Is this possible?

[leaf]

Hm... Is there only enough room in the data for one additional effect on abilities? I wanted to make a psynergy something like this:

Name: Sacrifice
PP: 100
Range: All (party)
Heals 9999 HP and fully revives target(s). Afterward, user dies.

But it seems it's only possible to have either the revive effect or the user dies effect, not both, at least with the current editor.

edit: Back on the topic of making a djinn/summon seal... I forgot what the menus looked like during psynergy seal. I thought that you weren't allowed to click that icon at all, and that making it work for other attack types would be as simple as copying the coding for that status and then changing the value that specifies psynergy. Instead, it just makes the psynergy selections purple and gives you the blocked message when it comes to your turn if you actually select it. That might be harder to make work for other types of attacks than I thought.

[Charon]

Doesn't the unused Psynergy Reflect inflict damage on the user? It could be possible to make it so that the damage taken is so great it always kills the user.

[leaf]

Nah, that wouldn't work. Reflect has an effect already in there listed as (Reflect), and it doesn't look like anything else would be causing it to do that. I also thought of making it do damage aimed at the caster, but since it's a party spell, that would be causing damage to all party members instead of healing them, which defeats the purpose. At the moment, it appears to only be possible to do damage or cure while using one additional effect. If it was possible to use two or more additional effects on an attack, it would open the doors for all kinds of new effects, like... a move that restores PP to all party members but casts psynergy seal on them.

Currently, the most mixing of effects you can do is dealing damage to your party while buffing them/clearing status, or healing your party while debuffing them/dealing status. That means it's possible to have a spell that affects the whole party that say... boosts attack by 25% (instead of the normal 12.5% you get for party spells) but causes them damage at the same time to balance it. It's also possible to have a move that restores a lot of HP but causes a stat debuff or status effect. But you can only have one non-HP effect at a time, which really limits what you can do.

[Salanewt]

I have a question... Why have psynergies that kill yourself and aid the other team? Seems like a good idea though, but it sounds a bit strange by itself.

Anyway, I hope that we will easily be able to create our own status ailments in the future. I would not mind creating a working Charm effect.

Have a nice day.

[leaf]

I have a question... Why have psynergies that kill yourself and aid the other team? Seems like a good idea though, but it sounds a bit strange by itself.

Anyway, I hope that we will easily be able to create our own status ailments in the future. I would not mind creating a working Charm effect.

Have a nice day.

Well, besides that one I posted (sacrifice) none of them would be explicitly killing you, and sacrifice only kills the user because the rest of the effect is so potent that nothing else could justify it. Most of the ideas I had just inflict negative effects or damage, which may end up killing you if you use it at the wrong time, but that's why you need to use it intelligently. In exchange for taking the risk, you get a much greater beneficial effect. It's not like you're healing your enemies and debuffing yourself or anything lol

[Salanewt]

Ah, lol, I see. Now it makes more sense (although the timing for killing yourself made enough sense before).

Oh yeah... Is it possible to copy and alter all of the data of one character? What I mean is to hopefully copy a character to change them. However, this would probably take forever, with many bugs left, but is it?

Have a nice day.

[Rolina]

If you have a spell like that, NOBODY will use it.  I'm a huge Dragon Quest Monsters player, and from the talks I've had with all the other people who are into it, self-sacrificial skills SUCK compared to the so-called weaker moves.  The death just isn't worth it.  Especially a death to revive another dead guy.  Kinda defeats the purpose.  By the way, a power of 2000 pretty much covers everything - 1999 is the HP cap, after all.

Edit:  Oops, misread the topic... thought this was the GSDG psynergy thread.

I'm sure there's room for it.  Besides, if all goes well, we'll have an effect editor.  After all, we'll NEED it for new status ailments (inflicts Siphon, may inflict Plague, may inflict Summon Seal, may inflict all ailments, etc...)

[Charon]

Doesn't those little Stone Soldiers have a suicidal move? Even though it's pretty strong, it's kind of easy to win the battle. Anger Balls also have one, but since they can be replenished, they're a lot harder :s

[Rolina]

Yeah, there is a 'kills user' effect... Interestingly, it DOESN'T WORK for unleashes. 

[leaf]

If you have a spell like that, NOBODY will use it.  I'm a huge Dragon Quest Monsters player, and from the talks I've had with all the other people who are into it, self-sacrificial skills SUCK compared to the so-called weaker moves.  The death just isn't worth it.  Especially a death to revive another dead guy.  Kinda defeats the purpose.  By the way, a power of 2000 pretty much covers everything - 1999 is the HP cap, after all.

Edit:  Oops, misread the topic... thought this was the GSDG psynergy thread.

I'm sure there's room for it.  Besides, if all goes well, we'll have an effect editor.  After all, we'll NEED it for new status ailments (inflicts Siphon, may inflict Plague, may inflict Summon Seal, may inflict all ailments, etc...)

After thinking about this a bit more... Well, no. If there's only one effect ID per move, then there isn't room for it, at least not in an easy way. You'd have to completely change the way the game reads the code if you wanted to have multiple effect IDs on a single move, which if not done carefully will result in breaking a ton of pointers, not to mention being overly difficult. What is more likely, is the ability to add entirely new effect IDs which act as a combination of effects. Currently, the game only has 92 (0-5B) effect IDs, meaning it should be possible to have up to 256 (0-FF) IDs, given the amount of space reserved for the effect ID in the attack data. In all probability, though, the game does not have additional room for new effect IDs in the location they're currently stored. Taking a mostly uneducated guess, I'd say that the game handles it in a method similar to the following (and I'm probably going to completely butcher the lingo here, so please don't kill me):

1) Attack ID is called, runs down list of memory addresses until match is found, points to memory address
2) One part of the attack data (type ID, target ID, range ID, power ID, effect ID, and so on) is compared to a list of memory addresses until the matching ID is found, points to new memory address to handle that portion of the data
3) Data is written to the location that handles attack calculations, points back to attack data and repeats from either step 1 or step 2 with each of the remaining IDs
4) After all data has been retrieved, attack proceeds as normal

I may be completely wrong, so anyone who actually does know (especially Atrius), please correct me.

Anyway, assuming the data is called in a method similar to what I stated, then what you would have to do is create a pointer at the bottom of the list of effect IDs that tells the game what memory address to look at, which points to a later location in the file with enough free space for the extra effect IDs we'd be adding. The list would be continued here, with the new IDs pointing to memory addresses even further in the file, which include all the actual directions for executing those effects. And of course you'd have to figure out how to point back to the proper location in the file after all is said and done. In theory, it should be fairly simple to enable new effects. Actually creating those effects, on the other hand... would be colossally more difficult, as it would require actually figuring out how the game structures the effect commands.

As for the usefulness of such an effect as what I was talking about... I'll take that discussion to the psynergy topic.

[Rolina]

Here's an idea that leaf came up with that I wanna ask about...

Of course, if you could hijack the damage formula the game uses, you could probably add a line that uses a mult mod of 1+(lv/100) for base damage psynergy, or something similar to that.

Do you know if it is possible to pull this kind of thing off?  That is to say, change the damage formula for psynergy so that it DOES get stronger with level (just, in a different way than physicals)?  If we could do that, it'd go a LONG way to solving the rebalancing issues with psynergy in the late game.

[Atrius (He/They)]

That wouldn't be too difficult once they're located.

[Tetsuya the Azure Blade]

Hmm,I agree that it would'nt be that hard once they're located.But on another note I think that things that are hard-coded into the game e.g Isaac's party joining all at once would be harder to change.

[Atrius (He/They)]

I would assume that would be less hard-coded than the damage formulas.

[Tetsuya the Azure Blade]

Oh those damage formulas are potential pains in the @#$, well I wouldn't be much help with those 'cause of
my currently average programming skills ( some C++ and parts of JAVA,please don't ask me I'm still a bit of a n00b with both.It's only what my cousin taught me a few years ago >_< )

[Atrius (He/They)]

Not really, even things that are hard coded aren't terribly difficult to work around as long as they aren't complex.  A simple equation shouldn't be too difficult to rewrite assuming you have the right skills.

[Rolina]

Which Atrius, being well... Atrius, should be able to pull off.  Now, finding the right equation for balancing purposes is another thing...

Perhaps we could have a damage equation editor or something like that?

[Rolina]

New question!  You remember how if you're missing djinn, a random djinn is chosen to be gainable?  Is there some way we can do that for many other djinn?  Basically, make a bunch of different djinn, have a few certain scripted ones, but the rest are random, determined at the start of the game?

[Aile~♥]

Would it be possible to add in a real-time clock so that it knows the time of day, the month, etc.?

I have cool (no pun intended) holiday-themed weapons that would be good if we could have the game know what month it is.

[Atrius (He/They)]

Hadn't noticed your question yet, Role, sorry it took me so long to get to it.  I imagine once script editing is in that should be do able, I can't think of a reason it wouldn't be right now.

Jamie, I seriously doubt it...  I may have to look into whether emulators will actually even allow that, and if so under what circumstances because the GBA's hardware itself has nothing that allows such a feature to exist normally.  Any game with a real-time clock has to have the hardware for it built into the game cartridge itself.