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I don't want to sound too critical but if you add features like that why not just give us a god mode as well. The challenge would be about the same to game if you did. Sure it would be nice to have some of that, but then where's the heart pounding adrinalin rush when you tell some one to cast the spell on the weak guy hoping it will hit before they are dead. It just looses something in my mind.

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Don't fear the reaper!
Wonderful system this "Democracy" is no mechanism to break a tie -Dinobot-
It's spelled Raymond Luxray Yatch but it's pronounced Throat Wobbler Mangrove.
Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici
Sic Semper Tyrannis bush.

I don't think I'm following, Lockes AlterEgo. You think we're overpowering the characters by eliminating the inheritance of passive skills by the Bare class? Or do you think we're overpowering the characters by giving them passives that are too good? If you elaborate a bit more, we'll be happy to address your concerns.

What you said later in the post is exactly what will happen. You will definitely feel that adrenaline rush of trying to heal the weak members of your team before they die. Three slots for passive abilities and commands is really not enough to prevent you totally from the enemies. You might be immune to sleep and paralysis and hasted and be dual-wielding Ragnarok and Excalibur, but what happens when you become a zombie? Now that beast of a character is destroying your own teammates, and all your attempts to revert him back to human fail because you have 4 physical tanks and no healers. Or you have two healers, but they each have different commands, so one might not have the anti-zombie spells. So then the one capable of healing zombie gets turned into a zombie or dies and now you're sunk. You can be as fast as you want, but pure physical power or immunity to a few statii is not going to save you.

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Is PJ

What i was referring to was his reference of replacing one of those with the ablity to have auto haste or something like that. If you were to utilize that right you could god mode your charecter and make him unstopable. I really think that nothing needs to be done with the class, just leave it the way it is. After all bare is suppost to be there inherint (sp?) ablities that they've learned with out the use of a billion other classes. In that sense it's fine the way it is because the charecter is not only strong in all other respective classes, but there over all normal selves are also becoming stronger. Does that help any?

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Don't fear the reaper!
Wonderful system this "Democracy" is no mechanism to break a tie -Dinobot-
It's spelled Raymond Luxray Yatch but it's pronounced Throat Wobbler Mangrove.
Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici
Sic Semper Tyrannis bush.

If that were true though, why doesn't bonuses carry on to other classes then? Your "personal growth" doesn't just vanish from picking a different career.

On the other hand, there is no "supposed to" anymore. We're throwing everything down and building from scratch atop of the ruins of the original FFV. Not changing it. Therefore changing things is not only likely to happen, it's essential (otherwise this would just be an edit.)

Look at it from a balance point of view: why pick a job during boss battles when you can be bare, have all of the strengths of the other classes, AND still be able to have any ability? The ~5-10 JP isn't anything worth crying over especially if your party is capable of equipping the best equipment, has a host of bonuses to their stats, no restrictions on their first command slot, and more? Seriously, why even use classes other than to learn their abilities if Bare does it all and more?

Now suppose "Bare" applies to new skills. Skills that make you perma-hasted, immune to all statii, with boosted stats, and a host of protections when in low HP? That's what we'd be looking at. There is nothing to balance this on anymore - by making jobs more powerful, the Base class becomes ridiculously overpowered. Yet without the base class, everything's absolutely fine. The alternative would be to make jobs have cheaper bonuses, rendering half of them useless for all but a command or two (potentially learned early on in their growth.)

I see "Bare" as "Jobless." Bare by definition means "without any extra things; bare-bones." But it's hardly a bare-bones class when it has every class's strengths...

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Wow, rune, your crazy Noob-speak sounded like the development committee behind FFXII. Big flashy spell that uses all your MP... hmmmm....

Also, to hop into the discussion on bare classes, they've changed the entire class structure already, why SHOULDN'T the bare class be renovated as well?

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Oh sure, I don't have to get kicked in the junk to activate it, but I like it anyway. -- Thief commenting on the difference between Throw and Blue Magic.

Another idea I've just pitched to Caesar (dunno his thoughts yet but I figured I'd post it here too seeing as we're on the subject of Bare) is to transform the Bare class into a real class where you'd gain JP.

The idea I've had would look something like...
Lv 0: (Nothing)
Lv 1: (Nothing, but the base jobs require it to be unlocked)
Lv 2: 1 skill slot
Lv 3: 2 skill slots (à-la old Bare class)
Lv 4: 3 skill slots (à-la old mimic)

WH makes a good point - something to keep in mind is that we're not just changing a few names and numbers, we're giving the game AND its system a complete rehaul. So if you're against changing the Bare class, that's fine, but don't even think about the way things were in your argument why not to do it. That stuff doesn't hold water anymore. In this hack, the original FFV is gone - this is basically a new game but based on the FFV engine (by which I mean we're not even using the original engine all the way anymore. )

I'm just saying, I get this "but it's not like the original, so how CAN it work out properly?" vibe. And that souldn't apply to this hack, if it does. >"<

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Hahahaha, I am amazing.

Everybody, I have good news. About 15 minutes ago, I discovered where the animations for magic spells are stored! I found the pointer table and the actual code itself. This is tremendous news, because it means that there is now nothing left to find except for very, very trivial pieces of data that we can code without or code around if need be.

To add to this news, I'll share with all of you that the way FFV handles animations is VERY similar to the way FFVI handles them; the commands are different but I've already figured out a few of them. This means that it will take us less time to get our act together and make animations because we already get the gist of how to do it from working on it in FFVI. This is very, very good news!

As you can tell, I am very excited. If RL tonight finishes coding some of the commands, this means we could potentially have finished a good portion of the spells and commands for our jobs, leaving only enemies, enemy attacks, maps, and equipment. Easy things. I am really excited and you all should be, too!

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Is PJ

Quote

The idea I've had would look something like...
Lv 0: (Nothing)
Lv 1: (Nothing, but the base jobs require it to be unlocked)
Lv 2: 1 skill slot
Lv 3: 2 skill slots (à-la old Bare class)
Lv 4: 3 skill slots (à-la old mimic)

i like that idea, people would quickly abandon the class early on, only to use it for customization end game.
_________________________________________________________________-
Another idea that could add to strategy is hidden stat-boosting equipment. It would be interesting, they wouldn't be achieved through basic storyline, but sidequests towards the end game, it'll be like the ribbon, except certain equipment will give stats to certain areas, for instance an item call Warlock's boots could raise stats for an archetypal magic user. while Centurion's Mantle, raises HP, defense and strength stats making an archetypal fighter.
there could be one piece of equipment for each archetype. (Fighter, Mage, Nimble, and Healer/support)

the player could choose to give them all to one character, or distribute them throughout the characters, although all the equipment does is raise stats, so equipping all of it on one character would deprive it of potential status immunities, while all other characters have the basic bare stats.

P.S. "nimble" means agility based classes such as thief and ninja. And i wouldn't use those names for equipment I just typed them off the top of my head.

This post has been edited by Cloud_Strife510 on 1st February 2007 23:59

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

...You expect me to finish coding commands tonight?

I expect I'll be doing commands and spell algorithms until near the end of the hack, frankly. This stuff's no cakewalk. Finding a command, writing the new code, testing it, and finding bugs if any (especially finding bugs) can take anywhere between a half hour (I know where everything is, the code is just a few lines long, and there are no bugs) to a day or two (wtf wheres mah code at??? zomg o noes teh complex tweaaak... fux0rz teh bugs o noes wth? debugging r innefective plz uese anothar weapoN?)

On my side of things, I'm working on a map viewer. I suppose we can start rigging a few basic jobs together and a test map, or maybe even the first town/dungeon. Will a demo be out soon? Will we be evil bastards and not release anything until it's all complete? Only time will tell. >:)

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

i have a suggestion (that will probably just get eaten alive...)

Make bare class actually bare.

No restrictions.
No Inherint abilities.
No Commands (4 open slots)

That way I can 100% phaze out !Attack for !Mug without "wasting" another stupid slot. And it's not about making the game easier, it's about making the character more of a reflection of what the gamer wants.

Edit

Quote

so one might not have the anti-zombie spells

So then is there finally going to be an anti-zombie spell? Cuz not having !Item sucks when Holy Water is your only out...

This post has been edited by leilong on 3rd February 2007 00:32

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

Hmm how will you attack if Bare has no abilities and you haven't learned any.

Bare is the prereq for all classes(from what I've read). and attack is basic, you'll need it 90% of the time.

ultimately it's up to Silver and Ceaser on how to handle it, but that's my two cents

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

Quote (Cloud_Strife510 @ 2nd February 2007 18:43)

Bare is the prereq for all classes(from what I've read). and attack is basic, you'll need it 90% of the time.

No... I understand that. I'm just saying make it optional to attach, kinda like it is with mime. And if you forget to add some commands to your bare character, then you should have payed more attention to your equipping... especially if all the inherant things are phased out, you will almost be required to equip something anyways. So that when the time comes (as long as it's not also phased out) that you get !Mug, you can all out replace, kinda like the command override Mug has in FFVIII.

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

We really like the idea of making the bare class an actual class that gains levels. First leve would give access to the basic jobs and one ability slot, level 2 gives another ability slot, and level 3 gives the third. This way you have to work to get the best combinations and the Bare class is slightly more balanced. It is still by far the best choice, but you have to spend a little bit moer time getting it there.

As for the anti-zombie spell, we have several ideas. We are actually considering making an ability that heals Zombie on one character. This status effect plays a MUCH larger role in our hack, because I feel it was slightly neglected in the original. Zombie can actually be a strategy in our hack, but it is very difficult to execute successfully. So yes, there are abilities that induce zombie on enemies, spells that induce zombie on everybody on the battlefield (if you're really unluckly), spells that resurrect as zombies, and spells that heal zombie. There are a few other surprise spells/abilities/commands that revolve around this same idea, but I won't spoil the surprise.

I guess to answer your question, though, no, you won't need to carry around a bunch of Holy Waters if you are prepared. I think we're going to leave the !Fight command on the Bare class, too, just for the reason that the Bare class will need SOMETHING to deal damage with before they gain that first level. Very original idea, though.

I just had to share this news with everybody. I have thus far discovered 24 commands to use in the animation scripts. There are some VERY interesting commands that have incredible potential and I have already been playing around with them. It is actually far easier to make animations in FFV than it was in FFVI, so I am really looking forward to getting my hands dirtier with soem of this code. There are still potentially up to 104 more commands out there, but many of them are unusable and the others are useless. With the 24 I know of right now, I can make complete animations.

As RL said in his post above, he will be working this weekend on a working Map editor for our use in this project. If he can actually do it, and if I can find some more commands, we may be able to make a demo with a temporary town/dungeon and some makeshift monsters. We could even give you access to a few basic jobs to toy around with. Potentially. This is all assuming that the combination of strep throat and mono that I have right now will grant me enough energy to actually get something done.

That's all for now.

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Is PJ

Quote (leilong @ 2nd February 2007 19:51)

Quote (Cloud_Strife510 @ 2nd February 2007 18:43)

Bare is the prereq for all classes(from what I've read). and attack is basic, you'll need it 90% of the time.

No... I understand that. I'm just saying make it optional to attach, kinda like it is with mime. And if you forget to add some commands to your bare character, then you should have payed more attention to your equipping... especially if all the inherant things are phased out, you will almost be required to equip something anyways. So that when the time comes (as long as it's not also phased out) that you get !Mug, you can all out replace, kinda like the command override Mug has in FFVIII.

O.K. now i understand what you're saying. start off with Fight as an automatically learned ability, that's also already set on bare, but can be removed. That is an interesting idea
But for me 3 slots is enough. 4, well I doubt thins such as magic sword and mug could be used in conjunction. but being able to just hold down the confirm button knowing that it's mug up there, makes battles less tedious.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

If you're going to make Zombies more prominent, I suggest you do something about hidden characters + zombies.

You probably already know this, but zombies with at least 1 living character, that uses the bard's !Hide ability is invulnerable. Occasionally the zombies attack the enemies, so it's a leave-the-game-on-and-wait-till-you-win fest.


And why limit it to 4 ability slots? Why not 5, or 6?
This would especially be good if you remove Bare's automatically having passive abilities. More stratagy with which active and passive abilities you pick.

This post has been edited by Kaijyuu on 3rd February 2007 06:41

Quote (Kaijyuu @ 3rd February 2007 00:41)

Why not 5, or 6?

I'm not even helping to code all this, but my Visual Basic programming background tells me that to extend something like those slots beyond the physical range of the box they display in would be catastrophic, unless you wanted to code it from scratch.

I would love it just as much as the next guy, but that was why I recommended the 4 slot thing only. But it sounds like that won't come to the ending I hoped for, but that's ok.

Again from the programmer perspective, I understand the task you've undertaken, and I know that I would be unable to help directly, but I will definitely use what I do know about programming to reccommend little quirkey annoying things. Whether you use them or not. I'm here for the random/realistic suggestions.

I'm curious tho, what language is all this programming/coding in?

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If internal struggles were as enjoyable and glamorous as the self conflicted wars within video game characters, we would all be statues, reveling in perpetual self war. -Me

Play me on Rock Band 2, GH-WT, or any other Xbox GH!
Xbox Gamertag-MeanJerry

We're doing all this coding by hand using a hex editor. Most of it isn't any real language or code. The stuff RL deals with is 65816 assembly, I think. That might be a language but even that is doubtful.

We're not going to put more than 3 ability slots in here because it makes the Bare class too good and that's exactly what we wanted to avoid by eliminating passives. If we got rid of inherant passives but added 4 more ability slots, then we really didn't accomplish anything. It would be possible to do with some menu manipulation but we don't want to.

As for the Zombie thing, you don't have to worry about people abusing the Zombie and !Hide strategy. Zombies can die. And they might not attack enemies. Not going to say anything further.

I'm aware of most of the glitches/strats in the game, which is why I'm trying to find ways around them, if not eliminating them altogether (goodbye, !X-fight).

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Is PJ

you cant get rid of X-Fight, its like the best ability in the game.

What i think would be really cool if you guys had some major side quest stuff like in FFXII but you guys could have it be different than kill this monster than tell Jo Smoe about it. It could be like if you deliver this package to My son who moved to Waltz youll get some weapon or something.


This post has been edited by yomama on 5th February 2007 03:27

The idea of the hack is to increase the difficulty and add more strategy to the game. rather than beefing up characters with X-fight, 2swords, or Mix. That's why 5 or 6 open slots on the bare class is ridiculous. I didn't think four would make it too powerful at all, but it really is up to RL and Caesar.

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"

Quote

We're not going to put more than 3 ability slots in here because it makes the Bare class too good

Im glad for the bare class not being too strong, because as i read this i just kept thinking "please leave it at the most 3...itll makem too strong!!!"

This relieves me, and i also do agree with whoever mentions side-quests. Im sure they could be hard to program, depending on ability, but they would be a well-appreciated break from the fighting of dungeons.

Oh, and i don't think anyones mentioned it, but try to break some barriers the games all had, if its possible. For example, try making over 999 MP possible, or making over lvl 100 possible, but equivalently make the monsters that much harder. Im somewhat knowing in code, and i believe all you could do for that is cut the code from FFV determining numerical lvl and HP/MP and such, and simply add in a multiplier for that.

I could be wrong...im only one quarter of college learned in general programming...hehe

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<DrkMagimaster282> MWAHAHA. I,
DrkMagimaster282, shall wreak havoc and destroy...
<Mother>TIIIIIIMMYYY...are you planning evil, unkind revenge again in the bathroom??
<DrkMagimaster282>UMMMMMMMM...NO.

CoN day is May 27th, 2005
Join elder-geek.com for unbiased reviews, no console wars here...

Breaking barriers is unlikely. Levels won't even go up to 99 - we're keeping the size of this hack realistic and if there's 70 hours' worth of levelling to be done, it'll either be a very boring hack or a huge one. Both Caesar and I have enough experience with these kinds of hacks to know a full-blown 50-70 hour game is not going to be done for years to come, and we do want to avoid making things too easy for powerlevellers, so levels go up to the mid 30s but HP/MP tables have been ramped up accordingly. We do have some sick plans with battle algorithms and expect to do neverbefore seen stuff in battles.

Little side note, since I just can't resist. ;) If you wanted to do this sort of thing, moving the HP/MP/EXP tables would be easier. They're set up to be exponential so you don't gain 15 HP at level 95. Calculating exponents with the 65816 is tough because there's no native support for it. Games usually rely on a LUT (lookup table) for stuff like this, or trig functions (for instance they'll split the -1 to 1 range into 256 parts and put up the corresponding values in a table for sin(x) and cos(x). Little trick that'll serve you in your college courses: the fastest program is one that does nothing at all. If you can avoid calculating something complex on the fly, do it (exponents for the 65816 can take up quite a bit of time - on a regular PC, it's hardly worth considering. But other stuff might benefit from a LUT, like the normals in a 3D scene.)

Getting rid of commands like !XFight was done to make the game more balanced. There are going to be new abilities anyways, so why worry? This isn't cannon FFV anymore. ;) Walsh doesn't exist anymore, Exdeath doesn't exist anymore, the jobs are pretty much all changed, so... new abilities will apply to new situations.

65816 assembly is technically a language. It's assembly, using the 65816 instruction set and SNES hardware. It's a low level language, but a language nevertheless. (Only sissies code in high level languages like VB, C#, and COBOL! ...Well, for serious projects, I mean... <_< And that time with COBOL was because I had to! o_o C'mon, get off my case, guy...)

Anyway, long story short, if we wanted 5-6 slots, I'd code them in there, and I'd make it work. Period. o_o But we don't want that because it'd be excessive. IMO, the biggest flaw of FFV was how, once you mastered every job, you could just stick the better commands on Bare and you're set. Everyone has !XFight and one of the magic subsets. Boring... Hopefully we can avoid this be removing passives and keeping the slots limited.

I rather like being able to replace !Fight, but I'm not sure how it'd be handled without jumping to 4 slots, or more. I think it's unlikely this will happen, though the suggestion is noted.

As for the map viewer, I have the entire map format figured out. Easy stuff, very similare to FFVI (blocks of 8 objects with a 1 byte header determining wether it's a tile grouping or an individual tile.) Regretfully I don't have the grouping data yet, but I know more or less where to look for it. We do have most of the ROM (80+%?) decoded, so it's just a matter of elimination now. The real challenge is implanting over 30-40 new commands and abilities... Better fire up the assembly furnace.

If the damned boards complain about too many emotes again, I'm going to severely harm someone.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

so is this going to be downloaded when it does come out, and when does it come out.

It'll be released as an .IPS patch. You can use some patching device to patch the FFV ROM and then you'll have our hack. We can't release the hack in the form of a ROM because I'm pretty sure that's illegal, and we can't provide you with a clean ROM because that's illegal to.

If you happen to find a ROM, though (don't ask here, it's against the rules), then when we finish it (a few months, hopefully) you can download the patch and enjoy it.

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Is PJ

Actually it gets a little hairy - there are many ifferent FFV translation patches floating around, so there's no "clean" ROM out there as such. Maybe the japanese version.

The problem lies in the fact translation patches often have to move stuff. It takes 1 character (2 bytes) to write a word that could take 5 characters (5 bytes, assuming the text routine has been rewritten accordingly.) So some things have to move around, and so two translations may have say... the item names stored at different places. Or worse, remember how I loosely mentionned patching the text routine to use 1 byte per character instead of 2? Well, now the code's different, too. In short two different translations will have differences that could make it impossible to simply patch.

IPS sounds best. But if this doesn't work, I can write a more throughout patcher. Something that will take the entire rom, pack it into some unusable file, then overwrite the ROM to patch with this data if the FFV header checks out fine.

Or maybe we can just produce a patch (IPS) using the original japanese ROM. The translation patch, our hack, and every other important thing will be transposed into the patch anyway, so there'd be no problems.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

As for the levels thing...

How bout still having it go to 99 levels, and just up the experiance gained from monsters. That way people feel they're getting more, when in fact they're getting the same.

And I suggest just putting the entire hack in an ips patch. It's unplayable alone, and it'll patch over any FF5 rom so long as it's the same filesize.

This post has been edited by Kaijyuu on 6th February 2007 00:19

Our logic behind capping the level at 40 is that it gives us some flexibility to make level modifying spells/abilities and to make the game slightly less dull. Nobody wants to fight to level 99 if they only gain 100 HP per level, even if it only takes 4 or 5 battles to get a level. We want levels to be slightly more significant than that, so we set it at 40. RL adjusted the MP/HP bonuses per level accordingly so you will still have several thousand HP for us to take away.

Plus, 40 is a multiple of 5 and 4 and 2. Err....nevermind.

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Is PJ

Okay due to my young non computer ligiunistical mind, what exactly is an ips patch.

And second, will different jobs affect your mp/hp, cause it sounds like it does

Caeser February 6th 2007@ 00:23

Quote

Plus, 40 is a multiple of 5 and 4 and 2. Err....nevermind

better math skills than me

Quote (yomama @ 6th February 2007 01:23)

Quote

Plus, 40 is a multiple of 5 and 4 and 2. Err....nevermind

better math skills than me

Lvl 5 doom, lvl 2 old and well the other multiple of 4 spell, hes not talking about math.

I am psyched for this hack, couple months aint helping for the "suspense" since it's basicly sorta like a legal FF 14.

Edit

Talking about the Zombie status, you could use a multiple level for a spell. Sorta like "level 6 zombie"

This post has been edited by Dragon King on 6th February 2007 02:26

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Kel'Thuzad: She is persistent. Reminds me of you, death knight.

Arthas:Shut up you damned ghost.

-Warcraft III Kel'thuzad comparing Arthas and Sylvanas Windrunner.

Actually, Dragon King, interesting you mentioned that. We have changed the Lvl? spells around a little. We might even mess with the multiples a bit. I am as psyched for this hack as you are. I literally cannot wait to make some sick animations for this beast.

yomama, an .ips patch is pretty neat. You basically just have a program that notes all the changes you make to a file and stores them into the patch. Then you can just take this patch and apply it to the unchanged file and it'll apply the very same changes. It's really neat and very handy.

Someone earlier mentioned something about making sidequests in which you find the best weapon or something for each job, right? Well, I'm not going to commit myself to anything with this, but RL and I have been discussing a few potential ideas and we may have a few nifty sidequests for all of you to play around with.

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Is PJ

Quote

Plus, 40 is a multiple of 5 and 4 and 2. Err....nevermind.

That's Evil, Pure Evil.

I like it.


Being an FFV enthusiast I welcom such things.

maybe even Level 8 Death...

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"Have you ever seen a baby do that before?"