New Hack

[ElectricArcher]

This is my revised version of Golden Sun: The Lost Age. It features revised and expanded classes and equipments along with substantially increased difficulty.

This project began a few months ago, when I first discovered the editor. At first I only wanted to tweak the class system a little, but of course I didn't stop there. So now, 120+ hours of work later, my patch features lots of all-new classes, equipments, strengthened psynergy, stronger enemies, and even some brand-new enemies.

I've created a text document to go with the patch which should tell you pretty much everything you need to know and then some. If you have any additional questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
Also, I'm a noob with this patching business, and I know we can't post ROM files. I believe I created the .ips file correctly, and it all seemed to work when I tested it, but if there's something wrong please let me know.

I've been calling my hack Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Revised. I am aware that this is a horrible title, and I am open to alternative suggestions. Unfortunately, I am horribly lacking in creativity when it comes to this sort of thing.

Huge thanks are owed to Atrius for making this all possible, and to the rest of GSHC for all of their very informative posts, which were often very helpful when I was having trouble with the editor. I'd especially like to thank Rolina, whose class template patch and assorted posts on a wide variety of topics were incredibly useful. Thanks!

Questions, comments, suggestions, constructive criticism, bug reports, and discrepancy reports are welcome. I hope you enjoy my patch!

[Misery]

You seem to have put a lot of thought into this, I look forward to playing it when I have time. For now, I'm just going to comment on some things I thought about when reading through your documentation. I can't really give any feedback on the game balance before having even tried the game out.

Considering the animations they use, why are Plume Edge and Earth Power non-physical? Aren't there any more suitable animations?

One way to give characters exclusive psynergy is to make character exclusive mid to late game equipment that bestows them. Of course, the amount of character exclusive abilities will be very limited this way. But you could use the accessory slot and possibly the shirt or class item slots for this equipment.

About the defense piercing effect, I just assumed it simply didn't work at all. It has never worked for me, so I'd be more interested in which enemies it does work on.

About field psynergies, something I planned for a hack is to make duplicates of them that have a lower PP cost and can't be used in battle, each to be known innately by one of the player characters. If you were to do that, these spells can still have their intended secondary effect for classes that can use them.

[ElectricArcher]

Haha, yes, I have put a lot of thought into this. I couldn't even guess how much time I've spent just trying to balance everything. And I'm still not really sure that I did a very good job of it... But I tried.

I didn't change Plume Edge's animation because it has all that water in it, and the physical attack part almost seems like an afterthought. I couldn't think of a suitably epic single-target alternative animation - really, the only other one I can think of that feels powerful enough is Diamond Berg, and there's no way that's non-physical.
Finding a suitable animation for Earth Power was really difficult - I would've preferred some sort of light brown energy beam or something, but that just doesn't seem to exist. In fact, just about every Venus animation I can think of feels more physical than magical, except for Gaia, Judgment, Charon, and the Venus summon. And none of those seems suitable for a basic but powerful single-target spell. So I eventually settled on Titan Blade. It's semi-transparent, so it seems like the blade could be made of magical energy, and it has all those energy particles that fly all over the place. If anyone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it.

That's a good idea for exclusive psynergy - you could just make a bunch of Fan-type items, right? But that would clutter your inventory, unfortunately. And I'm already using all of the other item slots.
I think it's good enough the way it is - you really don't have enough PP in the early game to take too much advantage of all those stronger spells, and besides, they're not THAT powerful. And the early game isn't meant to be all that challenging in any case. I'm much more concerned about the later game, starting at about the Avimander.

The defense-piercing effect really confused me for a while. I still don't understand it. I gave Doodle Bugs 900 defense and tested it out; it didn't work. I tried lowering their luck - the effect still never kicked in, no matter how many times I attacked. Then I tried giving Pteranodons 900 defense, and the effect worked every time. So I don't know what's going on. Maybe it has something to do with Resistances. Or maybe it's just hardcoded in for some enemies. I have no idea.

Good plan for the field psynergies, that never even occurred to me. But oh well - the other reason I removed their effects was because I felt that Frost and Growth were way too cheap to cast to have such a powerful effect.

Thanks for all the feedback!

[Rolina]

Well, if nothing else, we do know what causes the attacking part of the animation in the code, so with a bit of work we might actually have a way to slightly tweak the animations in the future, thereby allowing you to drop the physical component of those spells.  Be sure to keep an eye out for it - Teawater's been working pretty hard to figure this stuff out.

[ElectricArcher]

Will do! I'd noticed that the physical attack animation seems to be separate from the rest of the animation, but I didn't know how to add or remove it. It caused some surprises for me, let me tell you. For example, I tried to make a new monster ability using the Armor Crush animation, but it doesn't look nearly as good (or make any kind of sense) when the enemy just stands still while casting it. I also replaced the Flare Burst animation with the Fume series, and was pleasantly surprised when it got coupled with a physical attack.

I suppose if I was a bit cleverer and/or enthused enough I could switch abilities around to take advantage of data slots that do or don't have the physical attack part already built in... but it would be nice to be able to control it directly. I'm not sure how I could help with that, but I'm game to try.

[Misery]

This might be what you're looking for. Some animations will look weird with the wrong type value, but there's a lot you can do with animations just by editing these values. You might also want to look into using different animation arguments if you haven't already.

An interesting note about the "Call" attacks: they use an enemy index to determine what sprite is summoned, not a sprite index, so you summon whatever sprite is used for a given monster. Anything that isn't normally a call attack just summons the enemy in slot 0 though (a venus Djinn), I don't know how to change this. Call attacks use type values just like regular attacks, so you can decide if the monsters should cast, use physical attack, or whatever else you can make them do.

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

@Attack Animation: Well, while I could code it in myself, I left it to Salanewt.

He has already said that he has added in the "spell types box"  (attack animations.) to my bug fix version.

[ElectricArcher]

Well that looks promising! Thanks for the link, Misery. Unfortunately, I know essentially nothing about this ASM stuff, so unless it involves Javascript (yeah, right), it sounds like I'm going to have a lot to learn.

But then again, if Salanewt's building it into the Editor, perhaps I won't need to. I'm sure I could figure it out if only I had a method by which to tweak the data.
And by the way, am I correct in thinking that these type values would allow us to use summon animations for other skills?

[Misery]

Unfortunately, I know essentially nothing about this ASM stuff, so unless it involves Javascript (yeah, right), it sounds like I'm going to have a lot to learn.

There are no code changes involved, you just have to open the ROM in a hex editor and replace the values starting from the location listed. If you haven't used a hex editor before... it's an application that displays the data of any file as bytes, and lets you edit them (though it's worth noting that every byte is displayed in hexadecimal (base 16)). Any value changes that the editor can do can be done with a hex editor as well, as long as you know where those values are stored.

There are a few free hex editors, I personally like XVI32 for its simplicity. But in this case, you could simply wait until they add editor support for it.

And by the way, am I correct in thinking that these type values would allow us to use summon animations for other skills?

No, but that can be done in the editor. Summons share their index with regular psynergy animations, but use a different animation argument. Check the second link, all notable arguments for every animation index are listed there.

[Aile~♥]

@Misery's second point: Actually, yes. Normally, attempting to use a summon animation with a non-summon attack, even if you have the argument correct, results in a different animation. For example, at one point Rolina tried to put Nereid's animation on a different ability, but got Spire instead. It really is necessary to change the attack type value to a summon type in order to use Summon animations. Incidentally, I think this means it's impossible to have a Call-type ability (like Call Zombie etc.) use a Summon animation. Which is a shame, because I REALLY would've loved to summon Doom Dragon and have it use Cruel Ruin...

[ElectricArcher]

Summons share their index with regular psynergy animations, but use a different animation argument.

Yes, but I thought that didn't work correctly. I tried rather hard to get the Meteor or Meteor Blow animation to work for another skill, by copying the exact animation index and argument from said skills. I also tested about 40 other arguments when that didn't work... No success. I figured there was something special about summon animations that couldn't be entirely replicated by the existing Editor. And I seem to recall reading a topic on these forums discussing difficulties with summons (something to do with Nereid and Spire?), so I guessed it wasn't just me missing something obvious.

I just thought that perhaps these Type Values might be the ingredient I was missing.

EDIT: Haha, Jamie just posted after I finished typing the above. Good to know that I'm not completely crazy!
Also, @Jamie: Seconded on the Cruel Ruin. That animation is EPIC.

As for the Hex editor - I know what the basic idea is, but no, I've never used one before. The biggest roadblock for me will probably be just finding one and learning how to use it - I shall have to google this "XV132"!
And don't worry, I was a math major - I understand how to work in non-decimal number systems. But I appreciate your attempts to dumb it down for me :)

[Misery]

Dumb it down? I know non-decimal number systems are taught in math, but I didn't know it was common practice. Outside of programming that is, which you specifically stated you don't have much experience with.

Oh well... anyway, I didn't know attacks had to be set to summon type to use the summoning animations (I probably set the type to summon when I tried it, so I didn't notice). Unfortunately, the actual summon part of it doesn't work, i.e. the one that takes away a percentage of the target's HP. I guess it actually uses the amount of djinn used in the attack to calculate that.

[Aile~♥]

It's not the "ability type" that determines effect and/or damage, but the "ability type" as was mentioned earlier. Like the thing with adding physical strikes to abilities.

[ElectricArcher]

It's not the "ability type" that determines effect and/or damage, but the "ability type" as was mentioned earlier. Like the thing with adding physical strikes to abilities.

Agreed.

Unfortunately, the actual summon part of it doesn't work, i.e. the one that takes away a percentage of the target's HP. I guess it actually uses the amount of djinn used in the attack to calculate that.

Yes, I don't know how to adjust that, which is unfortunate. I suspect that the percentage of HP reduced is hardcoded in somewhere - I don't think the game actually computes it based on the number of djinn, because Daedalus and Iris would break the rule. Also, enemy summons don't rely on Djinn, but Star Mine takes off 30% (I believe), and Cruel Ruin takes 40% HP. So each ability probably just has some number somewhere that, as of yet, nobody has found.
The only other alternative I can think of is that the game treats those specific ability data slots as special cases, and pulls the % value from some preset list (meaning that only those particular data slots could deal %-based damage). I doubt they'd program it that way, though. It wouldn't make much sense.

Outside of programming that is, which you specifically stated you don't have much experience with.

Hah, my bad. Apparently my earlier remarks were misleading. I have lots of programming experience; I build websites for a living. I only meant that I've never worked with anything like a hex editor before, and I don't even know what "ASM" stands for.

And yeah, it's hard to go through college as a math major without learning what hexadecimal means at some point. Sooner or later you'll have to deal with a proof that involves binary numbers in its logic or some such nonsense. And if you ever take a course in applied math, you'll probably spend half your time dealing with computers anyway. Math and computer science can become very interrelated.