[Sarah Shinespark]

Hey Sarah. So I went ahead and applied the SoR patch, the all maps, and then the hard type patch that exists here on the website. After having Teefa join, i bought 2 short swords and went to equip them. Upon entering the equipment screen, it immediately flashed blue and went black, unresponsive. I got a fresh rom, applied SoR and all maps, but no hard type. It works perfectly at the moment. So it looks like no hard type for now, haha.

Ok, I see the problem; we're both overwriting the same free space. I can move my code over in the next release (v2.2) and make it compatible, might be about a week since I have a work project coming up. Next version will have faster dungeon movement (new FastROM version), spell stats in the menu, and hopefully weapon stats in the shop and getting closer to being compatible with Spanish version.

Side note, looks like zombero found an enemy stat I didn't that directly determines their damage. Thanks for asking me to look into this, now I can document that.

[Manamiko]

This is probably not possible but, I wonder if something could be implemented that would also change some of the game play. Would a leech life/mana feature, or life/mana gained upon attack damage be a viable magic option for characters as a skill, or perhaps a card, or perhaps native to any specific gear when found? I wonder since it might add alittle more difference vs just card spamming/attribute spamming.

[Sarah Shinespark]

There are two dummied spells for draining HP and MP, but I don't know if the code was left in the game somewhere. Problem with draining MP is that enemies don't actually have MP; they can cast infinitely like in Pokemon Red. If a draining spell was found or written though, draining magic could be as simple as doing the same spell but healing MP instead. Sounds really overpowered to me, though.

There's a dummied Mirror Card that casts a random element, but 1) it freezes the game when using 2 or 3, and 2) They didn't actually leave room for the item name.

Pretty sure Defend does nothing; could be useful to research making it reduce damage until the next turn, but that'll involve modifying the (really long) damage formula and tracking a new status between turns.

Lot of cut content to read through on The Cutting Room Floor for ideas.

[Manamiko]

This may seem a little overpowered, but based on what you said, if the feature was implemented, I would say that it would be looked at as follows.

IE: Rooks, using a skill called Vampiric Slash/Strike, Heals back 50% of inflicted damage, costs 10 mp.

At that point, if you need some healing, you would have to decide if you want to attack And heal back some, instead of just burning up heal spells for him. It isnt too OP and in battle makes you decide if you want to strike as well, or spam cards, or heal via heal 1/2/3 and then spam cards, etc. Of course, he gains the elemental spells later. Even at end game, him hitting for 150+ dmg with this skill and healing back 75ish HP wouldnt be too OP, since he is partially relied on to use cards where possible.

If you really wanted to make it more OP, similar to the spirit of water, you could make that skill hit for around 1.5x his attack damage, spread the healing to all party members, but drop its healing effectiveness to 20%. It would make it similar to a health top off. Oh, and increase the mana cost to 15mp. At that point, say mid game, if he hits for 80 atk dmg normally, and he uses the skill, it hits for 120 dmg, and the heal for the entire party at 20% becomes 24 hp per party member, literally 1/3 of Marids healing XD

It seems like that would make it a preferable boss attack or hardier enemies when you want to dish out more single target dmg, or just want that quick health top off while still being able to attack.

As far as an MP Drain since you said enemies act like pokemon red/blue with no PP in the game for them, well...I would say implement an item, like one of the unused rings if its doable without too much headache, and it becomes an accessory equip. Only 1 exists, found slightly later in the game but not too late, and the character who wields it just gains a flat 5 MP regeneration per turn. That would help with regaining mp at a steady pace without having to rely on a dmg formula, and also prevents late game heavy scaling, where say it healed 10% mp of physical dmg so rooks cant hit for 150-200+ phys and pop 15-20 mp back into his pocket. It also motivates you to put it on a caster so that they can alternate between Attribute spells and physical while still gaining MP in the process, but not a crap ton.

Just a couple ideas that might diversify the gameplay somewhat. I know everyone has their play style, but most of the time until end game I find myself spamming nothing but Card attacks unless the physical dmg makes more sense against the mob/boss. Oh, and i almost forgot. When a character is taken via plot, the ring is returned back to the inventory, IE: Teefa / Darwin in Bintel Castle hold off enemies for you, ones wearing the ring, and then its gone, normally i think anyway

[Sarah Shinespark]

Hold on hun, you're asking a lot of me; I have to start with what's available in the game as a base. There isn't anything that uses MP and deals physical damage to work off of. There's "Attack" for physical damage, and everything "Magic" deals magical damage. No Skills menu, I'm not gonna hit it with a Blitz. Any new choices would come through the Magic menu (cards are just magic), so if anything I'd be trying to re-implement Drain Spell and Psych Spell. Don't know how yet, would be great if they were still in the code somewhere but you gotta understand just how unreadable it is.

As for MP regeneration, that sounds more doable... but it still has to be broken down into steps that each have to be researched.
1. At the start of the wearer's turn -> When someone wearing the item's turn comes up; This requires sometime before every human PC's turn, their equipped ring is checked against that specific item ID. Checking the ID is simple, but interrupting the start of a turn hasn't been done before.
2. Recover 5 MP -> There's no existing effect that does this. The two closest effects I can think of are Silver Flask (somehow calling half the routine with 5 power), or the Bartender's full meal that heals 10HP/5MP to everyone (not sure if that can be called inside a battle). May be possible.
3. Display effect to the screen -> (Checks) MP recovery from Silver Flask displays "Rooks has recovered", so this part is possible.
4. Continue with turn

So pseudocoding that out:
Locate code for beginning of a turn
Check for character and not spirit/monster
Get equipped ring ID and compare against the item you want to have MP regen
If true, call our custom not-made-yet 5 MP recovery routine
Otherwise continue with turn

That's the thing about ASM, everything takes a lot of time.

Oh, and i almost forgot. When a character is taken via plot, the ring is returned back to the inventory, IE: Teefa / Darwin in Bintel Castle hold off enemies for you, ones wearing the ring, and then its gone, normally i think anyway

Unlike later RPGs, characters don't actually store equipped items on their person. The equipment inventory keeps track of who's currently equipping the item, and when they leave it reverts to "nobody is equipping the item". So it's impossible for them to take equipment with them. Same reason Axs gets unequipped after Chapter 3, he leaves the party for the cutscene. Been meaning to skip that so he stays equipped and helps fight the boss... but if I mess it up you'd end up with two Axs in your party in Chapter 4 

[Manamiko]

After taking in  that last post, I see I did ask a bit much. This is pure ignorance on my part but I did not know that the data was unreadable and that we were limited to strict values inside the game like the meal heal and so on. So it seems that in order to become more fancy with features, you would have to code entirely new data and test it , otherwise you are stuck drawing off the exact limits of what exists in the game currently.

Im certainly no hacker and worthless in regard to help, just an idea person who doesnt know better haha.

[Sarah Shinespark]

I appreciate the ideas. I went into detail because it's important to understand what ROM hacking does. Reusing or changing existing features is way faster than making something from scratch. Some games get away with making a lot of chocolate features because they have a big community (Super Mario World), or have written tools to modify their games. But, Arcana's not well known, and I'm developing the only full mod and researching by myself. So adding new stuff is going to go much slower than for other games.

I heard DragonAtma on GameFAQs wants to make a second story of Arcana, but he's been busy with IRL stuff.

[Manamiko]

I just thought of something that would be viable, unless you believe that it would be too OP. It would certainly entice everyone to use magic a lot, while still having some use for physical damage in certain instances.

The spirits gain 1 HP/MP for each movement on the map in dungeons, regardless of stepping forward, backward, or rotation. Would it be possible to set it up so that all party members have the same regeneration, but for MP only? Im not attempting to remove the usefulness of items, and in a pinch they can be awesome.

[DragonAtma]

Nah, the problem isn't IRL stuff so much as other projects (7th saga, OB randomizer, RoTK2 NSF2, RoTK2 Darro mod, RoTK2 randomizer, and so on); I'm better at starting them than finishing them. The other issue is that there wasn't nearly as much info available when I tried working on it (that was back in 2014); I am not a snes coder, so working on anything compressed (such as the graphics) just wasn't feasible.

I do hope to return to modding Arcana (just as I hope to return to modding Actraiser, FFMQ, and other dormant projects), but it may be some time before I get a chance to work on them. :/

[Sarah Shinespark]

Well there is a decompressor (Revenant's exhal) and I can de/re-compress the level maps now. You just have to feed in the compressed data start byte and it extracts it for you. Could use help locating the monster/character portraits sometime. Other thing I ran across, adding complexity to simple maps and re-inserting them can make them larger than the original and overwrite the following map. So, anything that needs significant editing (i.e your character portraits) will probably need to be relocated and re-pointed. So, locations and pointers need to be documented.

[Sarah Shinespark]

News at last! I came back from hiatus and tracked down the Bishop freeze bug, so a new version 2.1.15 is up. It turns out when changing enemy weaknesses, I accidentally made Bishop a boss monster. But the game wasn't prepared for that, and probably got hung up looking for a special animation or something. I also made the Monster stats readme easier to read, and had some fun messing with the Python for that.