Final Fantasy VI: Divergent Paths

[PowerPanda]

Thanks Atlanta. After sitting down yesterday trying to figure out how to fix these various bugs, that's exactly what I decided to do. I am going to take a break for a few weeks before looking into any bugs. I just need to rest. For now, here is the list of known issues:

1. The Letter in Owzer's house re-spawns and causes a softlock. (Fixed in the master copy) For now, just ignore the letter upon subsequent visits.
2. Some characters freeze in a pose during events - this is actually the same thing as the Mog sprite glitch, and I have no idea what's causing it. A better hacker than me will need to take a look, I'm afraid. It doesn't affect the gameplay, but if you run into it, just load from a save or rewind (if using an emulator).
3. Strange behavior with Tools. This was reported by Leqesai, and then Gi Nattak figured out a way to reproduce it. There is some sort of memory leak when using breakable tools that comes to a head between 13-16 uses. It will add glitched items to the inventory, and cause your next tool to break without displaying a message (even unbreakable Tools!). This needs a thorough investigation. For now, just limit your breakable tools to 12 times or less per battle. I know that's not ideal.

[atlanta40]

Hey I found another issue I'm not sure you're aware of in the Fanatics Tower in the WoR.  At the top after you get the offering and go back out side, it soft locks when the fanatics all come up.  It says Kefka's treasure, return it now and it just locks up exactly like Owzer's house.  Guess I'm completing the game without the Offering.  Bummer. 

[PowerPanda]

Hey I found another issue I'm not sure you're aware of in the Fanatics Tower in the WoR.  At the top after you get the offering and go back out side, it soft locks when the fanatics all come up.  It says Kefka's treasure, return it now and it just locks up exactly like Owzer's house.  Guess I'm completing the game without the Offering.  Bummer. 

This didn't come up in any of the playtests, including my own. Try a different party and see if it works. You can use the Moogle Charm to get right to the top. I'll take a look when I'm done with my break.

[atlanta40]

Hey Powerpanda.  Okay, I took your advice and looked at my party.  It originally consisted of Terra, Celes, Locke and Leo.  I removed Leo, went in with the those three and the bug went away.  So it appears to be Leo related.  I haven't tried it with Kappa yet.

[DeathlesSNESs]

Hello, I see you are taking a break from working with this project, but in the meanwhile just wanted to report a couple of bugs/glitches I found while playing.

First it was in the three scenario selection screen. Not sure if this happens to everyone, but that's how the Mog's sprite looked for me the first time:

Not a serious glitch because it breaks nothing; the selection screen works as intended regardless. And once you complete one of the scenarios the second and third time the sprite looks fine, no glitches.

The second is a more serious one, thought. It happens in the Imperial Camps in the Sabin & Edgar scenario. There are some tiles in a left corner where you may get stuck in and, when this happens you can't move anywhere, no matters what direction you press. I recorded a short video and converted to gif to show this.

Maybe a problem with a tile's passability? I never tried hacking this game but it probably wouldn't be extremely hard to fix the map or the tile's properties. And it's easy to avoid when you are aware of it: just be careful when moving to certain tiles on this map.

Now I'm in the "Terra is fled to Zozo" part, and really enjoyed the hack so far. If I find any more bug or glitch or whatever I'll report here if that's okay.

Thanks for the hard work and have you a well deserved rest

[PowerPanda]

Thanks for the short video. That made it immediately clear. That tile had a wonky colission on it. It was an easy fix.

For the Fanatic's Tower, it's actually a glitch that has occurred elsewhere too. Having characters 14 (Leo), 15 (Kappa), or 16 (Umaro) in your party causes the 17th NPC on a map to not create correctly. On this map, that just happens to be the Magimaster. I would love to fix the source of that glitch, but to mitigate it, I have switched the Magimaster to be NPC #1, and have made NPC #17 one that does not need to appear. So if you come to this map with Leo, Kappa, or Umaro, you'll get 1 less fanatic, but it will otherwise work as normal.

I'm seeking some expert help on the Tools glitch, and then I'll release v1.1.

Also, since these questions are everywhere, let me address a couple of things:
1. There are only 2 rages that changed. Stray Cat and ChickenLip. Both were changed because my changes to Gau made them overpowered (like, 1-shotting WoR bosses overpowered). NO OTHER RAGES HAVE CHANGED, AND I WILL NOT BE PROVIDING A GUIDE ON THIS.
2. A few Colosseum items have changed, mainly surrounding the Imp's Armor, since the Imp's Armor is now necessary in a sidequest. The Cat Hood can be obtained by wagering a Back Guard or Gale Hairpin. The Imp's Armor just goes in a loop.
3. The Illumina CANNOT be obtained from the Colosseum. The Excalibur takes its place, should you try to wager a Ragnarok. There is another way to obtain the Illumina. If you want it spoiled for you, check the Spoilers folder for the text file labeled "Gaining the Illumina".

[Ballz]

I don't remember if it was in the original translation or not, but there's a typo in the description for the True Knight relic: it says "memebers" instead of "members".

[PowerPanda]

Thank you everyone for your encouragement, your enthusiasm, and your patience. I had hoped that 1.0 would be the final version of this hack, but there were 3 bugs big enough to warrant a 1.1. It has been submitted, and is awaiting approval by the mods.

Here is the changelog.

MAJOR FIXES
* The breakable tools had 2 bugs. The first was that their actual rate of breakage was 1 in 8. This has been changed to 1 in 32. The second was that using Tools 12 or more times in a battle could cause the item buffer to overflow, adding garbage items to your inventory, and causing any Tools used after that (even unbreakable tools) to be removed from your inventory. This was discovered to actually be a bug in the vanilla game that had a very low chance of occurring. Thanks to a herculean effort involving Subtraction, Gi Nattak, Serity, Seibaby, Bropedio, SirNewtonFig, and especially C-Dude, this bug has been resolved.

SOFTLOCK FIXES
* Setzer's Letter in Owzer's House respawned, causing a softlock if you read it without Locke and Celes in your party. This has been resolved.
* Depending on your party makeup, the Fanatics' Tower Roof had a despawned NPC (The Magimaster), which could lead to a softlock. The NPCs have been shifted around so that if an NPC needs to be despawned, it is an NPC of little consequence.

SMALL FIXES
* All single-enemy formations have had "Pincer Attack" disabled.
* There was 1 tile in the Doma Military Camp that could cause your character to get stuck. This has been corrected.
* Desperation attacks now have a 1 in 8 chance of occurring, as they should.
* A few small typos were fixed as they were reported.

OTHER CHANGES
* Banon's Chocobo Riding sprite was edited by SilentEnigma to include more consistent shading.
* The Auction House in the World of Ruin has better items. You can buy one set of Marvel Shoes for 50000 GP, and as many Hero Rings as you would like for 10000 GP.
* It is now possible to rare steal a Cat Hood from a Pug.

[Vanya]

Groovy!
I was wondering, off the top of your head, do you know if I can change the Coin Toss relic to change a different command in any of the editors and if not what address(es) to modify to change it manually?

And I'll bug you with one more thing. Do you, or anyone for that matter, remember there being a patch that replaced Cyan's Bushido and/or Sabin's Blitz into a simple 8 option command sub-menu like Mog's Dance command uses?

Back on topic...
Is the Summon command used anywhere in Divergent Paths?

[Gi Nattak]

Groovy!
I was wondering, off the top of your head, do you know if I can change the Coin Toss relic to change a different command in any of the editors and if not what address(es) to modify to change it manually?

And I'll bug you with one more thing. Do you, or anyone for that matter, remember there being a patch that replaced Cyan's Bushido and/or Sabin's Blitz into a simple 8 option command sub-menu like Mog's Dance command uses?

Back on topic...
Is the Summon command used anywhere in Divergent Paths?

You can edit the command-changing Relics with FF3usME, in the Item Editor, the 'Special 1' set of flags. But if you want to edit them further to swap in any other commands, you'd need to change some values in C2 and C3 - check out the existing disassemblies and goto: C2/5452-C2/545B & C3/6198-C3/61A1, you'll see the data for the 'commands that can be replaced with other commands due to relics', which you can change the values of. DP has these edited already to suit the mod, so keep that in mind if/when changing them.

You can find the blitz menu patch here, by LightPhoenix, the site can take a while to load these days: http://slickproductions.org/forum/index.php?topic=1902.0
Check out the very last post, where they updated the link. I don't believe there to be a similar one for Bushido, and no idea if it's compatible with DP.

And no, the normally unused Summon skill is not used in DP afaik.

[PowerPanda]

And no, the normally unused Summon skill is not used in DP afaik.

Thanks Gi. I think I applied the aim fix, because why wouldn't you? I did not do anything else to the command though. I didn't want to devote an entire character ability to just being able to multi-summon the same Esper. I tried to hook into the code for the Slot spell that summons a random Esper, but I found out Summon is not ACTUALLY unused in the game. It is the command that you switch to when you actually summon an Esper. Editing the command edits it for EVERY character.

[Vanya]

Thanks, Gi!

@PowerPanda: Now that you mention that, I think I recall reading about that before.
If I were to try to add it, I'd want it to be a new relic or something.
I just wish I could figure out a way to add the relic commands to the menu instead of replacing a command.
But I digress, and I wanna go play DP now.

[PowerPanda]

Thanks, Gi!

@PowerPanda: Now that you mention that, I think I recall reading about that before.
If I were to try to add it, I'd want it to be a new relic or something.
I just wish I could figure out a way to add the relic commands to the menu instead of replacing a command.
But I digress, and I wanna go play DP now.

You should definitely pay Duncan a visit in the WoR.

[Vanya]

Will do!

b_(^.^)_d

[tjsmith3]

I ran into a glitch. When I go to the opera house in WOR the Impresario starts the dialogue about how Setzer is coming to kidnap Maria and we have to be ready. Then the game freezes. Also, the letter from Setzer is still in Owzer's house. If I read it the game freezes. I think what happened is that the letter appeared again in Owzer's house after I finished the Opera event in WOB balance. I read the letter again and I got the dialogue about setting the trap for Setzer again.

[atlanta40]

Hey Powerpanda.

I took the new 1.1 version and applied it to a fresh FF3 1.0 unheadered rom.  However, when I load in my previous save it still has some of the issues from the prior version.  What would I be doing wrong?

[Sarah Shinespark]

Hey Powerpanda.

I took the new 1.1 version and applied it to a fresh FF3 1.0 unheadered rom.  However, when I load in my previous save it still has some of the issues from the prior version.  What would I be doing wrong?

If you mean you used Load State and it's still there (like the Owzer's House letter), try saving in-game and re-loading. If it's still messed up, you should use an earlier save or restart.

[PowerPanda]

The letter in Owzer's House is stored in the SRAM, not the ROM, so there's no fix for it if you have already reached that point in the story. The softlocks that were fixed should stay fixed as long as you don't load a savestate on that map. For example, if you made a save state at the top of the Fanatics Tower, that savestate already has the bug loaded. You would need to load a save state either in the Gem Box room or on the staircase maps.

[tjsmith3]

The letter in Owzer's House is stored in the SRAM, not the ROM, so there's no fix for it if you have already reached that point in the story. The softlocks that were fixed should stay fixed as long as you don't load a savestate on that map. For example, if you made a save state at the top of the Fanatics Tower, that savestate already has the bug loaded. You would need to load a save state either in the Gem Box room or on the staircase maps.

So that means that there is no way for me to get into the opera house in WOR to fight the dragon or anything else there?

[Sarah Shinespark]

So that means that there is no way for me to get into the opera house in WOR to fight the dragon or anything else there?

Probably not unless you want to hex edit your save file.