These additional features look very promising, I'm looking forward to them. I don't know if this is helpful to you, but I've made an excel file for some of the damage calculation formulas which I'm using for my modding. For those who are interested, here it is:
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Code:
http://speedy.sh/PYtGD/FF9-Damage-Formulas.xls
By the way, I tried your suggestion with placing the counter script in Function_func_1_1, but it didn't seem to work. Although I have to admit, I didn't test it very thoroughly yet. I will experiment some more with it.
On another topic, your to do list reminds me about something else that I've always wanted to play around with, but since I don't know anything about programming, you need to tell me whether the following 2 things are impossible, or whether you could include them in a future version of the editor.
1.) The first one is about the duration of temporary status effects, which are way too short I think. When you’re playing the game with the ATB on active mode and the battle speed set to fastest, no negative status lasts longer than 2 rounds at most if your spirit stat is decent. This becomes especially obvious near the end of the game, when most party members have spirit stats of around 40 even on moderate levels. For example, Mustard Bomb will hardly ever have a chance of killing a character even if it inflicts Heat, because if just a single attack with a decent animation time is in between Mustard Bomb and the targeted character’s turn, the Heat status will have already expired by then. And with ‘decent animation times’ I’m not even talking about summons, as the length of any normal spell or other technique is already sufficient to make Heat wear off. This makes the Body Temp ability more or less obsolete in the late game, even when going up against enemies that use Mustard Bomb or Freeze.
I have found some info on the duration times of status effects in this document here.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/197338-final-fantasy-ix/faqs/44329
It’s a very in-depth analysis of FF9’s battle mechanics, which leads me to believe that the author (Rebirth Flame) must have located these data by looking directly at the code. After all, the only way to obtain that knowledge is by actually hacking the game, isn’t it? Now as I said I am no programmer, so what I’m saying now might be completely wrong, but the duration time seems to be one fixed number for each temporary status (both positive and negative ones), like 160 for Heat or 240 for Poison. This counter decreases continually, and when it reaches 0, the status wears off (at least that's what the author claims). So my question is, if you know where these duration counters are located, would it be possible to make them editable in Hades Workshop to prolong status duration? That would be great.
2.) The second point is about the Poison and Regen stats. One thing that I believe needs to be changed in order to make the game more challenging is to break the power of the Auto-Haste & Auto-Regen Combo. With these 2 abilities activated, you’ll never need to manually heal your party ever again. No matter how powerful the enemy’s attacks are, with Haste status the Regen healing will come so fast that it easily heals you back to full health before the enemy gets his next turn. Add Auto-Life into the mix and your party becomes nigh invincible, eliminating any level of difficulty from late disc 3 onward.
I was thinking that one way to weaken this combo would be to increase the time span between Regen healings. According to the same battle mechanics guide, there seem to be secondary counters for Poison and Regen which determine the time span between two Poison damages / Regen healings. Would it be possible to make these counters editable?
Anyway, these are just some ideas floating around in my head, and I don't know how difficult it would be to change them. But I would like to hear your thoughts on those.
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