This is something that vanilla FE8 never actually does, but I don’t know if that necessarily means its base engine doesn’t support doing this.
What I want to do is set things up to have maps that would essentially serve as Fire Emblem Awakening-style “Paralogues” in terms of how you access them. They’re not necessarily going to be equivalent in terms of plot integration, but the important point is that, ideally, I would like to have a main story map available, and then an optional map or two that you could choose to do, or not, beforehand, but that wouldn’t affect the completion status of the next main story map.
The idea is to inject a bit of nonlinearity into my hack, so that you have options beyond just monster grinding and direct plot progression. Ideally, I wanna have a sort of semi-Gaiden-style World Map setup, where there are side things you can go do at certain points in addition to just strict plot progression.
I don’t necessarily expect this to be possible without ASM hacking, but it is something I’d love to do.
Apologies for the bump here, but I figure it’d be better than just making a duplicate topic.
I also understand if people don’t really have the answer to this or it’s just not something anybody has tried.
I’m thinking about an idea for a Fire Emblem hack that utilizes optional story maps and perhaps sort of expands on Fire Emblem Gaiden’s world map design philosophy, which obviously would require the ability to have multiple “main story-type” map nodes active simultaneously. If there’s another way to do that, though, then I would be open to pursuing that, instead.
This is likely going to determine whether I use FE8 or FE7 as the base, since I want something that will support optional story maps, and doing it FE5~7-style will be preferable to not having them at all for my purposes.
My gut tells me this is not possible without ASM, but then again I have not done an exhaustive look on the matter. The furthest I’ve got is having the possibility to choose between two world map nodes, but one becomes inaccessible once the other is cleared - which is something to be avoided in your case.
Something to keep in mind is that the amount of nodes you can use is limited. You can extend the amount of them, but you can run into some issues, such as nodes not being saved/disappearing.
Maybe HyperGammaSpaces knows more, considering that he is working on Gaiden demake and utilizes the world map.
Okay, so it is at least possible to do branching paths via the world map, even if all that’s known to be doable is a mutually-exclusive route choice.
I don’t necessarily mind clearing certain maps making others unavailable in some cases (I may want to make certain side maps only available during limited windows of plot progression states), but it would still be important to have the option to make a world map node not close when another is cleared.
And, that’s also good to know! I’d sort of surmised as much; the world map node limit seems to be 28, per FEBuilderGBA’s slot limit for them (and its not allowing you to create an “extended list” like you can for many other internal directories of things), but thanks for confirming that for me!
I would be interested to hear from HyperGammaSpaces about this if they’d be interested in sharing their discoveries!
In order to expand the nodes on the map, you must expand the save data.
This is because you need to record in save data which nodes are present in the world map.
(Similarly, the PATH between NODEs needs to be recorded in the save data as well.)
An extension routine for the world map nodes is currently being developed for EMS.
However, as it is still unstable, this feature is turned off in FEBuilderGBA.
(If it is enabled, sometimes misplaced nodes will appear.)
I’m sure we can add more nodes in the future, but for now we can’t do it yet.
Oh, and you can create nodes that you can enter as many times as you want in addition to your destination.
This applies to vanilla towers and ruins.
The towers and ruins are not destinations, but you can enter them as many times as you want.
You can use this to create a node that you can stop at as many times as you want, even outside of the destination node.
If you’re not allowed to stop by that worldmap node, I think you can use a StartEvent to kick the player out.
(Turn off Flag0x03 and call EndEvent, because if you enable Flag0x03 and issue an MNC instruction, a clear turn is recorded.)
There’s still a lot of mystery about world map events.
Still, I think it’s slowly being figured out.
Hey there, so there are a few things to consider here:
It is possible to do these types of missions in the base game without needing to do custom ASM (I’d recommend keeping the number of story chapters short for a first project, anyway, so you should have room for 8 of them in a 20-chapter hack, and could squeeze a few more in if you pull a Phantom Ship/Landing at Taizel and have a few chapters that don’t have their own node). The caveat is that an optional node cannot be placed in such a way that your lord must cross over it to reach the next story node, because then you’ll just be stuck in an endless loop of doing the optional node’s map. (it’s treated as "if the lord is touching it, automatically start the associated map… yeah.) For Sacred Echoes I had to move e.g. the Thieves’ Shrine out to the side in an L-shape, so it’s not a 1:1 recreation of that part of the worldmap.
As 7743 said, an optional node must be set to “Placement flag” and “Map skirmish type” of 0x3. This will tell it to behave like the Tower of Valni (that is to say, you can visit/revisit it at any time). You can use chapter events to kick the player out at the start if they don’t meet the conditions to be there, and if you don’t want the map to be repeatable after a certain point, you can just remove the node and/or the path to it using worldmap events.
In the ending event of your repeatable map (or if you kick the player out early), make sure to use MNCH 0xFFFF to return to the worldmap without advancing the story destination.
With extensive ASM and abuse of global flags to track chapter completion, it’s also possible to have two main characters on the map and switch between them, but by its nature that breaks the (linear) way the game tracks chapter completion progress and map skirmish spawning. This is something I have mostly functional but it’s still in testing at the moment. I highly recommend turning off map skirmishes entirely if you’re using the world map.
There’s a lot of ASM that goes into expanding the world map paths/nodes, including making save files incompatible with vanilla FE8. It is possible, at least according to my tests so far, but there are still some bugs being worked out so it’s not ready for public release just yet. The maximum possible count without exceeding the game’s IRAM allocation for the world map is 84 nodes and 64 routes simultaneously. So keep that in mind as a hard limit, but that’s way more than even the Echoes world map needs.
Thanks a bunch! This is all the info I need and then some!
I actually don’t mind working within the vanilla 28-node limit, since that should be more than enough for what I have in mind for this project.
My idea is actually that most of the nodes wouldn’t really be repeatable at all; is it possible for an optional node to have an associated world map event that gets run when you complete it? I totally understand if that isn’t doable, of course, and I can find ways to work around it… Actually, it sounds like I could use conditional branches like that to set up a map that you could just diddle around and use the shops in if nothing’s going on there, or that could even have multiple plot things that happen there at different times.
I’m rambling now, but thanks again! Even if I can’t make things work exactly how I had in mind, it’ll be fun coming up with something interesting regardless!
I don’t believe so, at the moment, at least not with the same visuals you’d get from the two “official” ways of doing worldmap stuff. These are: the worldmap events that get run (once) when that chapter is set as the next destination, and the worldmap events that run when you’ve clicked on the node for that chapter and started your lord walking towards it. Since you return from an optional chapter with MNCH 0xFFFF it means it’s not setting anything “new” as the next destination so no events get run on completion.
There may be a way to switch event execution mode to world map mode from within normal events at the end of a chapter, but I’m not sure of the graphical implications there - Snakey1 might know more about that as I saw him doing stuff with that recently. For now I’d say see what you can do with conditionals within the map.