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Personal Projects / Re: [PSX] Final Fantasy VII - Retranslation Project (R06g)

« on: October 08, 2021, 03:06:44 am »

Bug Report:

Disk 3, doing Chocobo Breeding.  Got my Green Chocobo and went to get the Mime materia (mountains in southeast Wutai continent).  Rather then picking it up without issue, doing so seems to trigger a boss fight.  But since there shouldn't be a boss fight there, the game simply hangs after the screen fade out.

Got around it easily enough by just loading an unmodified game, getting the materia, saving, and going back to the mod, but still annoying.

EDIT

Tentatively looks like *all* the Materia caves are doing this.

Should probably also have specified: Because Cannon Addendum.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Final Fantasy II Restored

« on: February 18, 2021, 10:59:22 pm »

Thanks for the responses.

Yeah, it's a hard balance between fixing what is obviously broken (which was a lot), touching up some rough mechanics, and trying to do a broader balance patch.  Just the fact that we finally have a patch dedicated to fixing the existing bugs puts FF2 in a much better spot then it was just a few years ago.  If nothing else, this serves as a potentially good starting point for anyone else who wants to tackle replacing some of the more broken mechanics with the game.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Final Fantasy II Restored

« on: February 13, 2021, 02:17:18 am »

Some final thoughts, now that I finished the game (again, with the Restored patch).  Note some of these are complaints against the base-game mechanics; just pointing out some areas that could potentially be improved in future editions of the patch should you continue work on it.


1: As I noted above, there's a lot of people in the early game who give the "Ask/Learn/Item" dialog that probably shouldn't.  I know this existed in the base game, but it would be good to remove this dialog from all the NPCs who it doesn't apply to.

2: I noticed with the Aura spell especially that even at level 8+ I *rarely* got more then the Red aura when I used it.  Note I almost always used it as a group-all target, but the times I did I ever got just Red or Red/Purple Aura.  Not sure if the accuracy on it is that bad, or if there's a possible target-all issue there.  Then again, I rarely get more then four Auras when I single target anyways...

3: I don't have any hard data to back this up, but there seems to still be a targeting bias toward the third battle position.  My party was aligned Front-Back-Front-Front, and subjectively it felt like over half the targets were targeting the third position.  Of the remaining attacks, they seemed to bias the fourth position over the first.  My end game HP totals seemed to correlate this, with my third position having double the HP of everyone else, and even the last party member being second in total HP at the end.  Again, subjective.

4: While not really a "bug" per-say, MP growth remained a significant problem throughout the game.  It was mitigated somewhat once Osmose became available, but it would be nice to either bump up the rate of MP growth somewhat, or somehow allow out-of-battle spell actions to count toward future MP growth.

5: The accumulation of points towards weapons/spells was nice, but their growth flatlined around level 6.  I *think* that's because the area enemies were too weak to accumulate farther points.  Thing is, that lasted a *very* long time game wise, which led to a ton of battles even against normal area enemies (especially around Dist) that I was dependent on magic to get through.  The scaling up to about the Dreadnaught felt fine, but from there through about Mysidia Cave felt like my party basically flatlined attack power wise.  Obviously, more grinding would have helped, but considering the minimal amount that was necessary until that point, the sudden lack of growth was noticeable.

6: There remains a clear bias towards wanting Evade% over pure Defense rating.  Ran a test against Emperor with and without Genji gear equipped, and the difference was night and day.  While unparalleled in defense rating, most end-game enemies hit like trucks and that -Evade on the Genji gear results in you taking MORE damage then you would with much lighter armors equipped.  Again, base game mechanics, but it might be worth touching this up in the future if you continue working on this hack to make things like the Genji equipment less of a trap.

7: The items that were supposed to be removed from the inventory when their use was up were removed at the appropriate times.


My overall opinion is that most of the obvious bugs I can point to were successfully fixed, and the overall improvements over the base game are worth it.  That being said, FF2 remains a hilariously unbalanced game, and while some of the improvements in the Restored patch helped, there is still some *significant* work to be done if the end objective is a more balanced game.  But as far as bug fixes go, I can say that the patch accomplished that mission.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Final Fantasy II Restored

« on: January 09, 2021, 06:46:06 pm »

Goodie. Just finished my FF1 playthrough, so I'll likely be giving this a try soon.
January 11, 2021, 11:06:13 am - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)I've begun an initial playthrough using the latest version of the Restored patch.  Still early, but enough to give some initial reactions:

-I feel early game enemies start to run away far too early.  And considering how the enemy difficulty ramps up fairly quickly (especially pre-Mythril) this makes it harder then it should be to do any sort of early-game grinding.  Not sure if this could be touched up just a little bit in the future.

-I like the passive +1 Weapon/Spell growth after battles.  I'm still fairly early, but spell growth in particular is less of a pain (except for the very beginning of the game, which is still a PITA).  There's going to be grinding for some of the later spells, but I'm already finding I'm doing much less spell grinding overall compared to my last playthrough.  [That being said, this is putting  a lot of strain on MP; see below]

-HP/MP growth remains a bit of a problem.  While HP tends to normalize over time, MP growth still tends to lag a bit, even with my spells being more expensive then they normally are on average.  Sadly, the best method for increasing both remains repeated party-hit-all spells.

-I do have an idea for HP/MP growth.  My idea is that certain percentage losses for HP/MP would correspond to a certain percent chance of trigging HP/MP growth.  For example, losing 1% HP/MP might result in a 1% chance to trigger growth, but losing 10% might result in a 25% chance of triggering growth.  This type of growth model would result in HP/MP normalizing over time; as HP/MP grows you need to lose more to reliably trigger more growth.  [EG: You'd need to face stronger enemies to gain more HP, and cast more expensive magic to gain more MP].  Just an idea; not sure how hard it would be to implement in assembly.

-Finally, I did find one minor bug/annoyance: I've found a few NPCs (the ones in the prison in the Semite Mines, one of the men in Bofsk after the Dreadnaught takes off) that allow you to use the Ask/Learn/Item dialog even though none of these apply to them.

EDIT: Updated list of people with the Ask/Learn/Item dialog that probably shouldn't.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Final Fantasy II Restored

« on: January 02, 2021, 05:59:26 pm »

Just want to say I appreciate the work done on FF2; the base game even with its "quirks" was still buggy as hell, and it's nice to see after so many years someone stepped up to get the most egregious ones addressed.  Speaking as a Software Engineer who's had to code in poorly documented assembly at times (yay, pointer misalignment!) I know it's not an easy thing to do, so I appreciate the work you've all put in.

I'm currently doing a FF1 playthrough, so will likely get to FF2 sometime soon^TM.  I'll almost certainly be using one of these patches when I do, so I'll let you know anything I find and my overall opinion of things.

I do have a handful of questions, however:

-What's the difference between the "Bug Fix" and "Bug Fix - No Growth Barrier" patches?  I assume growth rates for attributes/weapons/spells were adjusted in some way? [I read through the entire thread this morning; I didn't see specifics on this point]

-Should Chaos Rush's (technically yours now, I guess) translation be applied first, or one of these patches?  Or does it matter at all?

-I noticed a few pages back Leviathan Mist posted a link to his INT-Penalty rebalance patch; I assume that removes the penalty for using most weapons/armor when casting spells, similar to what was done in newer releases of FF2?  Might be worth posting that on the main page.


And remember: real life takes priority; don't burn yourself out trying to optimize every little thing under the sun to achieve "perfection".

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Lufia-Patches by Artemis

« on: August 31, 2019, 05:55:24 pm »

To everyone having issues with Frue Lufia or the other hacks, learn from my pain.

Most ROMs these days (that I'm certain we're all acquiring legally) are unheadered, and have a ROM signature that looks like this:

Lufia II - Rise of the Sinistrals (U).smc
   Size:   2,621,440
   CRC-32:   20F2AC29
   MD-5:   6efc477d6203ed2b3b9133c1cd9e9c5d

You need some program to add a header; I used Tush, which you can get here easily enough.  After adding a header, your ROM should have the correct information:

Lufia II - Rise of the Sinistrals (U).smc
   Size:   2,621,952
   CRC-32:   2FAEBB78
   MD-5:   d35fcf90c273d4bc12eed59120954e58

Here's the part that I think is screwing everyone up: I was *trying* to get this to work with Snes9x's Retroarch core.  It ran the "normal" Lufia II fine, but would not run Frue Lufia, even when the patch was applied to the correct ROM.  I think this is what was causing everyone to *assume* the patch is at fault.  Nope, it was Snes9x.  After spending two hours fighting this, I upgraded to the latest core, and shockingly, it now works.  So I think the real problem most users have been running into has really been an emulator issue, not the patch itself.

No idea why the patch necessarily caused issues when the base game ran fine though...

Hope this helps; wish someone figured this out about two hours ago.