Restrict espers by character.

Would you mind explaining how did you go about doing this? I know assembly, but just a little bit. I'm sure Madsiur will be very interested as well.

The only reason an esper would be grey (unequippable) on the esper list is if someone else already had it equipped. What I did was find the subroutine that determines that and jumped to different parts of it depending on which espers the selected character could equip. In essence, if I didn't want a character to equip a certain esper, I made the game think someone else had it equipped already.

The problem this approach presented was that, if you try to equip a grey esper, the game BZZTs you and tells you "<Chr> has it!", where <Chr> is the character equipping the current esper. Since no one actually had the esper equipped, the message was incorrect. I ended up having to write a new message to display when trying to equip a grey esper, assuming someone else didn't have it already. That's what the last screenshot shows.

"Making it portable", do you mean like making an .ips file?

By that I meant putting it out in a format that anyone could modify the esper list without having to dive into the ASM file. I can distribute it as is as an IPS file, but then if the person who downloads it isn't familiar with ASM, they're stuck with the restrictions I've already placed.

Interesting idea! Have you created a data table with esper number and then disable the selection of the esper in the menu loading routine depending which byte for which character is loaded from that table? Anyway I'm interested in your code because i would implement something similar but enable some espers to be equipable on more than one character

Code:

TerraTbl:
DW NoEq        ; Ramuh
DW NoEq        ; Ifrit
DW NoEq        ; Shiva
DW NoEq        ; Siren
DW NoEq        ; Terrato
DW NoEq        ; Shoat
DW Eq        ; Maduin
DW Eq        ; Bismark
DW NoEq        ; Stray
DW NoEq        ; Palidor
DW Eq        ; Tritoch
DW NoEq        ; Odin
DW NoEq        ; Raiden
DW NoEq        ; Bahamut
DW NoEq        ; Alexander
DW NoEq        ; Crusader
DW Eq        ; Ragnarok
DW NoEq        ; Kirin
DW NoEq        ; ZoneSeek
DW Eq        ; Carbunkle
DW NoEq        ; Phantom
DW NoEq        ; Seraph
DW NoEq        ; Golem
DW Eq        ; Unicorn
DW NoEq        ; Fenrir
DW NoEq        ; Starlet
DW Eq        ; Phoenix

I just made one of those for each character. Espers aren't restricted to just one person; if you want Ramuh to equipped by everyone, just jump to the Eq label instead of NoEq in each character's table.

I mainly just used the routine that checks if someone has an esper equipped every time the esper list is loaded. This is my first in-depth ASM hack so I'm sure it could be made more efficient, but for now it's at least functional.

This would be absolutely wonderful, I have actually been wondering about the possibility of this very thing for a while so I hope that you will be able to find a way to 'port' it, even if it means just creating a spreadsheet with instructions on what to do, even that would be just splendid!

My first idea was to write a quick Visual Basic program that would alter an IPS patch directly with whatever changes the user wanted, but I was hoping there was an easier way that I'm overlooking, since I'm not too familiar with IPS patch formatting at the moment.

But I'd love to know more details about the changes you made to the game.

My partner was keeping a detailed changelog, but he took it down as we were changing things too rapidly to keep it updated. There are quite a few things we've changed so it's hard to summarize, but our main goal was to re-balance the game a little, make every character useful in some way and ramp up difficulty a bit. Just about every esper has had its spell repertoire changed to fit more thematically with not only the esper, but the character(s) that can equip it. He's also taken on the mind-numbing task of editing every enemy and formation to improve the spread in some areas.

Some of the smaller changes we made include re-writing large portions of the dialogue, drastically cutting down on the rage list, modifying some unique commands to be more useful (notably Cyan; for example, retort is no longer reactive, but a proactive MP damage ability), trying to make physically attacking more appealing (lowering max MP, raising MP costs of powerful spells, removing magic damage +50% from global relics, etc.), and modifying some of the more useless spells (example: W.Wind is now Storm, a weaker, wind-based version of Merton).

I'll try to remember to put up a link to the changelog when he gets it back up.