I can't say when I'll get around to it, but I'll try to see if I can find some time this week. Might be a fun little thing to work on.
No worries, and thanks if/when you get around to it! So long as its fun, that's the main requirement!
I overhauled a few things today. In order to free up those 2 stats for base HP... Weapon sprites and palettes are calculated before battle and stored in the same way other flags like Stone and Cover and such are. While loading stats for magic and physical attacks, instead of doing every stat one by one--and having my dumb self try to save a byte by doing INY whenever possible, which always mucks up everything when I re-arrange ch_stat RAM at all--it now reads from a table of "byte to read, byte to save" and does a loop. This is pretty space-efficient for magic loading/saving, but probably not
that much better for physical attacks. Still, it keeps things tidy and makes editing WAY easier!
Short version is: Need to test a party of Black Belts with different sprites out again to make sure their fists are loading right. Don't think I got around to making sure the attack cloud was white for their attacks.
Then after re-organizing ch_stats some, I figured why not tackle how stats are drawn, too? Which resulted in some nice clean up of stat printing. (I think I forgot to update the alternative name display byte used for "X learns the spell!" in the magic menu though.) While doing this I stumbled on a few other bugs I hadn't run into before. Like, the Elixir use menu only displayed 7 levels of MP. So I adjusted that.
And while I was in there I re-did the boxes for shops to use the main menu's box loading, so I had to hunt down and change all the IDs after cutting out all unused box dimensions...
Shops and menus seem to work just fine still, from my quick glances.
Oh and while adjusting stat loading for physical attacks, I set thieves to have a straight up 2x damage boost for being hidden. This might be too much? I thought 1.5x wasn't enough, but I forgot it also boosts critical hit rate on top of that... Still, Hiding is riskier than Focus, since you still have to avoid being hit until the next turn, and then your action on top of that. I put all these cool things into the battle engine and when I play I just mash attack still, because its still faster than doing the new things! :I New things need to be awesome! Grr!
I updated everything on GitHub, its a messy update, I'll be checking things closer tomorrow!
May 13, 2020, 01:47:10 am - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Something I just noticed.
The FF Bytes document shows that enemies have an "ailment chance" for their attacks. R.Goyle has 2, but no ailment set. Sorcerers, well known for their instant-death hits, have 0--the only enemy with an ailment attack and no ailment chance?
I can't find where in the original disassembly that this stat is used. Constants has it listed as ENROMSTAT_UNKNOWN_E. Physical attacks just have a base chance of #100 for any enemy that has an ailment to inflict.
So--what to do with this unused enemy stat? Do I set it up to do an actual "ailment chance" as what was maybe intended, or do I re-purpose it? I do still have 1 extra unused enemy ROM stat that can be pre-loaded as something. What I was doing when I found this out was fixing up the Counter/Parry status for enemies. I was going to see if I could set some enemies to counter physical attacks by default.
If I do set up this stat for ailment chance, how should I go about it? Its either 0, 1, or 2. Do you think the 1 might have been planned to be converted into #100 and 2 meant #200?
@Vanya: Looking at the hoops I jumped through to get characters posing in the shops for equipping stuff... at the moment, doing that for magic is a bit too much of a headache for me and I don't know if there is enough space in the bank to do the necessary checks all over the place for it.
To make up for that, I added in the alternative Ruined Castle melody you requested ages ago! Give it a listen in the sound test menu!