[FF7PC-98/Steam] New Threat Mod (v2.0.999992)

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Would anyone here be particularly against having an option called, I dunno, 'Fast Mode' or something where Boss HP is reduced by a certain %?
 
Would anyone here be particularly against having an option called, I dunno, 'Fast Mode' or something where Boss HP is reduced by a certain %?
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Very much so. However, a little more information as to why you posed the question could help. What brought this on?
 
Would anyone here be particularly against having an option called, I dunno, 'Fast Mode' or something where Boss HP is reduced by a certain %?
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If everything else is the same, then I think that'd be fantastic. It would help bug testing, make getting to certain points much faster.
 
Very much so. However, a little more information as to why you posed the question could help. What brought this on?
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Xifanie and other people in the past have mentioned that boss fights felt like they took forever and I started thinking about what the ideal time for a boss fight to take should be; thing is, that's dependent on the player. I think 10-15mins is roughly where it should be but not everyone will agree with that and in the end it's not me playing the mod. Having the option there should alleviate that problem a bit.

If everything else is the same, then I think that'd be fantastic. It would help bug testing, make getting to certain points much faster.
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There likely won't be bug-testing after this release; I'll be fixing reported issues but that's about it. It's time to get onto other projects.
 
I personally didn't think the HP was that big a deal, because bosses are supposed to be a big deal, but I can understand why other players might not like it. Someone else made a good point: once you nail down a strategy, it's just a matter of surviving long enough to keep doing it. That can get a little repetitive if the boss just takes that long to die, which is why I thought the Curator was too much even for a battle that's supposed to be hilariously hard to win. 45 freakin' minutes to take that thing down.

A "Fast Mode" might not be necessary. Just trimming some of the bosses' fat would be a compromise.
 
Oh, that doesn't even come close to the multiple hours it took me to take down the final super boss of Last Dream: World Unknown on Legendary difficulty during the beta. :) That is not even taking into account the failed attempts. I think the fight lasted more than 3 hours but I don't know for sure how long it took as I didn't record it. The sense of accomplishment afterwards was worth it though! :)  I can't wait to jump into this mod once its polished.
 
Hey Sega Chief, thanks so much for this mod, it's my favorite mod of all time. Is there any estimate for when 1.5 will come out?
 
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Xifanie and other people in the past have mentioned that boss fights felt like they took forever and I started thinking about what the ideal time for a boss fight to take should be; thing is, that's dependent on the player. I think 10-15mins is roughly where it should be but not everyone will agree with that and in the end it's not me playing the mod. Having the option there should alleviate that problem a bit.
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If that's the case than yes, I am certainly against it.

Take a look at my playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3B-NAl8G2fMzaKwXtY5AGeop8iFJnxNn

You'll see that virtually all of the boss fights fall within the time frame of 8- 15 minutes as you think it should be, which I agree with as well. The only ones that are outside of that range are either bosses that should have more health seeing as they are more important to the story or game as a whole, or are bosses that were either bugged at the time and have been fixed, or had too much health at the time and have been shaved down some. I should also note that I was by no means getting the fights done as fast as I possibly could either. In a lot of them I had Sadness which reduces damage dealt and limit fill speed, both of which could have pushed these times much lower. Couple that with that the fact that I could have probably done my Rank Up's and materia situations better and to shave more off and you begin to see how I did not do a lot of these fights anywhere near as fast as they could be done. Hell, you can even factor in that I also had Intro and Outro's for every single video, and that probably adds up to another 15 - 20 seconds that could be taken off the total times because they're just for show, they're not apart of the actual fight themselves.

It's kinda funny actually, looking at those playtimes and with all the points I made, you could actually make an argument in the opposite direction and say that some of these bosses may need a buff in health instead of a debuff! Not that I am asking for that mind you. By and large I think you've pretty much got the boss health numbers where they should be across the board. Could they use some tweaks here and there? Perhaps? We shall see when 1.5 comes out. But I think the health numbers are in a great spot personally.

I personally didn't think the HP was that big a deal, because bosses are supposed to be a big deal, but I can understand why other players might not like it. Someone else made a good point: once you nail down a strategy, it's just a matter of surviving long enough to keep doing it. That can get a little repetitive if the boss just takes that long to die, which is why I thought the Curator was too much even for a battle that's supposed to be hilariously hard to win. 45 freakin' minutes to take that thing down.

A "Fast Mode" might not be necessary. Just trimming some of the bosses' fat would be a compromise.
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This speaks more to potential enemy AI tweaks that could be added to make bosses change their attack strategies when they get lower on health than health itself. Adding those kinds of things to ALL bosses though would probably be a ton of work I imagine? And judging by what Sega said that's probably not going to happen when 1.5 hits. So yeah, I agree with the just small tweaks and changing of health numbers if necessary, but as I mentioned, I don't think it is.
 
This speaks more to potential enemy AI tweaks that could be added to make bosses change their attack strategies when they get lower on health than health itself.
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This! Having the bosses change strategies when reaching the "critical" stages keeps the fight intense and actually alleviates the feeling of having the battles drawn out.
 
I apologise if this was posted already, but with 203 pages it's a bit hard to verify.

I seem to have Cait Sith and Vincent's innate abilities swapped on my installation. I don't know if I need to simply reinstall it or  not.

I've tried the two fixes, but it seems I'm already "up to date."

(I've just done a clean reinstall and it's fixed issues I was having with Dark Cave's Guard Scorpion.)

Nevertheless, this mod is excellent. I never imagined I was going to play this game again, as even though I was always a fan of the game's mechanics, there was only so much playing around with them I could do. This mod really forces you to use and understand every aspect of the game and it's brilliant.
 
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Hey Sega Chief, thanks so much for this mod, it's my favorite mod of all time. Is there any estimate for when 1.5 will come out?
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It was supposed to be a few weeks ago but I had to stop for a heady cocktail of unit assessments and a week's holiday abroad. I'm back to work on it now, but I can't really say when it'll be done. I've got the week off work again next week but not going anywhere this time so I'll use that to power ahead.

If that's the case than yes, I am certainly against it.

Take a look at my playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3B-NAl8G2fMzaKwXtY5AGeop8iFJnxNn

You'll see that virtually all of the boss fights fall within the time frame of 8- 15 minutes as you think it should be, which I agree with as well. The only ones that are outside of that range are either bosses that should have more health seeing as they are more important to the story or game as a whole, or are bosses that were either bugged at the time and have been fixed, or had too much health at the time and have been shaved down some. I should also note that I was by no means getting the fights done as fast as I possibly could either. In a lot of them I had Sadness which reduces damage dealt and limit fill speed, both of which could have pushed these times much lower. Couple that with that the fact that I could have probably done my Rank Up's and materia situations better and to shave more off and you begin to see how I did not do a lot of these fights anywhere near as fast as they could be done. Hell, you can even factor in that I also had Intro and Outro's for every single video, and that probably adds up to another 15 - 20 seconds that could be taken off the total times because they're just for show, they're not apart of the actual fight themselves.

It's kinda funny actually, looking at those playtimes and with all the points I made, you could actually make an argument in the opposite direction and say that some of these bosses may need a buff in health instead of a debuff! Not that I am asking for that mind you. By and large I think you've pretty much got the boss health numbers where they should be across the board. Could they use some tweaks here and there? Perhaps? We shall see when 1.5 comes out. But I think the health numbers are in a great spot personally.

This speaks more to potential enemy AI tweaks that could be added to make bosses change their attack strategies when they get lower on health than health itself. Adding those kinds of things to ALL bosses though would probably be a ton of work I imagine? And judging by what Sega said that's probably not going to happen when 1.5 hits. So yeah, I agree with the just small tweaks and changing of health numbers if necessary, but as I mentioned, I don't think it is.
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This! Having the bosses change strategies when reaching the "critical" stages keeps the fight intense and actually alleviates the feeling of having the battles drawn out.
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The timeframe thing is a personal preference; there's no set rule for how long a fight should be, so long as extremes are avoided (1min or 1hr+ for example). It's actually not too difficult to change a Boss' attacks when they reach a certain HP threshold due to most of them having a HP check in their General Counter AI and the ability to have them read attack IDs from variables instead of directly (letting you load a different attack into the var when the conditions are met). The majority of the Disc 1/Disc 2 bosses have altered behavior after conditions are met like reduced HP or certain attacks are used, whereas a lot of the Disc 3 ones don't change at all. Maybe that's what's missing?

I apologise if this was posted already, but with 203 pages it's a bit hard to verify.

I seem to have Cait Sith and Vincent's innate abilities swapped on my installation. I don't know if I need to simply reinstall it or  not.

I've tried the two fixes, but it seems I'm already "up to date."

(I've just done a clean reinstall and it's fixed issues I was having with Dark Cave's Guard Scorpion.)

Nevertheless, this mod is excellent. I never imagined I was going to play this game again, as even though I was always a fan of the game's mechanics, there was only so much playing around with them I could do. This mod really forces you to use and understand every aspect of the game and it's brilliant.
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The innates were swapped but the text wasn't (I forgot); Vincent now has the MP > HP regeneration and Cait has the passive MP regen. Vincent's one matches his Limit forms quite well because it lets that MP get used while he auto-attacks. Cait's is going to be changed so that, on top of the MP regen, he gets a much stronger MP regen while defending (+20 or something). I should mention the new innates for 1.5:

Cloud: When an ally is KO'd, he gains Wall + Regen (effect activates once - this innate only available after Cloud recovered from Mideel).
Aeris: Geo-stance covers more elements (space issue prevented this before)
Yuffie: Magic evade was dropped, physical evade set to 255% when hit by a physical but wears off after a few turns or if targeted by a magic effect. Issue with this is that accuracy gains evasion, which'll need something done to the .EXE. This problem applies
Cait Sith: Passive MP regen of +1 per tick; when defending, this becomes +20 per tick.
Vincent: HP sporadically raised by current MP as an irregular regen.
Cid: Starts battle with a STR/MAG boost, loses this for rest of battle if his HP drops below 50% at any point.
 
The innates were swapped but the text wasn't (I forgot); Vincent now has the MP > HP regeneration and Cait has the passive MP regen. Vincent's one matches his Limit forms quite well because it lets that MP get used while he auto-attacks. Cait's is going to be changed so that, on top of the MP regen, he gets a much stronger MP regen while defending (+20 or something). I should mention the new innates for 1.5:

Cloud: When an ally is KO'd, he gains Wall + Regen (effect activates once - this innate only available after Cloud recovered from Mideel).
Aeris: Geo-stance covers more elements (space issue prevented this before)
Yuffie: Magic evade was dropped, physical evade set to 255% when hit by a physical but wears off after a few turns or if targeted by a magic effect. Issue with this is that accuracy gains evasion, which'll need something done to the .EXE. This problem applies
Cait Sith: Passive MP regen of +1 per tick; when defending, this becomes +20 per tick.
Vincent: HP sporadically raised by current MP as an irregular regen.
Cid: Starts battle with a STR/MAG boost, loses this for rest of battle if his HP drops below 50% at any point.
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Oh okay, cool. Until now I felt like I was "cheating" by exploiting Vincent's innate in his beast mode, but now that I know you did it on purpose I shall exploit the bahoozits out of it.

It seems to have been a real struggle to settle on an ability that feels right for Cid, doesn't it? Auto-crits, reactive guard, now this. I like it though, it fits in with how he acts like he's the "old guy" of the team.
 
The innates were swapped but the text wasn't (I forgot); Vincent now has the MP > HP regeneration and Cait has the passive MP regen. Vincent's one matches his Limit forms quite well because it lets that MP get used while he auto-attacks. Cait's is going to be changed so that, on top of the MP regen, he gets a much stronger MP regen while defending (+20 or something). I should mention the new innates for 1.5:

Cloud: When an ally is KO'd, he gains Wall + Regen (effect activates once - this innate only available after Cloud recovered from Mideel).
Aeris: Geo-stance covers more elements (space issue prevented this before)
Yuffie: Magic evade was dropped, physical evade set to 255% when hit by a physical but wears off after a few turns or if targeted by a magic effect. Issue with this is that accuracy gains evasion, which'll need something done to the .EXE. This problem applies
Cait Sith: Passive MP regen of +1 per tick; when defending, this becomes +20 per tick.
Vincent: HP sporadically raised by current MP as an irregular regen.
Cid: Starts battle with a STR/MAG boost, loses this for rest of battle if his HP drops below 50% at any point.
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Not to sound like "Hey you changed the innates i liked!" but why change Cids and Clouds to these new ones?
Cid i thought was good with the Barriers (if the go through resist that would have been amazing) since it does not shoehorn him into a melee dps role, but adds a tank role aswell. With the current one for 1.5 + the gear + rank up options he can only be a physical dmg dealer, period which is a shame.

As for Cloud, I feel its kinda wasted, since Wall + Regen are 1) easy lategame to apply, 2) quite boring from a innate standpoint. The only thing i can see going for this new one is Cloud being a recovery bot, aka when a teammate dies, Cloud is protected to get them back up again.
 I though the switching MAG/STR was a cool idea but hey in the end it your mod, just my two cents. Ohh, another thing for Cloud could maybe be reverse Yuffie innate. When he gets hit by magic, he gains STR (to kill the casters), when he gets hit phyc he gains MAG etc.

PS: Love the fact that you switched Vincent and Cait. They no both have multiple roles. Vincent can save mp for sustain while being a phyc dmg dealer + caster and Cait can be Tank or a caster/support!

Anyway keep up the good work Sega, cant wait for 1.5! =D
 
SC, was it you that notified me that Bugen's lab should play 4 sound effects simultaneously?  Anyway, to whoever did, you are right.  It's clearly broken in the PC port - but it works in PSX.  It uses akao opcode 0x23 (when playing 4 musics). I am adding this to my dll as we speak - and also updating akao documentation.  I made other errors too. The summon effects in battle also allow for multiple effects and probably use this opcode (akao) in PSX.

I'm testing with PSX, since PC is totally unreliable.
 
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The timeframe thing is a personal preference; there's no set rule for how long a fight should be, so long as extremes are avoided (1min or 1hr+ for example). It's actually not too difficult to change a Boss' attacks when they reach a certain HP threshold due to most of them having a HP check in their General Counter AI and the ability to have them read attack IDs from variables instead of directly (letting you load a different attack into the var when the conditions are met). The majority of the Disc 1/Disc 2 bosses have altered behavior after conditions are met like reduced HP or certain attacks are used, whereas a lot of the Disc 3 ones don't change at all. Maybe that's what's missing?
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I was referring more to the coming up with ideas part rather than the actual implementation part. I imagine you've got all the number changing and coding stuff on auto-pilot at this point. If every other boss started casting Fire2 at 30% health it'd get repetitive quite quickly though, and avoiding that kind of repetitive nature of boss AI would be a good plan. Certainly if you've got some ideas that could be added to bosses I would go ahead and test them out. Or people could share theirs as well. I'm not very creative nor do I know much about the coding, so anything I would come up with probably wouldn't be that great, but even simple changes like making a normally single target magic spell a boss casts into a multi target attack or throwing Reflect on your team at different health thresholds could elicit the desired effect for sure. Any type of "Monkeywrench" or slight strategy changes the bosses have would certainly do it.

As for any specific bosses that come to mind? Not sure about that, Tyrant perhaps?
 
SC, was it you that notified me that Bugen's lab should play 4 sound effects simultaneously?  Anyway, to whoever did, you are right.  It's clearly broken in the PC port - but it works in PSX.  It uses akao opcode 0x23 (when playing 4 musics). I am adding this to my dll as we speak - and also updating akao documentation.  I made other errors too. The summon effects in battle also allow for multiple effects and probably use this opcode (akao) in PSX.

I'm testing with PSX, since PC is totally unreliable.
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Yeah, it seems that some sound effects are able to play simultaneously using Akao 23 but not others. I tested it with alarm and three short SFX (jump, etc.) and they all played together, but the four in bugen's observatory seem to override each other and the 4th one is the only audible one. Also, on that particular field the channel(s) aren't cleared when the SFX has finished because the 2nd Akao 23 on that field script can't be heard at all when it triggers; adding a Play Sound #0 beforehand seems to fix this.

I was referring more to the coming up with ideas part rather than the actual implementation part. I imagine you've got all the number changing and coding stuff on auto-pilot at this point. If every other boss started casting Fire2 at 30% health it'd get repetitive quite quickly though, and avoiding that kind of repetitive nature of boss AI would be a good plan. Certainly if you've got some ideas that could be added to bosses I would go ahead and test them out. Or people could share theirs as well. I'm not very creative nor do I know much about the coding, so anything I would come up with probably wouldn't be that great, but even simple changes like making a normally single target magic spell a boss casts into a multi target attack or throwing Reflect on your team at different health thresholds could elicit the desired effect for sure. Any type of "Monkeywrench" or slight strategy changes the bosses have would certainly do it.

As for any specific bosses that come to mind? Not sure about that, Tyrant perhaps?
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I think it's mostly Disc 3 bosses that are lacking adaptive AI and mechanics. I'll be keeping that in mind while I re-work them.
 
Hey-o, first off loooove the mod, I decided to replay FFVII in anticipation of the remake, and upon finding this, I've fallen in love with the game all over again.. phenominal work! A quick question - I've looked all over with Google and such but couldn't find my answer - I'm playing version 1.4, and reached the Shinra Mansion. I read the clue about the melody, and played it on the piano, triggering SFX, music change, and the "something has escaped" prompt... but I haven't found anything.. Beat Lamba, recruited Vincent, found Sephy, etc., but no sign of an escaped.. anything.

What gives? :p
 
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