Sacred Blaze

Off to a good start... Yeah, I'll sort those things out. That's good to know about the portraits. I'm really glad that I got all the ones that I did. Anyway: The main changes, as listed in the Readme file are: New/Revamped portraits. (Mostly) New map for chapters 6 and 19. Changes in enemy composition, levels and positioning throughout the later chapters. A particular example of this is more promoted enemies in the last few chapters. A couple more stealable items have been added to some (later) chapters, so lookout for them. Small rebalances and changed boss stats. Amongst the player characters this includes: Drake, Gemma, Edward and Jace. Some dialogue changes here and there. A few in the story, but most of it sits in supports, boss conversations and talk conversations. A few more boss conversations have been added. Certain supports - the ones that were really quite slow - are now easier to build. As well as that, some other things: Light Cage, (the A-rank light tome from before) has been bumped down to B-rank and instead you will get the new A-rank tome with the same condition to obtain as the one before. The B-rank light tome is now obtained on chapter 19. Chapter 22 (Matthias) has been reduced in size slightly. The beginning of this map is quite different from how it was before. This was true as of 1.3.1, but the Eclipse tome's hit has been buffed slightly. Not to a really annoying extent, but just so that it at least something of a threat. Val's promoted palette has been changed. Emilia now uses the female soldier animation made by Dr0zz. I'm going to leave the new portrait topic open for now, so if you do have anything, I'd still appreciate whatever can be done to improve upon the remaining few there. In the meantime, this will also be good time to iron out a few of the inevitable bugs and text codes that I might have left in before a truly finalised version of the patch can be released. Whenever people do get around to them, I'd also like to know what people think of the new chapter 6 and chapter 19.

Hey there, everyone. So I'm now releasing the next patch of this to everyone. I'll make a more detailed post about it later, but well, there you go. The important changes are listed in the Readme file. I would not recommend trying to resume where you left off on a previous patch for this one, as some events and stuff have been moved around a bit. As always, let me know if anything weird comes up and of course, enjoy.

I tried to do some reshading on Alyssa's face and neck, cause it was looking pretty bad. All good so far? If so, I might try and see whether I can make the hair look a bit better next, but that might prove difficult. Also, it's really weird seeing how little I apparently seemed to have paid attention to the shading from the people I spliced the face from. :| EDIT: Also tried doing the same things to Zara. At the very least, it's looking better than before, I think.

For the future, I'd probably say not to go editing the portraits that I've already cleared. As for the portrait itself, I guess that the detail on the shirt is interesting. I didn't really have a problem with how it was before though. On the other changes, I don't know. They look pretty minor, so I have no idea whether they're better or not.

Alright, that's fine. After looking at it I think I found out what might be causing things to bug out, anyways. I've now fixed it, I hope. I've checked it and it should now just move onto the save screen if she's dead, as of the next patch. Yeah, I'm still allowing for that. The enemies on the map aren't as static as they were on the older one, so it might be a little bit more difficult, (not by much though) but there are a decent number of enemies for her to get some safe kills on.

There's quite a few things and I wouldn't really be able to explain them all myself. If you want to look into it though I guess you should start here. It's worth looking into if you've got the time to commit to it. I'm pretty sure that the option for the side chapter shouldn't even be coming up if she died, so I might have messed up somewhere in my eventing. I'll have to double check on that one. Unless someone else can confirm for me that they've let Emilia die and the option to go to 19x didn't show up for them? Eh, I could change them, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. That being said, I do a lot of things that I say I won't so maybe I will. :P That's a fair point. I could possibly make the central area below the throne into the courtyard area this time around. I should also point out that this screenshot of the map is actually using the wrong tileset, oops. It's still blue, but it's that lighter blue colour, if you know what I'm talking about.

To do spoilers: Like that, you write Spoiler inside a set of square brackets, write whatever you want after that and then close it off with /Spoiler inside another set square brackets. You can also write Spoiler=A Spoiler, in the same way to give it a title. [spoiler=A Spoiler] Anyway, about the logistics of the warping, just assume that it takes a lot of concentration to do the warping and for someone to suddenly get thrown out of position and then try to run back in isn't something that someone like Ash would be able to pull off easily, I guess. EDIT: Sorry, i forgot to answer your other question. Yeah, you will get all the characters back later, even if they die in the Lyn mode. Yeah, I used Lucius' monk sprite for a different animation, I believe. So when it tries to go to the monk, it's probably trying to access that and bugging out. I think I'm just going to remove the class roll in the next patch. There are other oddities in it besides that glitch, as far as I remember. As far as I've searched, no it can't. But if I'm not adding another light magic character in, do people really want an S-rank, along with the A-rank magic as well? I can easily make the change, but I've always just found that it would be way more effort than it's worth to actually get either Rayden or Katarina to S rank in Light magic.

I've thought about adding more units before, but I don't think it's something I'd do before this next patch, that's for sure. I don't even know if I would do it in the future either, honestly.

Oh, well I did try and give it a go myself. I hadn't gotten around to re-correcting all the shading and everything, but maybe it will be of some use. It's the one on the left, with the one you did before on the right. EDIT: Anyway, I'll be away for the weekend, so I apologise in advance if my responses become really slow or disappear altogether.

Well, this is chapter 6 in Val's mode, so you don't have a thief at this point. I'll be sure to give out Door/Chest Keys. I'm gonna have the doors in the center open up after a certain point in the map. The long left path is probably going to be unused for most people unless you're trying to do the map quickly, in which case it shouldn't be too bad for one of your mounted units to get around. 4-5 turns it's looking like.

Yeah I see what you two are saying. That's my fault though, it was like that in the original. I should probably shift her head a bit more to the left or something, right? And maybe extend the right side of the collar out a bit more too, I guess. Not sure how I'll go about fixing up the shoulders though. She might end up needing some new ones.

So, I've decided to remake yet another one of my castle maps for now. Remember this: [spoiler=OldMap] Some people will probably question why the map is now bigger than it was before, but I've allowed a bit more freedom of movement around the map this time around. As a result of that, the map shouldn't be 25+ turns of slowly moving a trail of units in one direction either. I still need to actually test it myself, but what do people think?

Haha, I was beginning to think this had almost died again. But she's looking great. Thanks a lot for this.

Wow, that's probably the most useful that even I've seen those NPCs be on the prologue. (And I've played it like 100 times over) Anyway, always good to your own game getting played, I guess. Good luck with the run. Also, I know the feeling of getting killed by Drake after a miss at the end all too well.

That's most likely just because I lazily copied the body base over from her mother's outfit. I might try do something about that. Nice. I'm glad you for what you did to the one on the left to make all the features on her look a lot more real.

Great, this one sits better with me. More reminiscent of Lyon, once again, but I think that the much better attention to detail everywhere else draws away from that now. I just recently did a run through my hack to test the new portraits and features coming in my next patch, so I've really grown to appreciate these new portraits so far. And because it just led to some weirdness, I've just updated Val's other look to have her new face for now. I'll just put it up as a placeholder for now, I guess. Not much needs to change about this anyway imo, because it has a very limited showing. (Think Eliwood and Hector's alternate outfits) For the future anyway, the point of her other look is to look more like her mother, (the woman on the right) hence the similar clothing.

I didn't have any problem with either of them before, but alright. The two new ones aren't looking any worse imo, though, so I'll go with the ones you're more happy with. EDIT: Anyway, I've been back and forth on this one, hence why he's still in the purple, but I've decided now that I'm just not quite feeling the redesign of this guy yet, even though it's not bad: (Sorry to Yasako on that one, if you see this.) I think he could do to look a bit less neat in the hair department, sort of similar to the original version. Of course, if you wanted to have your own crack at him from scratch then go ahead. [spoiler=About him] For reference, this guy is the final boss of the game and dark magic user. (Surprise, surprise) He's a pretty standard crazy, evil guy, as one would expect, although not to the same extent as - say, Legato. (the guy next to him on the sheet in the white armour.) The covered eyes is a detail that I would prefer to be kept. Pretty much everything else is up to you if you want to make other changes but he is using Lyon's battle animation and stuff.

That's fine by me. I think my main problem with him was the hood anyways. It was kind of poorly shaded and didn't really mesh well with his head. You've seemingly solved both of those problems, so I guess that's pretty much it.

Whoa... You're too good to me, Yoshi. I can imagine that this took a long time, but I'm glad for it. Spikes hurt me when I was a child and I'll never forgive them.

I've been having this issue for a while in my hack, but I've had no luck seeing where it's coming from, unfortunately. So, basically, upon a certain few characters joining the party, their stats will sometimes be raised to a number well above what it should be. [spoiler=Example] These two images are from different playthroughs. As of now, this issue only occurs on four of my characters, the ones in the slots for the non-tutorial versions of Lyn, Wil, Sain and Kent. On the point that they rejoin in the Eliwood mode, their stats may look like this. Apart from the broken ones, their stats, levels and experience have been perfectly translated over from their stats at the end of the Lyn mode. If I'm remembering correctly, when Lyn mode characters who've survived return in the Eliwood mode, they shouldn't actually get any extra stats anyway. It seems to be fairly random what stats of characters are affected by this. For example, (See picture above) I've seen Kane's strength be raised, or Andrei's skill and speed be raised. The most common stat that has been affected by this to my knowledge is resistance, but it's not always the case. I have also had playthroughs in which this issue will not occur on any of the characters, but it seems to be most common in affecting at least one of the four characters. At one point I thought that it might be something in Nightmare that was affecting this. [spoiler=Nightmare Screens] The stats in the image above are for the characters in Lyn and Wil's slots. There's nothing particularly strange about the values here that should be doing this, I think. It should also be noted that none of the four characters are autolevelled, so they have no reason to be gaining extra stats. One thing I've noticed as well is that if I were to load straight in Eliwood mode, these nightmare base stat bonuses will worked out for the four units just fine and they will never encounter any issues. I also thought that this might be some kind of Hex issue. [spoiler=Hex Screen] So the above screen shows the hex from a part of the Nightmare Character Editor. The highlighted values are those corresponding to Andrei/Wil's (from Level to Constitution bonus) listed numbers in the said editor. The hex image is taken directly from the ROM file after seeing this glitch, so nothing has been altered yet. His base resistance is the 02 byte. But there's nothing here that seems out of place to me. Some other things to note: These characters do all rejoin together on the same chapter as each other, like they do in the original FE7, although i'm not using the same chapter to do this. As a result I have tried seeing if changing the chapter in which they rejoin would solve the issue, but it didn't. This issue can be fixed mid-game, either through editing the nightmare stats of the characters again, or by using codes to change your characters stats, but obviously this isn't ideal and the first solution may actually cause another stat bug later into the game. The bug is raising their stats by 31, which is the limit on stats or something, right? I don't really know what I can do about that though. So, can anyone think of something that might point me in the right direction to seeing where the issue really lies here, or did I just screw my ROM up a long, long time ago and should have realised it back then? Thanks in advance for any answers. And please tell me if if I need to provide anymore information or make something more clear.

He doesn't talk, but he does make noises, so that's good. I had wanted to give his portrait a little something extra, but I honestly can't imagine what would really set him apart. I guess he fits the Berserker class role just fine as it is, anyways.

Yeah, everything's there, I'm sure.

Not exactly sure what the state of this topic is, but... I've got a bit of free time this week, so I was wondering if there's anything that people feel might be particularly helpful to for me to provide that may help with re-designing the last set of portraits? I don't have any ideas at the moment, but it feels kind of off for me to just be sitting here at this point waiting to see what people end up giving me.

Alright, that's fair enough. I decided to go with the split mostly because I thought that the main problem with the map, other than its length was that because you were only ever advancing in one direction, slower units (*cough*Drake*cough*) and non-mounted units basically just got left behind. I think that for a late-game, non-defend castle map though, the forced split works better, too. For the structure of the map, it helps me to control the unit pathing a bit better, and it allows me to make the enemy unit composition and density a bit better, as opposed to saying that the enemies at any given point on the map should be able to handle your team of 12 units no matter who they are. Anyway, here's the final-ish version for now. It's certainly more of a challenge than the previous version, I'd say. (Though that doesn't say much.) Also takes about half the time to actually complete now, as well.

They do get a little bit more, yeah. 15 for heal and 20 for mend. But even with that, level 20/10 seems a bit too high for chapter 18, even if we're talking about Katarina, because the exp per heal gets cut down a little bit once they've promoted. And if its Clare that is that level, then yeah you definitely have been using her a lot.