I give up for the night I’m going to bed
G’night, maybe some sleep’ll help.
UPDATE: Fixed the Lightning animation, so that’s progress. But uh, after several hours of messing around with patches and stuff I still have no idea why the Staff command crashes the game. Kinda at the end of my rope here ngl
Is this finally a FE7 rebalanace that will not be cancelled and delisted like Project Wildflower or Project Anima?
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If I can figure out how to stop the game from crashing every time I press the Staff button then I will more than likely have the passion to finish this rework!
That said my ability to fix this issue is looking less and less likely every day and I really do not want to have to start over with a fresh rom
Do you have backups?
I do, yea, but uh, this issue clearly must’ve cropped up early in development and I just never noticed it. Didnt really think I’d need to playtest staves since I didnt (intentionally) make any changes to them, and that clearly came back to bite me
I’ve been told I can debug and find the issue with no$gba but I wasn’t exactly told how to do that, so I have no clue where to start
tryna ask around the discord but that hasnt been much help as of yet
The main problem is that, unlike with the Lightning issue, I have no idea what the game calls on when you press the “Staff” command, so I don’t even know where to begin looking. With the Lightning spell it was literally just a broken animation so it was easy to figure out
Miiiiiiiight just have to bite the bullet and restart development from scratch, as much as that sucks. Really gonna throw off my morale, I’ve been working on this for almost two weeks now, but it’s better than being stuck with no idea how to proceed
Sometimes, something just inexplicably breaks. When I was first working on Age of Light, at some point the transition between the Prologue and Ch1 started just crashing. I couldn’t find a reason for it, so I scrapped the rom and started over.
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Pretty much where I’m at. I’m sure I did something by accident when I was just starting out with FEBuilder and didn’t realize my mistake at the time
That said, worry not! I am very much still motivated to work on this, just really frustrated with how this attempt ended.
FE7 is my favorite game in the series, and I’ve played it over a dozen times. This hack is entirely motivated by a yearning for an FE7 that’s just more fun for me than the original, and so long as I continue to enjoy FE7 I will continue to want to make this hack.
It’s really just a matter of how long it’ll take me to finish it. Which is why I’m splitting the project into several phases, to avoid burnout! I’ll finish phase 1 and see where I want to go from there.
I should make it clear that this definitely won’t be a hack made with the intention of increasing the difficulty or anything like that. Mind you, the difficulty might be higher due to all the changes I want to make, but the ultimate goal is fun, and I don’t think the game needs to be harder to be more fun (especially considering I usually play on Hector Normal Mode)
Just wanted to share an idea I had, actually, to balance bow units a bit: reduce all bowlocked classes’ “Class Power” values to 2, same as Thieves, Soldiers, and T1 Staff-users. This will make them gain EXP faster to help compensate for their near-nonexistent enemy phases, but also give less EXP as enemies to account for them being easier targets than other classes of the same “tier”. It won’t fix them on its own or anything, but it’s an idea I’ve decided to experiment with myself.
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Oh, that’s actually a pretty good idea. Didn’t even consider using Class Power to balance units
How would that affect staff users though? Does Class Power affect staff EXP?
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I do want to add some fun unit-specific promotions, I think that’ll be the next thing on my to-do list. After that, I’ll edit promotion bonuses (mostly buff them, GBA promo bonuses aren’t as big as they should be imo)
*Technically* already have one unit-specific promotion with Lowen since he promotes into a different type of mounted unit compared to Kent and Sain, but it’s the same type as Marcus so it’s not completely original
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Oh, Thieves/Soldiers/T1 Staffers have a Class Power of 2 in vanilla, so it wouldn’t change anything! I believe Staff EXP is fixed per staff (albeit I don’t know how it’s derived), and I’m pretty sure the only effect class (or level, or anything else) has on it is that it’s cut in half if the character has the “Promoted Unit” flag set to their unit or class data. Class Power (which I’m seeing now is actually called “Relative Power” in FEBuilderGBA) is never used in that equation to my knowledge.
My understanding is that the effect Relative Power has on EXP yields is that there’s essentially a multiplier of E/P applied, where E = Enemy unit class Relative Power and P = Player unit class Relative Power. Most of the time, Relative Power is the same (3 is the standard), but some classes have other values. This is why you get less EXP for killing Soldiers, Priests/Clerics, and Troubadours; their Relative Power is 2, so most player units get 2/3x normal EXP from them. Inversely, the same principle is why Thieves get extra EXP from most kills; they’re getting 3/2x normal EXP from it, since they’re a 2-Relative Power unit killing 3-Relative Power units. My suggestion is to put bowlocked classes (Archer, Sniper, Nomad) in the 2-Relative Power group alongside them.
Since I can see this being a concern, the effects of differing promotion tiers on EXP are handled separately (units with the “Promoted Unit” flag set are regarded as 20 levels higher than is displayed on their stat screen), as are the EXP bonuses from killing Thieves and bosses (flat +20 EXP if the Thief Skill flag is set on the target and +40 EXP if the Boss flag is set). All of these values can be changed from the “Patch” menu in Advanced Editors, but my point is you don’t have to worry about Relative Power affecting any of that.
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Yeah, I kinda figured that’s how it works. Just wasn’t sure if staff units would be affected at all, cuz I do want to give them some accelerated EXP gain
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Well, I got a fair bit done tonight, but after work today I am exhausted and my entire body is sore so I am going to go to bed before I collapse
Finished copying the changes from the old ROM, got Eliwood’s new personal weapon functioning, made a couple palettes for Lowen and Marcus, and started replacing the map music (finished up with Lyn Mode so far)