Hi! I’ve recently gotten into FE8 Buildfiles, and I have a hack idea for a game that takes place entirely in one enormous chapter. Does anyone have any resource that would be helpful for such a project, or even how to go about starting it? Like a save-in-the-middle-of-a-chapter module, or if there are any limitations on map size how to bypass those. Thanks in advance!
One restriction to making an enormous single chapter is tile changes. There is a limit of 127 tile changes per chapter. Usually that won’t be an issue unless you’ve got 15 specific places on the map that can each be 4 different buildings + a tiny section of the map dedicated to fighting with 25 different battlegrounds + a winding labyrinth holding everything together with 25 doors that open and close and 15 pathway blocking rocks that decide the layout of the labyrinth.
Another is map size. I forget the exact rule, something about the amount of total tiles, but I know the longest map you can make vertically is a 15x63 size map. Horizontally it’d be 60-somethingx10. I think I use the largest possible 25 width map in HQ, 25x29. I’m sure someone can chime in with the specifics.
hm, that probably won’t work then. Another idea I had was to have the game split up into a few large chapters, that you can freely travel between by seizing different castles. How feasible would that be?
You could set up something like a hub area with landmarks of the available chapters. If you use flags to track chapter completion, you could even go to those landmarks multiple times to start multiple chapters.
Example
in hub area, interact with castle
castle checks if flag for beating castle chapter 1 is set
if flag not set, go to castle chapter 1
beat castle chapter 1
at end of chapter, set flag that you beat it and go back to hub
in hub area, interact with castle
castle checks if flag for beating castle chapter 1 is set
flag is set, so next check if flag for beating castle chapter 2 is set
if flag not set, go to castle chapter 2
...
Doing something similar to that would let you
- have a giant map battle
- after beating that section, you get a moment of rest which could be used to hypothetically talk to your party members or buy items or whatever else
- after the rest, have a second giant map battle
- repeat as needed
I think that this would be perfect, actually. Thanks!
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To clarify, 127 is the limit of tile changes a map can have. The maximum amount of traps a map can have is 63, and an active tile change is counted as a trap.
I made both large 1-chapter hacks and one hack where the map keeps switching, so you could check my topics in my profile and those might serve as reference for you, but I made them in FEBuilder so you’d have to figure out how to make it in Buildfiles.
EDIT: And if you change your idea to do the multiple castle thing, remember that there is a split menu ASMC in which you can let the player decide which map to go to.
EDIT EDIT: Found where the 127 limit is determined. To allow up to 255 tile changes on a map, change 2E517 and 2E521 to 0x5C The only thing to mind is that tile change IDs after 127/0x7F cannot be triggered by map objects, but are fine to trigger by ID in events. This does not change the 63 active trap limit.
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How can you go back to the hub chapter over and over?
In the End Event of any chapter you want to go to the hub, you’d want to add a “Goto next chapter without world map” at the end pointing to your hub map. You might also need to install a patch called “Skip World Map Fix (Disable Skirmishes World Map)”, as certain chapters in vanilla require being entered from FE8’s world map.
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