Tales of Phantasia (SNES Enhancement)

Do I spy the font I made for the Schala Project?

Yessir you do :3  Certainly saves up a lot of room for text.

3. View Foes was actually the "Battle" command.  It's still vague but not as vague as before.  What that command does is enable or disable the screen scrolling at the beginning of the battle to show the enemies you're fighting.  So I altered it a bit so it was a bit more clear.

May I suggest survey? As in survey the battlefield?

Oh I like that much better.  I'll use that suggestion.  Thank you very much!

I had a decent look at the screenshots and by the look of it and what you've said is that you're going to make the combat more flexible. It's looking impressive so far and I'm probably be playing when I think it will be done in 2012.

So Justin, do you have any plans for the 8x8 font? Dragonsbrethren made a pretty decent-looking one for ToP GBA. All it really does is give the original set of all-uppercase letters a lowercase set. Then again, there's a Finnish version that does basically the same thing...

I think it'll help people who don't feel like using Spy Lens all the time.

I do use Spy Lens many times.  So hope you don't mind to keep that. 

Yeesh, been awhile since I posted in the topic on here.  I've been semi steadily working on Tales of Phantasia for awhile now and making changes here and there.

First off, I've updated the usable items in the item menu.
- Probably going to change this as there's too much blank space on the right of the screen.  Probably see if I can put at least two PC's on each side.

Second, I've fixed a MASSIVE amount of item bugs that I introduced.  Buying, Selling, Event Items, Chest items were all bugged to hell with the amount and how they worked.  That has been fixed finally.

Third, I fixed some items disappearing when de-equipping them (Introduced by me again).

Fourth, fixed a lingering item menu bug in which the icons at type to say what type they were wouldn't work.  (Introduced by me again).

Fifth, I've been studying the battle code a bit for the characters.  A majority of the characters use extremely similar code that take up large amounts of room.  So what I'm essentially going to do is have every PC, if possible, load the very similar code in one area so it'll save room everywhere.  By doing that, I should be able to squeeze in just enough room for Rambard as a PC.

Sixth, name menu got a overhaul!

- Original
- New

Seventh, been studying palettes a bit more.  I MIGHT be able to alter the palette routine a bit to load separate palettes for the PC's/NPC's all together.  Being PC's always load this palette while NPC's load another.  So what that would is always have 1 palette usage being used by the PC's, but if there needs to be a different one depending on the PC you are, it'll load another palette piece for them while leaving the NPC's at least 3-4 palettes to use.

Eighth, Cless now has his own battle code.  He can appear in other slots now but the game still plays like you're controlling him.  Not too much in appearance but it's a massive code save and it's allowing other PC's to be in control during battle.

Ninth, fixed a couple typos and introduced a lot more PS1 sprites into the game.

Tenth, skill menu!

- This is how it appears now, loading Mint's spells regularly.  Though the icons are temporarily missing because of new code I had to place in.  What's the big deal?

This: - Spell names are no longer hardcoded to load from a certain value and above.  Instead, it loads the spell # from a table and uses that accordingly to load spell names.  Similar code will be put in place for battle so any spell can be usable by anyone and can be altered.  Makes it a lot easier to customize.  I will say, this table code was the most frustrating thing EVER because I have like, 3 frikin separate tables loading throughout the code trying to shift between A/X/Y and storage everywhere.

it's nice to see someone working on a game making it better by 1) adding new things, 2) redoing coding in the game and 3) just making things look nicer.

Is Mint still going to uselessly try to cast the same spells over and over again if left to her own devices?  I hated that.

Also, are you fixing the random-chicken bug?  I don't think anyone ever really understood the problem there – something about how, if you have too many items in your inventory, an item might randomly change into a chicken.  It might have strictly been something triggered by the entrance to the lower levels of the Moira gallery that blows up your Holy bottles.  Does that ring a bell?

1. I plan to prevent that for all characters probably by some sort of extra memory storage to make sure it doesn't do that >.< It's really annoying.

2.  I have never heard of that bug to be honest.  I know it blows up your holy bottles but I have never heard of it turning into a chicken.  I'll definitely have to check that out.  What level does it blow up at?  Just the beginning of the lower levels in general?

Ah, here we are.  I experienced this myself during my playthrough, to be clear – but then, maybe it's just ZSNES or some other wacky emulation issue.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/snes/588771-tales-of-phantasia/faqs/8713

The merchant standing in front of the stairs going down sells useful
stuff you might have forgotten to bring. If you want to and have the
money (most likely) make a whole set of Lemon, Pine and Miracle
Gummies by using Rune Bottles on the Apple, Orange and Mixed Gummies
you can buy here. The transformed items restore 60% of HP/TP instead
of the 30% recovered by the other items, however, do buy a new set of
the original items, you can never be too careful. Don't forget to buy
another 15 Rune Bottles before going down.

 This is important, sell your oldest equipment and useless items, then
fill your food sack. The reason for this is that there's a bug in the
game that transforms items randomly into Chicken (a food item) if you
have too many items (I have only experienced this bug here in the
Moria Gallery).

I'm not sure if this bug exists or not for me.  The item # has been drastically reduced from basically 320 down to 255.  I've gone to the Moria Gallery, made a save before hand, checked all items and nothing changed at all in either quantity or item itself.  So maybe the bug was inherently fixed with the item reduction?