So, in vanilla FE8, the maximum amount of support partners a unit can have is 7. But back in FE6, characters could have up to 10 supports.
Is there a way to have it so you can have 10 support partners in FE8?
FEBuilder support threshold menus for reference:
I’m going to go out on a limb and say ‘technically’, but that would probably require referencing a new extended table elsewhere, due to the how limited actual unit data space is, that is, perhaps similar to how skill system works in assigning ‘learned’ skills.
AFAIK other patches are taking advantage of those spaces left behind by having fewer supports to inject things like the Str/Mag split, but I haven’t been using my PSP to test FE8 and verify with its memory viewer, especially against FE6, and even then that has no correlation to what or how it can save to battery.
The in-battle slot is rather unique in that it’s likely a 1:1 of the unit state, but the normal saves are bit compressed from what I can tell, (I.E. not only does it not save things like ‘current HP’ or the current status effects on a unit because that’s nonsense outside of a battle, but also uses fewer bits for each stat because the vanilla game doesn’t expect a value over 63 with HP (6 bits) or 31 in other stats (5 bits).
Well, my hack uses skill system, but I’m NOT using str mag split. So maybe the suport data could be expanded in my specific scenario?
Yeah
Vanilla:
Skillsys:
Vanilla bitpacks while EMS allows for stats to be 255 I guess.
I don’t know anything about having >7 support partners. I clicked hoping for an answer since this is asked often.
I don’t know if this actually says anything, but I got bored enough to test it out by a little bit of jiggery pokery. First screenshot I changed stuff around in the hex editor to set partner number to 10 (A), Initial Values for Ephraim, Seth and Saleh are now used for the newbie supports.
Second this just shows it ingame with the debugger thing to show what values change what. (The 55, where Gilliam’s thing is is also where the MAG stat is for the Skill System)
So, aye, I’d say it’s technically possible, but a lot of repointing needs to happen, rejigging the character structure as well might need to happen too.
Like I said, I’m not using str mag split. So maybe it’d be easier to use that space in the unit data?
While initial support values may not be very important, I think the ram after the 7 support partners is:
/* 32 */ u8 supports[UNIT_SUPPORT_MAX_COUNT];
/* 39 */ s8 supportBits;
/* 3A */ u8 _u3A;
/* 3B */ u8 _u3B;
/* 3C */ struct SMSHandle* pMapSpriteHandle;
8th partner overwrites your supportbits, so they won’t maintain their support value properly when you support other units. I’m not really sure what support bits are exactly, though.
0x3A is unused, so we use it for mag with skillsys. 0x3B is also unused. Neither of these are saved between chapters or on suspend after turning the gameboy off and on again, unless you’re using EMS configured for that. Strmag split means we save the 0x3A byte.
0x3C is a pointer to your map sprite and overwriting it with support values will likely crash the game very quickly.
I think even if you set the 8th partner to a fake unit like 0xFF, it will cause issues. 9th and 10th could be used otherwise, assuming you setup ems for it and manually changed the initial support values yourself after recruiting each character. You cannot use 9th and 10th without the 8th existing, however. So I’m going to say that we cannot do it. Sorry. You’d need to rewrite functions and decide on how to use ram.
Oh, that’s interesting. I just extrapolated from fiddling around with values and seeing how they behaved after saving/suspending in a vanilla setting, though I didn’t test those regions because there didn’t seem to be a reason to/a relic from FE6’s data structure.
I wonder if you’d also need to adjust how the game checks for supports to get it to work, I.E. if the game only checks to see if the first 7 on the list are in range for support gains, I don’t know why they’d change this, other than to tighten the code and not accidentally change values that should not be changing.
Please let me know if anyone figures out how to unlock infinite support partners, and make each character on the battlefield alive at the end of a chapter unlock one support rank for every unique pairing between them.