I did a quick (though not exhaustive) search on the forum and didn’t find any information on this. I’m interested in implementing a poor man’s version of dismounting where rather than having a dismount command, units would just be hard coded to class change between a mounted and dismounted class between chapters. It’s been awhile since I’ve hacked Fire Emblem, but my intuition tells me that this shouldn’t be too difficult of a task to do.
My thoughts are to either borrow from the routine that auto promotes lords or to just simply write a routine that changes a unit’s class ID. I’m not sure if it’s possible to circumvent the promotion animation in the former case (since it would be dumb to have every mounted unit “promote” before every chapter), and in the latter case of changing a unit’s class ID, I’m not sure if that would also change their other parameters to correspond with new class bases.
Do the more experienced ROM hackers have any thoughts on the matter?
It shouldn’t be hard to make it change, don’t know if it would save it though. All you have to do is write a routine that goes down the unit data in ram and changes the classes of all mounted units. Run it at the end of a chapter after it fades to black. I’d suggest you make different classes for each mounted class, so changing back to the right class is easy.
As for changing stats, If you’ve got the FEditor autopatch that changes how stats are stored, a save and restart would automatically change them to match the new bases, since it’s stored as the increase from the bases, instead of the absolute stats. (as far as I know)
The FEditor autopatch stores stats relative to the unit’s personal bases, not their class bases, iirc. Regardless it wouldn’t be too difficult to make a routine that changes characters’ classes and modifies their stats by the difference between the classes’ stats. I could write something like that up if it hasn’t been done already.
Palettes would be an issue unless you hacked in FE8, though.
You could make versions of the unmounted animations with the palettes rearranged to work with mounted unit palettes. That way you don’t have to worry about palette issues.
I wrote the base for such a routine here All you should have to do is change the code so that it takes the base stat of the class instead of the cap, which should just involve swapping a few bytes to be at the correct indexes. Granted this is for FE8.
Welp. Thanks for stopping by. I’m afraid we’re gonna have to ban you now.
Glad to see you, don! Hope you end up finding everything you need. The dismounting concept definitely sounds interesting; I’ve thought of doing something similar in the past, but animations were obviously a barrier. Best of luck with whatever you’re working on! Don’t fret too much about not being able to make ASM/tools/whatever (I can’t either). There are all sorts of ways we can “give back.” The point of having a community is that we’re able to help each other rise above those individual shortcomings.
Honestly, with all the progress that’s been made recently, a real dismount command is probably possible.
You know me, I’ll never let lack of animations get in the way of a concept. If need be I’ll just use the unpromoted Eliwood, Hector, and Ephraim animations as placeholders until someone with artistic ability decides to make real dismounted animations.
A real dismount command would be great. I don’t foresee myself needing anything more than the fake dismounting feature, and I try to not bother people too much. If whatever Venno’s working on ends up being part of a framework for a real dismount command in the future, that would be amazing too.
