Since this is going to be next on my personal project docket, I figured I might want to jot down what sort of ASM trickery I’m hoping for.
Casual Mode: An ASMC that will check all fielded units and force any “killed” characters back into the party. Having a routine would be more efficient than mass UNCMing characters, as it’d require a permanent event ID to check each miss-able promotion (otherwise Casual Mode would just mass force every recruitable character into the party). Perma IDs are love, perma IDs are life.
If someone wanted to get especially fancy, one idea is that Casual Mode “death” would penalize the player by making any killed units unselectable in the next chapter. Nintenlord’s already got a character banning system constructed. Not sure about the game remembering lists of characters between chapters though. Sounds like too much trouble to be worthwhile?
Fixed Growths Mode: Fork on the level-up routine that checks to see whether event ID 0x66 has been triggered. If so, the game implements Hextator’s “tony mode” with fixed stat gains based on a formula instead, allowing players to choose from a prompt at New Game whether they want to circumvent the RNG goddess.
Party split: ASMC that sets all unfielded units to invisible status (ala UNCM 0x8).
Accompanying routine that will set invis on all units without it, and revert the status on all units with it.
This may sound kinda silly, so I should probably explain that it’s for a party swapping system. Chapters 11 and 12 feature a party split between Marth and Hardin. With the first ASMCs, the prep. screen will be used to select Marth’s party. Any unfielded units go with Hardin, and then this second ASMC would run at the end of each chapter to flip between the two sets of units.
Branching Promotions: 2/3rds of the system is complete now thanks to icecube (it’s much appreciated!). Branches are based on which promotion item the T1 class uses, with two items available to each class.
The only bit that remains functionality-wise are the “custom animation” settings for characters. With multiple T2 classes, in its current state this engine’s setup would be useful for T1 classes only, or pre-promoted characters. It would need a setup similar to the modified palette display .
Summon Charms: Item usability/effect routines - would be usable only if the character’s class is Summoner and has a free tile adjacent to them. Using the item would activate the little warp-in effect and summon a designated unit and class to the nearest adjacent tile. Lower on the priority lists, but it would be kinda neat?
Kill X Enemies Goal: I built a simple counting system with event IDs, but again a routine would be far more efficient to count the number of enemy deaths. Could also have a variation ala FE10, where any unit’s death contributes to the overall count. Just an ASMC that would add +1 to a count.
If possible, it would be nice to have a chapter goal display option showing the number of kills (like what survive missions have with the turn count display).
Most of these are things that would be useful in BlazingShell as well, either as add-ons or as part of the base package.
i believe that marc figured out some sort of system for no perma death, if you want more on that you could talk to him. otherwise i might have some of the routine files kicking about in a shared dropbox folder or something. . .
I actually thought about a good way to do this–what you could do is make an actual chapter dedicated to the party split and have the map be a CG instead (which is now very possible thanks to @CT075), sort of like the party split screen in Radiant Dawn. You force Marth and Hardin onto the map and have a very obvious “line” between the two.
Then you can use an AREA event to check which units are in which zones and use perma event IDs to note which units are in which party. It works particularly well for a 2-party split, since you can just assign the “on” flag to Marth and the “off” flag to Hardin or vice versa. At the end of every Marth chapter, just use conditional event IDs to UNCM each character as you need to. During battle preparations, the player can simply swap units between each side as they need to, trade items, etc. The chapter ends as soon as you finish battle preparations.
Obviously this may be a problem if you have a huge number of units, but if there aren’t too many you could definitely use this. After the party split ends you could easily recycle all the perma IDs.
Another potential problem is that the player might decide it’s a good idea to not field all units in this chapter and therefore some units wouldn’t be assigned to each party. You can’t force all units because then the player can’t change their positions, either. Still, you could just blame the player.
For Awful Emblem, we’re having a similar party split idea happen early on in our Act 2. It’s early enough in Act 2 that there are no prep screens, but we discovered that the game will hang trying to find the “main lord” to put the cursor on when the chapter starts. We’re circumventing this at the moment by having a dummy main lord unit sitting on the map so it won’t break but obviously, this will need to be fixed eventually.
Your request is a bit more complicated than what we need but I think both of us will need to figure out how to trick the game into thinking there’s a new “main lord” in each chapter so that it doesn’t hang upon starting the map. Any sort of research into figuring out how to implement the party split will benefit us as well, so I’m definitely interested in this request.
Part of the problem is that the ‘autocursor’ at the beginning is different from the autocursor that you can turn off - the former is hardcoded to zoom to your main lord.
The solution, and what I’m working towards is just to have it zoom to the first character in your deployment list - which should be your leader for that chapter anyway!
If it doesn’t already do that, I have no idea how EN works at all. Never had problems with the auto-cursor in FE7, though I’ve heard of struggles with FE8 from MK404 and Cam.
In TRTR the main lord is absent in two chapters. I use an autocursor work around to avoid it freaking out. Just load your main lord on the space where your main character will be, then turn them invisible/get rid of them somehow. The cursor will then begin at the space where the lord was loaded.
The one side effect is that if autocursor is turned on in the options, it will keep going back to that tile at the beginning of every turn.
A lot of this seems relatively doable. If you don’t already have Colorz on it, PM me on Skype. I’m trying to make a Here and Now item, but after that I could do stuff. I think.
I can tell you right off the bat that doing an actual hooked routine for your casual mode would be better for everyone than ASMCing some offset every chapter. And I’ve been working on items hacking for awhile so I may be able to do some summon item, but honestly, if you’re going to go that far, you may as well just make a command. Other stuff looks ok too. Talk to me on skype about the details