Level Bonuses Based on Equipment

I recently read an article about why Final Fantasy VI was the greatest RPG game ever made. In terms of characters development, plot, structure and all things storytelling I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately the game's biggest flaw is that it's skewed towards its magic system which slowly makes each character more like one another. It got me thinking about playing the game again which got me thinking about my last challenge: No ability bonuses, no level grinding, and limiting espers and spells to specific characters in order to give them each more individuality. This ultimately lead to romhacking.net to check out all of the hacks.

That's where I took the time to read about Brave New World's fantastic Esper hacks. That concept literally fixes, what I believe, is the game's core mechanical problem. Obviously, that hack is as proprietary as it comes with romhacking and while I've messaged BTB and Synchysi about sharing it, I really don't expect them to just hand out their hack's most definitive feature.

Then I got an idea. What about attaching Level bonuses to equipment. I think armor or helmets is the best fit here as everyone can only equip one piece of it at a time and you can restrict those to different characters very easily.

I have a couple questions regarding this idea. First, is the idea good or bad. Second, Would it be hard to implement? Finally, would someone be willing teach me how to create it?

I like the idea but I have no comment on how you should balance the game with this hack. For its implementation, you need room on the equip data, which I think is full. If you scap as an example the spell teached by equipment, you could use this byte to have 8 different possible bonuses, e.g. byte value 1 would be 1st bonus, value 6 2nd and 3rd bonuses on same equipment, value FF all 8 bonuses on same equipment, etc.

After it's a matter of checking which equipment the character has when leveling up, it's well documented in bank $C2 and a special function could be hooked there. The details of it could come later once you jump in the water, I'd say for a first ASM hack it's ambitious. There's a bunch of details like would you want the bonuses to stack given a character has the same one on his armor and helmet, stuff like this..

If you want to display those bonuses on the item menu screen, there is little room so I'm not sure how to go with this.

Edit: Another possibility is run the hack with a table of 256 bytes and check the value based on equipped item. You could also this way make it to 2 bytes per equipment (512 bytes) and have 16 possible different bonuses. It's not a big step further than putting this on the equip data and instead of scrapping a feature to implement one, you just add value to the game.

Personally, I'd be fine with scrapping equipment based spell learning because having spells and bonuses on equipment puts too many eggs in one basket. Eight options would be enough for my needs. Vigor +1, Stamina +1, Speed +1, Magic +1, HP +25%, MP +25%, and nothing.

However, I'm a man of the people and I would prefer a patch that benefits the entire community. So the 512 byte version is probably the way to go.

Very interesting approach - I was going to do the typical materia approach but changed my mind and will be doing a Tarot System like the playing cards in ff8 - it would be nice if the equipment can do more than one for class equipment - example:

• black mage +1 Vigor /+2 Magic / +1 Stamina / +1 Speed / +25% HP / +25% MP 
  
• warrior +2 Vigor /+1 Magic / +1 Stamina / +1 Speed / +25% HP / +25% MP
  

Etc...

I do agree of getting rid off the spell learning and I would go as far as getting rid of the Extra Effects on weapons

Brave New World is excellent, and they've made so many modifications and tweaks to the game that it's difficult to point to any one hack as what defines it. However, they HAVE released the Restrict Espers by Character hack publicly:

http://www.romhacking.net/documents/656/

I agree with the sentiment that BNW looks rather proprietary, but I don't think it's because BTB and Synchysi are being miserly - more a case of being targeted towards players rather than hackers, and Synchysi feeling reluctant to publicly release code that's not up to his standard of documentation. I think Synchysi would share code if asked.

Furthermore, BNW incorporates many hacks that were coded by members of the community. Many patches are posted in dev threads at the forum at Insane Difficulty, available to anyone who cares to dig through the posts. Also, my own meager contribution to BNW (Smart Cover) is publicly available here: https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/showth...p?tid=3373

Sorry for the offtopic reply. I think that the neatest way of adding bonuses to gear would be to hijack the normal esper bonus routine and use a look up table to attach specific bonuses to item IDs.

Brave New World is excellent, and they've made so many modifications and tweaks to the game that it's difficult to point to any one hack as what defines it. However, they HAVE released the Restrict Espers by Character hack publicly:

http://www.romhacking.net/documents/656/

I agree with the sentiment that BNW looks rather proprietary, but I don't think it's because BTB and Synchysi are being miserly - more a case of being targeted towards players rather than hackers, and Synchysi feeling reluctant to publicly release code that's not up to his standard of documentation. I think Synchysi would share code if asked.

Furthermore, BNW incorporates many hacks that were coded by members of the community. Many patches are posted in dev threads at the forum at Insane Difficulty, available to anyone who cares to dig through the posts. Also, my own meager contribution to BNW (Smart Cover) is publicly available here: https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/showth...p?tid=3373

Sorry for the offtopic reply. I think that the neatest way of adding bonuses to gear would be to hijack the normal esper bonus routine and use a look up table to attach specific bonuses to item IDs.

I just want it to be clear here. I wasn't trying to make any kind of connection to my desire to share with the community with Synchysi's hacks being proprietary. There are numerous reasons for a developer not to share their code but only a few of those reasons are selfish. ROM Hackers essentially give away free art, clearly they aren't "miserly*.

Seibaby, that approach looks novel too. I'm really down for any of these approaches. I'm just going to need a little guidance. Before that happens I probably need to familiarize myself with asm. What's the best guide or tutorial for my needs?

Before that happens I probably need to familiarize myself with asm. What's the best guide or tutorial for my needs?

I gave you some links on this post. The tutorials on the document page are good and I especially refer to the web page made by TheGun aka assassin, it's well written and pretty much complete. However it's more a companion guide when coding and a reference document rather than a tutorial.

I've learned by looking at documented code, understanding it and trying simple hacks, it has grow up starting from this.

I don't know how I missed that. Thanks for pointing that out again.

I remember esper restriction - cool concept - ... so it seems the equip approach wasn't attempted before? I was going to start working on music (Mysterious Girl) but I'll have to wait for Ni - this looks like something I can look into in the meantime - thanks for sharing - cheers!

I just want it to be clear here. I wasn't trying to make any kind of connection to my desire to share with the community with Synchysi's hacks being proprietary. There are numerous reasons for a developer not to share their code but only a few of those reasons are selfish. ROM Hackers essentially give away free art, clearly they aren't "miserly*.

No worries, I didn't intend to imply that you were making such a connection.

Seibaby, that approach looks novel too. I'm really down for any of these approaches. I'm just going to need a little guidance. Before that happens I probably need to familiarize myself with asm. What's the best guide or tutorial for my needs?

I tend to rely on this site a lot: https://wiki.superfamicom.org/snes/show/HomePage

Also, if you want a reference tome, this should cover everything you'll ever need to know about 65816 assembly: https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/images/7/76/Programmanual.pdf
(I wish I had known about this document when I first started bumbling about with FFVI - all I had was assassin's C2 disassembly)

However, learning the language is only half the battle. You'll need to familiarize yourself with the FFVI codebase, something best done by diving into the disassemblies, particularly the battle program in bank C2 (which also happens to be among the best documented banks). This, I feel, is best done by simply scanning through the document with a reference sheet close at hand.

I don't know your background, so in case you're completely new to romhacking, I'll say that unless you're already familiar with hex editing, using an assembler, decimal/binary/hexadecimal conversion, using a debugger, etc., you'll need to learn the basics first. For SNES assembly, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the basic operation of the 65816 processor; its operations, its math and index registers, processor flags, memory addressing modes, etc.

What you want to do is not too complicated, but obviously it will seem that way until you know what you're doing. We'll be happy to help with specific questions, even stupid ones, so don't worry.