Dragz’s Backstage

Alice · April 27, 2025, 5:19am

On the note of Auto Refresh Weapons… Do you think you’ll make it so Items and Staves can’t be used when at 0 durability any time soon?

GigaExcalibur · April 27, 2025, 6:33am

Thanks for following up on that! I’ve looked into it briefly, and any solution would likely depend on whether the user has IER installed since one of IER’s flagship features is custom usability routines for items. I believe Retina accomplished it for staves but not items for TMGC’s balanced repair mode. Regardless I’ll do some more digging and get back to you as soon as I can.

Alice · April 27, 2025, 6:58am

Thanks for the reply! Since IER comes packaged with SkillSystems, you could maybe package the change with just the SkillSystems version of this ASM.

I’m no coding expert. But to me it seems that Items and Staves both work off of the same “use effect” and IER byte in Item Editor. And Staves are only distinguished by virtue of having a Staff rank, as well as the “Staff” Byte in Ability 1, makes them be called with the Staff menu command, rather than Use from the inventory. In fact, if you turn a vanilla Staff into an Item, it will still work as intended, but from the Use command.

If I set Both the Use Effect and IER Byte to 0 on an Item or a Staff, they can no longer be “used”. Here I did this with both Warp and the Elixir. I also set Warp’s rank to E, and made Eirika a Cleric. (IER is installed)

It’s worth noting that Warp appears as if it can be used, because Eirika has the Rank for it. But it doesn’t show up when using the Staff command. Neither with the use command.

Also, I haven’t played TMGC. But if I had to guess, items not being repairable was probably an intentional decision made for balance reasons, rather than a limitation of the code itself.

I hope this information is useful in some way. And thank you again for the awesome code!

Alice · April 27, 2025, 7:20am

Also… this may be a huge ask. But I think it’d be really cool to have an ASMC to repair a specific Item ID (Maybe even if it’s not in the Auto Refresh ID list).

GigaExcalibur · April 28, 2025, 2:33am

Having looked into the mechanics of item usability I can confirm that making consumable items unusable at 0 durability is impossible without either being incompatible with IER or rewriting every single item usability function to include a check for durability. Neither of these are ideal: incompatibility with IER means incompatibility with Skillsys and the complete inability for users to adjust item effects, and having to rewrite existing IER routines is both a lot of grunt work and new users will be forced to include a durability check for all of their custom items. I apologize, but it’s not happening.

Staves mercifully were an easy fix and are now properly unusable at 0 durability. The fix has been pushed, thank you again for bringing it to my attention.

Lastly, I have to refuse your request to specify an item id to repair. As it stands right now RefreshItemsASMC is very involved ASMC and it’s exhausting to add new nested checks to it. If that is a feature you desire I encourage you to write it yourself. A function like wouldn’t even need to be packaged with Auto-Refreshing Weapons anyway.

Alice · April 28, 2025, 3:11am

I can live without refreshing Items, that’s ok. And thank you! This is amazing! Can’t wait to implement it in my own hack.

GigaExcalibur · May 2, 2025, 4:14am

Good evening everyone! Not an entirely new hack tonight but I pushed an update to WeaponAvoidDodge to allow an option for displaying a weapon’s passive defense/resistance bonuses instead of avoid and dodge. The name of the hack has changed to FourthWeaponRTextColumn to reflect this.

Since passive def/res bonuses are a vanilla mechanic, this variant of a weapon’s fourth R-text column works with or without Skillsys and has a much easier setup. Simply #include FourthWeaponRTextColumn.event in your buildfile or Insert EA with FEBuilder, no external tables needed.

New download link: asm/FourthWeaponRTextColumn at main · GigaExcalibur/asm · GitHub

That should be all! Have a fantastic night.

GigaExcalibur · June 10, 2025, 4:56am

Hey guys, been a while. Introducing a microscopic hack today: Fade Solo Ending Portraits. Apparently when displaying epilogue text, the game will give portraits a slight fade during a paired ending but not a solo ending. This decision was made to make the text more readable, but it’s slightly baffling since text runs over portraits in solo endings too.

This hack fixes that. Now you too can enjoy more readable text when characters aren’t paired up.

Download link: asm/FadeSoloEndingPortraits at main · GigaExcalibur/asm · GitHub

#include "FadeSoloEndingPortraits.lyn.event" or Insert EA with FEBuilder. That’s it, enjoy!

GigaExcalibur · July 4, 2025, 3:54am

Introducing Unit Name Item Drop.

I only just found out that FE8 supports drawing unit names in popups, but this feature is never actually used. So I immediately changed that for the item drop popup since it’s always been strange that it says Got [item].

Installation instructions:

#include UnitNameItemDrop.lyn.event or Insert EA with FEBuilder.
Change the text at id 0x0008 to got [X] (with a space before and after the word; vanilla is Got [X]).
Change the text at id 0x0009 to pilfered [X] (with a space before and after the word; vanilla is was pilfered.[X])
Change the text at id 0x000A to stole [X] (you get the idea).

Download link: asm/UnitNameItemDrop at main · GigaExcalibur/asm · GitHub

I encourage anyone interested in popups to look into how FE8 does them, they’re a super intuitive yet underutilized structure. Anyway that’s all, have a great day!

Alice · July 4, 2025, 3:29pm

This looks amazing!

Would you also add an option to change
“[Item] was pilfered”
to
“[Unit] pilfered [Item]”?

GigaExcalibur · July 5, 2025, 3:13am

Done and done! The new version has been pushed, the only change on the user end is to change text id 0x0009 to pilfered [X] (with a space before and after “pilfered.”)

Alice · July 5, 2025, 3:30am

Awesome sauce

JesterEmblem_EX · July 5, 2025, 7:15pm

Just installed it on my build. I like QoL hacks like this. It does one job and it does it well

JesterEmblem_EX · July 5, 2025, 7:26pm

Should this line not be NewPopup_Simple(NewGoldStolenPopup, 0x60, 0x0, parent);

github.com/GigaExcalibur/asm

UnitNameItemDrop/UnitNameItemDrop.c

c7d8b41a4


      
          void NewPopup_GoldGot(ProcPtr parent, struct Unit *unit, int value)
          {
              SetPopupNumber(value);
          	SetPopupUnit(unit);
          
              if (FACTION_BLUE == UNIT_FACTION(unit)) {
                  value += GetPartyGoldAmount();
                  SetPartyGoldAmount(value);
                  NewPopup_Simple(NewGoldGotPopup, 0x60, 0x0, parent);
              } else
                  NewPopup_Simple(PopupScr_GoldWasStole, 0x60, 0x0, parent);
          }
          
          void NewPopup_ItemStealing(u16 item, ProcPtr parent)
          {
              SetPopupItem(item);
          	SetPopupUnit(gActiveUnit);
          
              NewPopup_Simple(NewItemStolePopup, 0x60, 0x0, parent);
          }

GigaExcalibur · July 5, 2025, 7:31pm

Thank you! I never know when something I make is desirable by others so this hack already seeing some use makes me glad.

Oh and you’re totally right, whoops. Thanks for pointing that out!

JesterEmblem_EX · July 6, 2025, 9:20am

I had to hack my way to this screen, hence why the sprites are still shown, but just wanted to say I’m loving the fade on the character epilogues as well.

fable · July 6, 2025, 4:48pm

I’ve been looking for a way to add limited-use weapons into a ROM - this is precisely what I need! Now, this may be just from a lack of experience on my part using FEBuilder, but how would I go about adding this POIN ZeroDurabilityWeaponUsability to the weapon usability calc loop? I don’t see any options for that.

GigaExcalibur · July 6, 2025, 5:11pm

To edit the weapon usability calc loop in FEBuilder, follow these steps:

Insert the auto-refreshing weapon file with EA, and make sure to generate a .sym file.
In that .sym file, look for the number next to ZeroDurabilityWeaponUsability. That’s the address of the function that prevents weapons at 0 durability from being equipped.
Go to Builder’s patch screen and search “usability.” Select CalcLoops_WeaponUsabilityCalcLoop.
Select a dummy routine in the list (one that says “DummyIRQRoutine” in the box on the right). In that box, write 8 followed by the address you got earlier.
Write to ROM, and voila! Items at 0 durability are now unequippable.

Followed these steps on a clean ROM myself to confirm they work, if you need further clarification please ask!

fable · July 6, 2025, 5:35pm

Works perfectly now, thank you!