Final Fantasy VI Randomizer

- Added automatic check for updates.

That's a pretty nice feature, for the developer. You can release as many updates as you want and never worry about people missing them.

I like that it tells what items you can get in each area. I was thinking that it might be interesting to do a race where the guide is allowed, so participants can plan out their routes. I did a test randomization and I noticed that there were only five MiaBs (and two of them were the same). Vanilla has about 11, or about 4% of all chests, I think. Just wondering if that change is intentional.

I don't think Umaro is able to use the Lore command, for some reason. I'm pretty sure his Lore menu is always blank.

I forgot to mention it earlier, but for swag points you can rewrite the checksum of the rom (so that it shows up as "not corrupt" in emulators). Here's the algorithm I used:

Code:

def rewrite_checksum(filename):
    MEGABIT = 0x20000
    f = open(filename, 'r+b')
    subsums = [f.read(MEGABIT) for _ in xrange(24)]
    subsums = [sum(map(ord, s)) for s in subsums]
    subsums += subsums[-8:]
    checksum = sum(subsums) & 0xFFFF
    f.seek(0xFFDE)
    write_multi(f, checksum, length=2)
    f.seek(0xFFDC)
    write_multi(f, checksum ^ 0xFFFF, length=2)
    f.close()

Basically, the checksum is a sum of 32 megabits, but there's only 24 megabits in the rom, so the last 8 megabits are mirrored.

Excellent stuff, Abyssonym. Unfortunately the auto-update doens't seem to work for everyone. Sadly I have no way to even diagnose this at the moment.

MiaBs: That's just how the randomization came out, though I expect it to be lower in general. I plan on eventually changing the MiaB algorithm to either match the 4% number on average, or maybe go a little higher. This will have to wait until I can place the monsters in tiers, much like the items. Of course at that point I'll also be able to randomize the formations that show up, which would be another nice change to have. Possibly be able to randomize the formations a little bit.

Umaro's second ability is a stop-gap until Leno finishes his patch that will swap Umaro's Magic list pointers with the character that is a berserker. Last I checked he had some good progress, I think getting half of the feature to work perfectly. He just hasn't had time to finish it up. I think the Lore thing came up... if that's the only one that is bugged, I can just remove that from the list of abilities he can get.

The checksum thing will be nice. I'll need to be able to make the save checksum work anyway for when I start writing save files, as I plan on including a save right before the floating continent (after Leo dies, with the cutscene already watched) with all characters at level 20-30 (not sure on this number yet) and all missable treasures from WoB acquired, as well as come number of every consumable buyable at that point. That way players can start a race at the "interesting" part of the game. This feature would be nice to have input on for tweaking numbers, etc. Any idea if the save uses the same algorithm for the checksum?

I haven't done any save game hacking but here's the relevant code: http://datacrystal.romhacking.net/wiki/F...m_checksum

That subroutine is called both when saving the game, and when checking that a valid save file exists. It looks simple enough, just adds up all the bytes in the save file. It would probably be easier to disable the check altogether, but if you generate a valid checksum then the software would be extendable to vanilla FF6 roms.

As for starting items... normally a racer would earn money mainly by selling what's provided in chests, so I'd think starting them with a low number of consumables, and letting them do their own shopping would be best. Maybe give them some extra GP for encounters not-fought. I guess starting up the game and immediately needing to go shopping could be a bummer, but they're going to need to check out their party at that time anyway.

When I did the race, my average party level was only 18 before the floating continent, and the highest leveled characters were 22. AtmaWeapon's a pretty neat boss, so I don't think the characters should be overleveled at that point. Were you planning to start with every esper's magic learned on every character? TBH that would be a huge advantage. Also, I'm guessing that you're planning to leave dances, rages, and lores at their initial values?

Hey Dessyrekt.

Jackimus and I have been racing your randomizer (generally to Kefka) a lot and while it is awesome and a lot of fun we have come across some rather... game-ending flaws that we thought we would pass on in the hopes that you might fix them.

First and foremost is our perennial race-ending issue: Vargas. Half of the time when you get to Vargas Sabin is LITERALLY unable to kill him. If Sabin is Umaro, guess what? the race is over, you just wasted 30 minutes. If Sabin is Relm, Gogo, Mog, most versions of Celes or Terra, Strago or Gau (if you get a bad selection of lores/rages) then guess what? the race is over, start again. In the non-Umaro case you might luck out and be able to equip them with a poison rod and luck out with procs and lack of gale-cuts, but at the same time you might not have found a single healing item for sale by that point and be completely unable to keep up with the damage.
Now I am aware that we COULD grind for some levels and win that way, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of a race, right? I haven't been keeping track of what level we generally get there at, so for now let's just say that said level is LOW. We run away from most fights all the way there (unless we luck out and get a bunch of insta-kill crowd control options like tools or slots) and so every time we get to Vargas it is kind of a coin toss whether the race ends at that point or not.

So our basic suggestion to fix this problem of having an awesome race cut off prematurely is easy: reduce Vargas' hit-points further. If we only have a fight command and starting gear (a common scenario) we MIGHT be able to get 500 damage off before we die. It would honestly be best if Vargas died in one hit, but if you want to retain some amount of challenge then 500 HP would be doable.


Our next biggest problem is the Flame Eater. The one time we raced to the World of Ruin Jack spent a full hour running through the game from the inn to the Flame Eater only to get killed over and over. He counters everything with Fire 2 and you're kind of expected to have breakable rods and Aqua Lore to deal with him. We had throw with no water skeans, one character with steal and a terrible magic stat, and something else I don't remember. Basically our only way to kill it was to equip a wall ring we had randomly found and throw things at it with one character over and over.
There are two ways to fix this. The main problem is really just that if you die to the Flame Eater you've lost 8 minutes. A save point in the room before it would go a long way towards reducing the buildup of rage from constantly being thrown back before the inn.
Second method would be to reduce its health, or let us break ice rods at that point, or some such. Because without that random wall ring we probably would have both given up at that fight.

Shiva and Ifrit can also be a problem when racing. You don't fight many fights so your knowledge of magic is slim by that point and if they happen to be RNG dicks and keep tossing level 2 spells at you it can be a ridiculously hard fight. This is another place we only really got through based on luck or that same wall ring. The annoyance is mitigated to a large degree by the save point right before them, but a reduction of their HP to some degree would help out a lot.

Jack has issues with your not allowing rods to be broken, but I understand your point of view and it would kind of break the game to be able to randomly buy poison rods in Figaro and then just kill everything with them. Maybe you could allow rod-breaking once you get to Strago's town? By then you know spells of that level anyway, and it would go a long way towards killing the Flame Eater.


The only other issue I can think of at the moment is just how often we have to press A to advance text. We spend about 1/3 of the race just mashing A for no reason. If you could find a way to auto-scroll the text, that would be amazing. Similarly if you could take the Opera scenes and Maduin scenes out like you did with the intro and such that would be excellent. They both take up a lot of time and involve no skill in terms of a race.


If we come up with any other things I'll let you know. These are the main ones, and honestly it is mostly just Vargas that is perpetually catastrophic to the runs.

Let me know what you think.

We stream our races sometimes on Jack's twitch channel. If you want to watch one sometime I believe his twitch thingy is twitch.tv/jackimuswedge. He is also the best in the world at blind-folded punch-out.

Just to throw my two cents in here as well, from what I've seen of this randomizer:

I really agree that the second half of Vargas should be easier. I think there should be more more emphasis on the fight when you have Terra/Locke/Edgar and less on when you have one character with no real strategic choices to speak of. I honestly think a OHKO of the second half would be much appreciated.

My first instinct is to agree with Mr Entity that rods should be breakable. I think that as long as rods early game cost enough money, they can probably be kept in check somewhat. But it's hard to tell because I don't know enough about how the economy is balanced.

Just a note, you can go outside Thamasa while the house is on fire to save. That way you don't have to redo the Inn portion again.

Personally I think that removing all cutscenes that you can save directly after anyways (as these have no impact on the race other than wasting everybody's time) would be pretty cool. I know that it's possible (and for any individual cutscene, not that hard), but it would take a ton of work for sure just because there are a ton of little cutscenes to erase.

However, I don't think that Ifrit/Shiva or Flame Eater necessarily need to be made weaker. I think that simply because it's intended to be for racing doesn't mean that you should always be able to charge through and still beat everything. I feel like planning and making decisions on which encounters to fight to learn the spells you need or get enough money/EXP is part of the speedrun. As long as it's not excessive, like for Vargas.

About rods, I do personally actually like them not being able to break. On the one hand, depending on how readily accessible they are, it becomes far too easy when you can break rods all day from the word go. Honestly, rods are powerful enough with the fight command since they proc lv2 spells, and if a rager can use one you basically win (like in last nights surprisingly close race- incidentally, Andrew screwed up his movements in the 11th hour multiparty battle and lost by a little under a minute for those of you who didnt catch the whole thing). Most of my complaints about rods originate from a race that I lost to Andrew where I had found an ice rod (and sprint shoes) in the training room, and was banking on breaking that thing to get past Vargas, since i straight up skipped south figaro and had limited healing items. Of course, that was the exact moment I found out we couldn't break rods, and yeah. Not fun. Prolly my fault for not checking the readme, but whatever.

However, I don't think that Ifrit/Shiva or Flame Eater necessarily need
to be made weaker. I think that simply because it's intended to be for
racing doesn't mean that you should always be able to charge through and
still beat everything. I feel like planning and making decisions on
which encounters to fight to learn the spells you need or get enough
money/EXP is part of the speedrun. As long as it's not excessive, like
for Vargas.

I agree with this also, really. it's no fun if it's too easy. The main issue I had with these fights is really based on a small sample size where there really was only one way past both fights (outside of grinding a pile of levels). Ifrit and Shiva are honestly fine I'd say, there is a save right next to them so you can throw attempts at them until you don't get powerful party-wipe caliber stuff thrown your way, and while the luckbox wallring we had in the one full WoB race was really the only reliable way to win, I'm pretty sure we both had access to runic and were just dumb when we picked our party for that section of the game.

Flame Eater is a bit different in that you have a forced party though. Ive played through this game quite a few times, obviously, and Ive never until that race noticed what a complete as*h**e that guy is, because, well normally you break rods/aqua rake/morphed icebrands hits etc. He really seems to be designed to be killed really fast with water/ice-stuff, like a damage race or something. countering everything with fire 2 is vicious enough, but he can also decide to just outright end you by reflecting himself and bouncing fire 3 spells at your team which are OHKOs to even overlevelled teams. Again, small sample size since we've only done the one WoB race (though we've probably both played the randomiser casually and I dont ever remember him being an issue), but man lemme tell ya, doing that part over and over for at least an hour was not fun.

And while the general concensus is Vargas still needs less HP, I noticed last night during our first failed race cause of this guy, the real problem is the countdown. The amount of HP he has is fair to everything but umaro-sabin with a bad initial weapon if he doesn't condemn you like that. Might be a more interesting way to make more winnable seeds (without excessive grinding I mean. every seed is winnable if you voluntarily overpower yourself).

Also, it was pretty cool that you played along with us last night, LK. Im not sure how popular the randomiser is outside the site, but it might be neat to have a weekly/bi weekly race with a handful of folks. Ive done a few punchout races with some of those folks, and I got to say the races are my favorite part of streaming gameplay. Long as we're all using the livesplit timer, it wouldnt matter too much if we all don't start at the exact same time, which naturally is impossible to co-ordinate over the internets.

Lastly, a small wish- a program that creates a save for the generated rom at the start of WoR.

I feel as though there are enough ways to defeat Flame Eater that most runs should get something.

-Access to Reflect (and I suspect Wall Rings are often for sale, if expensive) should wall him pretty well, as you did during your playthrough.
-Rasp turns him into a joke, and even Osmose could possibly put a dent in his 480 MP if you can waste enough MP before using it.
-Runic on any of your characters will help a lot.
-Rage might make for an easy victory, if you have something decent with Fire absorption/nullification.
-I'm not sure if it's possible to have normally late-game armor such as Flame Shields from high-tier chests such as clocks. If that's the case, the right piece of equipment might destroy the fight.
-Sometimes you might actually have the power to damage race him as intended.

While the chances of any one of these things being true for a particular playthrough isn't necessarily high, I suspect you'd have something going for you on most playthroughs. Of course, with a single data point it's hard to tell for sure.

Regular races in this game sound like a cool idea. If you were to go through with this, do you think that it would be a better idea to start the race earlier so that we'd finish earlier as well? I could also look into finding the best way to remove countdown from Vargas' special. Too bad I obviously can't tinker with the randomizer itself, but I may be able to "hot-fix" it after the ROM is created.

One thing I've struggled with in a couple runs is the utter lack of curative magic. In two runs, I've had no espers with any cure spells in the WoB, and no natural magic casters with a cure spell.

In fact, in one run, I never got a cure spell at all, and in the other I didn't get one until Alexander, when I finally could learn Cure 3. Worse yet, there was only one shop in the WoB with dried meat, none of them carried potions. In the WoR, there was only one with potions.

Seems like there should be some kind of assurance that we can at least have one WoB esper with either Cure or Cure 2. It doesn't even matter which. Trying to play through using only dried meat for healing is absolutely crippling.

Maybe I just got horrid luck, I have no idea how often this happens, but it happened twice in a row to me, which is very frustrating.

And you talking about the flame eater is even more funny. I had to get by it with no cure spells, Terra had sketch, Strago had berserker, and I think Locke had tools (making him my most useful guy there). A total recipe for disaster.

There are certain aspects of the game that were meant to have access to certain things, and are nearly impossible without them. 99% random is good, but I think there needs to be 1% of assurance that we have reasonable (see: not having to overlevel) means to overcome all obstacles.

Interesting that you mention Vargas. I can't relate, I've always had someone with blitz for that fight, oddly enough.