering the editing of single techs.


Ayla
Does Ayla touch the "real" Frozen Flame in Chapter 18? Or is it the "real" Frozen Flame that she nearly comes into contact with (not sure of the exact nature of Ayla's approaching it yet -- guess I'll find out soon either way). If there's any way to fit it in, I think it'd be rockin' for Ayla to learn some kind of non-elemental Earth magic. Like, tornadoes, earthquakes, and Grand Stone for a final tech. All this should certainly be doable. She could turn out to be this uber character, which may be fitting seeing as she's the "secret" character of CE. However, she may become too godlike, but on the other hand, maintaining a low magic defense and even weakening her physical defense may offset her awesome offensive advantages.


Magus
It's my opinion that either Dark Mist or Black Hole should be traded in for "Geyser." Magus' tech set is already edited awesomely, so this should probably be the only extra change. "Geyser" would have a Poison status inflict in keeping with its HP drain on the

Oh! That reminds me, I also wanted Magus or someone to have an HP steal effect too, heh heh. Maybe someone else can have it.


I have no clue how to code techs directly yet like json's done with Magus' techs, I'd only be able to swap tech sound effects and object animations to get things like Hexagon Mist working properly. However, if it's feasible I think it'd be rad if we could make some kind of "telekinesis" spell that would draw enemies closer together, exposing the enemies to Dark Bomb, Fire Whirl, and other area techs.

[Mauron]

2. Hexagon Mist. This would have been great for a hidden double tech with Magus. That might be doable too, but not as quickly as mastering the editing of single techs.

I explored the possibility of doing this not too long ago.

There's still a ways to go, and I sorta shelved the project due to a combination of frustration and lack of interest, but I'll go back to it if you guys want to try this.

[FaustWolf]

Yeah, that was awesome stuff Mauron. Wish I had some ASM skills and could pitch in with that effort. I'm wondering if triple techs would be any easier for Magus than double techs since we already have an example in the Black Rock and Blue Rock techs (Dark Eternal and Omega Flare respectively). I was considering, if it's possible (should be theoretically), actually sacrificing one of the rock triple techs and replacing it with something like "Dreamless." Maybe Dark Eternal > Dreamless.

Does CE even use the rocks at all? I haven't found any yet, though I'm only halfway through or so.

Also, while playing around with tech indices earlier I was able to make Crono perform a double tech with a random character by changing Cyclone's "code index" (that's what I'll call the first byte of the 7-byte graphical data) to that of the double tech. It executed fine with the exception that the double tech pulled in the second character regardless of who that character was. I wonder if this phenomenon is something we can exploit somehow.

[Agent 12]

the first byte determines what each object on screen "corresponds" to.
For example one byte might mean:  Tech Caster is object 0, Tech Target is object 1 and the rest are new sprites (like stars for cure)
Another byte might mean that Tech Caster is object 0, Tech target is object2, everyone around the tech target is object 3, and everything else is new sprites (think cyclone)



--JP

[FaustWolf]

I'm wondering how we add the stipulation that, say, Object 0x00 of Spire is Crono and Object 0x01 is Frog (if, indeed, that is how the double and triple tech code works), and make the tech an option only when those two are in the party together. I got Frog to cast the Lightning part of Spire while Crono did the sword part, which looked wicked, and I got Crono, Frog, and Ayla to do Delta Storm, which was also wicked, but I haven't seen whatever factor ensures that the proper characters are doing the proper parts of the tech. I guess what matters most is that we don't try to graft double techs onto single characters, heh.

But anyway, once we get the double and triple tech code locations specified, I could see Fire Whirl being replaced by a Fire Slash that strikes enemies in a line. But even then, some external factors would have to be changed to make Slash and Fire (or Flamethrower) the requirements for the tech instead of Cyclone and Flamethrower.

[Mauron]

Actually, one of my biggest problems with the Magus dual tech project was that the one I attempted to give him froze the game. I think the latest patch has the current version of it stored at 5E0000. Off the top of my head, the problems were that, properly triggering it, learning the new techs, and some menu issues.

[FaustWolf]

Lest you guys think I forgot about Crimson Echoes...

Consider this "new techs a la carte." The CE team can pick any new ones from these it likes separate from the others, with the exception of Nirvana X (thank Oswego for that name, still sounds formidable). Due to a tech design decision I made, it sort of comes with *Venom Mist. I guess you could consider that sort of like packaging a B movie with a AAA title before selling to theaters. If you guys really don't like *Venom Mist, I'll figure something out, but I thought a poison tech would be neat. It has no impact on X strike thankfully.

So far the only tech I've found to be screwed up by the changes is "Twin Charm." I guess I could redo Berserker to replace "Rock Throw" instead of Charm, but with Magus being a stealing character now, I figured we should open up something new and cool for Ayla. I could copy & paste Charm data to an unused area of player tech code space, but I'm personally more inclined to try replacing it with something else entirely. No clue what it should be yet though.

Haha, I just realized that I accidently put a "shock" animation in Nirvana X, but now I've got it fixed; it looks even better than in the video now.

EDIT: Backing up the latest patches here on the offchance my hard drive decides to crash or something. These should not be applied to the CE ROM yet because I have to do some more testing and tweaking. Twin Charm is executable, but it's bare bones till I put some normal Charm code somewhere and repoint.