spralwers

Had three snipers (Takumi, Mozu, and Setsuna) during my Luna BR playthrough. Also used Felicia and Jakob/Dwyer. Enemy phase sucked, but player phase was godlike. Mages were very easy to take out.

I found CQ Lunatic to be far more difficult than FEs 3-10, hard modes included. But maybe it's because they actually allow you to play Lunatic first (unlike earlier FEs where you have to unlock the highest difficulty). You can go in completely blind without knowing anything, which will make the game a lot harder. It's a very different kind of hard though - earlier FEs were hard because of units having high stats. CQ L has that too, but there are a lot more annoying staff effects, and enemy skills that significantly debuff important stats like def by -6. I found this to be quite overwhelming and I didn't want to spend a month going through the game so I went down to Normal. Even on normal I still found the game to in some ways be more challenging than earlier FEs. Towards mid-late game of other FEs, even on hard modes I could always get away with sending a couple of my strongest units supporting each other to dodge, tank, and/or wipe out tons of enemies. But even on normal of this game, I could never count on my units to dodge, and aside from two-three of them I could never count on them to withstand more than a couple hits. Even my fastest units sometimes had trouble doubling enemies, leaving several of my units who weren't necessarily slow nor fast to sometimes get doubled! I even had to bench a couple units because they were too much of a liability and were slowing me down. I've never been so excited to beat a game on its easiest difficulty lmao To expand on Conquest being hard for different reasons - mechanics of this game are very different with supports and items, and it fundamentally changes your decision making. That's probably where I struggled the most with this game - I was making decisions that would've been great in the GBA and Console FEs but didn't work in this game and didn't realize I was playing wrong. There are also lots of gimmicks on various maps you have to deal with. Now that I'm familiar with the game tho, I have ideas on what to do for a lunatic run so I'd be able to play through that and rate its difficulty much better. I didn't find the early game to be any more or less challenging than FE6/FE10 HM. It's challenging don't worry.

For some reason, I thought 2's complement had a different starting point for negative numbers. I originally thought FF was supposed to be -127, and -1 would begin right after FF/2. That's why I was confused. Looks like I didn't learn it well when I was supposed to. Well now that that's been cleared up I can keep going.

One's complement! I haven't seen that since my introduction to electrical and computer engineering course which I took 3 and a half years ago. My original guess was 2's complement, but then I knew immediately that wouldn't be right. I completely forgot about 1's complement. Thanks for the reminder.

hacking progress has been super slow (due to schoolwork) but I'm still able to do things here and there. Something I found interesting: In the laguz character data, in the set of four bytes which are for their transform gauge, the last two bytes are used for the transform gauge lost per tern (transformed/untransformed). For Lyre (Lire), those last two bytes read: FB FC So it looks like they're using some form of signed integers to do the reductions. I changed those two bytes to 0A 0A and Lyre was gaining ten transform gauge per turn, whether she was transformed or untransformed. I haven't fooled around with it enough to figure out where the negative numbers start (I'm guessing FF is -1?) . But I thought I'd note it for future reference.

Perfect. And duh, a pointer points to an address. Silly me haha, guess I just never connected the dots. Thanks for clearing that up. Well that was successful, I was able to change Ike's Ettard skill to crit + 25! Here's some snapshots of stuff I've done: They made thunder magic pitifully weak in this game. I always felt like this should've been the relationship between the anima magics: Fire - Accurate and Strong Wind - Weakest and Most Accurate Thunder - Strongest and Least Accurate Ike with critical+25. Oh noez, no Ettard! Here's a list of things I've been wanting to be able to do that I can do now: -Adjust all the playable characters' starting info (growths, stats, level, skills, etc) -Adjust item properties Things left for me to learn: -Adjust exp gained per battle for the laguz -Adjust enemies: their stats and what they are (as in taking a soldier and changing them to a sword cav). -Adjust enemy reinforcements (when they come, where they come, and their stats) -Adjust battle preparations and character statuses on maps: # of units allowed per map, less/additional starting positions to accommodate the # of units, which characters are required (if any), which characters have commander status per map The things left for me to learn are way more complicated than the stuff that I just learned, which is why I decided to do all the easy stuff first :D Once I've learned how do do all or at least most of the stuff on the list, I'll start working on my hack. Also forgot to mention: Vincent, in chapter 3 of your tutorial, under the spoiler where you go over Florete, you made a small mistake. The bytes are in the right order (since I was able to search that string and find it), but the way you labeled them is not. Weight and critical should be switched.

I saw those actually and messed around with them, they were pretty cool. Is there any way to lock/unlock a skill slot? Also, do you think you and/or Goldie can find RAM hacking codes that adjust the exp gain for the laguz when they're transformed/not transformed, and eliminate the exp penalty for wildheart? I was gonna do this myself by running dolphin in debug mode, but unfortunately it was way too slow. It ran at around 5 fps :x

Ok cool. That just made a lot of things about character skills make more sense. Now for that list of skills you posted, how do you determine what pointer value (or what set of 4 bytes) points to each of the skills?

Funny you talk about replacing files in real time. I actually just set that up with riivolution. It loads files on my computer through an internet connection instead of loading files on the sd/usb. It works, but there's still one big botleneck to replacing files in real time, and that all depends on when the wii loads those files into the RAM. Here's a quick example for the FE10Data.cms file. It loads the FE10Data.cms file very early, even before the health screens that warn you to make sure you have space around you when using the wiimote! So if you choose to modify things through the FE10Data.cms file, you will unfortunately have to restart the game entirely every time you change something. Theoretically, I could put all the FE10 files somewhere on my computer and have riivolution load all of those instead of reading off the disc. I'll do that later and report how it goes. Also a quick thing about Ike's data in the FE10Data file: I changed the 24 to a 25 and Ike was no longer able to equip his Ettard. Edit: Changing the 03 and the 36 also seemed to disable his Ettard. Changing the 00 in the beginning crashed the game even before the very first screen. I guess I had the pointer point to something completely invalid haha. I'll look more into this later as well.

Did anyone figure out how to adjust the exp for the laguz? If not, can anyone give me some pointers on how I'd go looking for that information? Also, progress on FE10 hacking: I was able to successfully edit stat growths. Just for giggles I gave Leonardo all 100%s for his stat growths, and whatddya know, he got an all stat level up! I also decided to get my hands on a retail disc and use riivolution. I figured it'd be better to test via riivolution b/c if I do fully get my hack going, riivolution would probably be the easiest way for people to play. Wrote a really simple template for riivolution where as long as you just put the files in a folder called "FE10Hack" at the root of the SD/USB, the files will replace the ones on disc. No need to worry about putting the files in the same folder structure as on disc. Just put any of your edited files in that folder and they'll be used instead of the ones on disc. I attached the .xml that tells riivolution how to handle the data, in case you want to see how it works. I'll eventually make my own topic, once I've figured out more stuff. Edit: Updated the XML, just renamed a few things. Fire Emblem RD Hack.xml

I got the whole loading gamecube games from an SD card working. I have a black wii so back-ups aren't possible unless I replace the optical drive with an optical drive from the older wiis. Unfortunately it's slower than reading from the game disc. The games are stored as .isos so unfortunately no direct file access unlike sneek/uneek + DI, which keeps FE9 hacking very cumbersome with iso recompiling. Maybe someday the guys will update the program to store the games in the respective file systems so you have direct access to the files.