[FE8] More Than Two Promotions

Didn’t someone once say that there was room for up to 5 different promotions for each character? Or am I imagining things?

^I haven’t personally heard that but honestly, fitting 5 should be quite doable based on the draw room needed for two more lines of class names.

I’m just glad I can finally have Pupils that have three promotion paths, or I can even rid myself of the trainees entirely and just use my Villager class idea.

it’s draw room; i wouldn’t imagine that it’s too difficult to make it draw an extra few tile rows (it even may do this automatically)

  1. That’s pretty much what my patch does atm, i.e. make a new table with all the third promotion paths.
  2. Uhh idk… needs more investigating. Maybe?

Hacking demo: Even more promotions!
(Okay, this is a dummy for now, because I only got the menu part to work so far…)

EDIT: Well… that didn’t work. I strongly suspect that > 3 promotions glitching is because of limited space in the RAM to hold the classes :confused: .

1 Like

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW AMAZING I FELT FOR A SECOND THERE

AND NOW YOU’VE TORN IT AWAY FROM ME

Well actually, you might still figure something out. The fact you can make the game draw the 4th promotion implies it is doable.

Hypothetical situation. Right now, the way classes load their animation data is by the player writing data telling the game what weapons use what animations, you can paste this data anywhere in the rom, and then the game will load that data by pasting the pointer into the class editor here: (Or selecting from a premade list as FE8’s NMM do >.>)

So knowing this, is there some way to rewrite the promotion data to feed off a similar system? We basically have 255x255[65025] bit of room for the battle animation data, so if we could replicate this system, we’d have even more room. Or, alternatively, just find a way to increase the maximum number of slots from 2 to 4+ in this data, as I assume you’re trying to do:

you could repoint whatever sort of buffer the game uses to a place in the RAM that has more free space. That’s what I did to expand the battle buffer and make Adept work. If you want it to be totally user customizable, you as well rewrite the way the promotion table is read and say instead of loading [location] byte for the first class to promote to and [location,#1] for the second, load the pointer at [location] and read the data from there.

1 Like

I like this idea.

the fact that it draws it properly suggests to me that there’s a general-purpose “draw rectangle” or “draw textbox” function that accepts a number of tiles as height/width

this is probably already substantially better than fe7 which just has hardcoded tile arrays

FE8 is substantially better than FE7 in virtually every respect, as far as the engine.

For real, just the event system is so much better put together than FE7’s.

Word up, yo
In general FE8 is a lot less hardcoded and makes a lot more sense but it’s definitely not perfect

If only CUE’s didn’t make the item droppable via weird math in the XX/YY system. Why can’t there just be a 00/01 extra toggle or something? In any case, making droppable items be chosen via the evented units instead of the character editor is far superior.

the xx/yy math system makes sense if you look at it from an information science perspective

it’s just a bitpacked struct

2 Likes

The general purpose “draw menu” thing is basically what I found in fe8. On a tablet atm, so I don’t have it with me, but the hacking folder has my documentation for fe8 menus.

jjl, did you ever figure out the 4th promotion+ options? Or were those a dead end?

Personally I think 3 is fine but more can’t hurt. Second sealing could really become a thing.

Dead end for now, or at least a pretty large step above the stuff I’ve done so far. Part of the difficulty is coming from it being closely tied with the primary menu routine, and there’s an issue with insufficient memory being allocated (which is why “Pupil” appears - seems to be garbage data).

maybe I’ll revisit this topic in 6 months and it’ll turn out to be something obvious

I might look into it at some point if you don’t mind

Sure. (My research notes are in the dropbox)

/roughly 6 months later
oops 4 months, I can’t math. Thanks new forum updates that just have to prove me wrong.

3 Likes