The 15th Man Project: ASM Thread

Another thing we need to think about is sprite space. If we want to keep the game as-is, we need to be able to add a whole PC sprite sheet. Most of it is pretty simple, but there are a few obstacles. The main one I have currently is finding the overworld sprite pointers. I've got extra sprites working in battle 99%, they just don't do the victory dance at the end of battle, which I'm pretty sure I can find and fix with a little effort.


I've got a semi-complete solution for learning magic. I made a patch sometime last year that reuses the magic lists over and over again for every actor. Our 15th man would have to share their magic list, but it would be fully functional including esper bonuses and learning magic from equipment. At absolute worst, it would be a little unfair that they would already have magic (unless we get the character before Zozo), and that they and whoever they share with will learn magic more quickly because 2 characters will be adding spells to the pool. Originally I replaced Gogo's magic code to make the patch, but I will go back and update it so that Gogo will still work as intended. I will fully document it so that the new code doesn't run on top of anyone else's in here.

While I'm going through it all I will keep an eye out for ways to revamp the magic system to allow more lists, I had an idea where instead of having a byte per spell, having a byte per esper followed by a bit per spell, then let the game figure out which spells the character knows from there... but then I would have to figure out a solution for equipment-learned magic. Theoretically, I could reduce the amount of memory needed for each actors list down to 35 bytes, down from 54 bytes. This would allow us to have 18 distinct magic lists with 16 bytes left over. This would obviously require a massive overhaul of the code, but it is technically doable. Again, the main problem is magic learned from equipment. I count only 8 pieces of equipment currently that teach magic, if we restrict the game to only being able to learn from those specific gear, we could add another 8 bytes to each list giving us 43 bytes per list, getting us to 15 usable lists with 1 byte left over.

Another perk to this method would be there would be 2 extra learned magic bits allowing us to add 2 new spells to the game if we want, but making them display correctly as magic in battle (with openings and all) would be opening a whole other can of worms... just something to think about.

Thoughts? ideas? preferences?