Thanks for the fast reply. It's always fun to hear similar stories in terms of being introduced to Brigandine. I didn't have a lot of money for games either, so buying one was a big risk. I paid $13 for Brigandine, try buying a copy for that now.
You're right on the money with teaching college, students who don't want to be in class, just don't come. Sooooooooooooo much better.
In terms of my mod, I actually think writing a function to figure out the odds of a spell or attack hitting would be fun. I don't know the formula for that, but I'm assuming that with a little experimentation and number crunching, I could figure it out.
As you mentioned, they already has to be a function built-in to the game that returns the % chance of a spell or attack succeeding. In GE, I'm assuming it's a value returning function and that the result is being assigned to a variable which is then being passed to the text drawing function.
It seems like, according to your post, the hard part is going to be finding those functions and tapping in to them.
I'm not familiar with the Playstation assembler language, do you have any documentation on it?
I also have never used a Playstation debugger, so maybe I will check out the psx 1.13 debugger and see what I can figure out.
It sounds like this could be quite an undertaking. Maybe it would be easier to just write custom functions, but either way, I'd have to find the variables that hold combatants various statistics.
This could get crazy........
I appreciate your help. If anyone one the forums has some good resources for tutorials on psx assembly or debuggers, shoot the links my way!
I will hit Google and see what I can find.
Thanks!
Update: I just played some LOF last night and became aware of a another potential hiccup for my mod. In GE, when a player selects a unit to attack or cast a spell on, two screens pop up that give an overview of the attacking unit and the unit being attacked along with the % chance that either unit will hit. Those two screens that pop up are frozen until the user hits the "O" button to confirm they want to perform the attack. In LOF, two screens also pop up, but they do not display the % chance of hitting, nor do they freeze and wait for the player to confirm the action, they simply pop up for a second or two and then the previously selected action is carried out. In other words, in order for this mod to replicate GE, I would have to do the following:
1. Find the variable or the function call that holds/produces the chance to hit for each unit
2. Find a way to display the % chance on the two pop up screens
3. Freeze the pop up screens in place until the user confirms that the action they selected is the action that they want to carry out by hitting the "X" button (since this is LOF USA it will use "X" instead of "O"). I'm assuming there is a function similar to thread.sleep built in that can do this, but it will require further investigation.
4. Give the user an opportunity to cancel the selected action by hitting the ^ (that's supposed to be a triangle) button
5. Figure out what to do if they cancel. I mean, I logically know what I want to happen, but I need to make sure that the code understands what I want. (go back to the battle overview screen)
It's too bad we can't load a .EXE into Visual Studio and have the code show up as JAVA, or C#, or C++ or something, that would make this way easier. What would be REALLY cool is if someone took all the cool things from GE and put them into LOF....now that would be a project!
Ok, so, "cut my teeth" on the debugger. Here we go! Maybe I can change Coel's starting class to ninja master or something, that seems way easier!
You're right on the money with teaching college, students who don't want to be in class, just don't come. Sooooooooooooo much better.
In terms of my mod, I actually think writing a function to figure out the odds of a spell or attack hitting would be fun. I don't know the formula for that, but I'm assuming that with a little experimentation and number crunching, I could figure it out.
As you mentioned, they already has to be a function built-in to the game that returns the % chance of a spell or attack succeeding. In GE, I'm assuming it's a value returning function and that the result is being assigned to a variable which is then being passed to the text drawing function.
It seems like, according to your post, the hard part is going to be finding those functions and tapping in to them.
I'm not familiar with the Playstation assembler language, do you have any documentation on it?
I also have never used a Playstation debugger, so maybe I will check out the psx 1.13 debugger and see what I can figure out.
It sounds like this could be quite an undertaking. Maybe it would be easier to just write custom functions, but either way, I'd have to find the variables that hold combatants various statistics.
This could get crazy........
I appreciate your help. If anyone one the forums has some good resources for tutorials on psx assembly or debuggers, shoot the links my way!
I will hit Google and see what I can find.
Thanks!
Update: I just played some LOF last night and became aware of a another potential hiccup for my mod. In GE, when a player selects a unit to attack or cast a spell on, two screens pop up that give an overview of the attacking unit and the unit being attacked along with the % chance that either unit will hit. Those two screens that pop up are frozen until the user hits the "O" button to confirm they want to perform the attack. In LOF, two screens also pop up, but they do not display the % chance of hitting, nor do they freeze and wait for the player to confirm the action, they simply pop up for a second or two and then the previously selected action is carried out. In other words, in order for this mod to replicate GE, I would have to do the following:
1. Find the variable or the function call that holds/produces the chance to hit for each unit
2. Find a way to display the % chance on the two pop up screens
3. Freeze the pop up screens in place until the user confirms that the action they selected is the action that they want to carry out by hitting the "X" button (since this is LOF USA it will use "X" instead of "O"). I'm assuming there is a function similar to thread.sleep built in that can do this, but it will require further investigation.
4. Give the user an opportunity to cancel the selected action by hitting the ^ (that's supposed to be a triangle) button
5. Figure out what to do if they cancel. I mean, I logically know what I want to happen, but I need to make sure that the code understands what I want. (go back to the battle overview screen)
It's too bad we can't load a .EXE into Visual Studio and have the code show up as JAVA, or C#, or C++ or something, that would make this way easier. What would be REALLY cool is if someone took all the cool things from GE and put them into LOF....now that would be a project!
Ok, so, "cut my teeth" on the debugger. Here we go! Maybe I can change Coel's starting class to ninja master or something, that seems way easier!