zahlman

Yeah, you did try, at least (not very hard obviously). Whatever, you still have lots to work with.

Well I mean you're also giving up on Purge/Bolting, Restore, effective tanking of status staves, effective tanking of magic in general (I'm guessing you're going to need a LOT of Pure Water)... But yeah, I think you'll manage too. :) I'm guessing you're planning on Sacae route?

Ahh, true, true. Well played, then. GL, I think you have a really good shot at this one TBH.

Picks received were as follows (please excuse the programmer formatting - yes, I wrote a Python script to make sure I didn't mess up the auctioning. BTW this is kind of a pain to do for FE6 because I had to normalize everyone's spellings of the character names to the ones in the SF character list. Also, holy crap there are a lot of characters in this game): This results in: Dr. Will: Lott, Lugh, Astohl, Miredy, Igrene, Fa, 10G remaining (I like it.) Naglfar: Marcus, Allen, Rutger, Saul, Echidna, 42G remaining (Oh, you got a healer this time, I see...) Second Pronoun: Lance, Bors, Ellen, Dorothy, Zealot, Treck, Noah, Wendy, Barth, Oujay, Fir, Klein, (Ray), Hugh, (Zeis), Niime, Juno, 14G remaining (An interesting strategy. Cecilia is idly wondering whether you really think Lance >>> Allen, or if you figured you'd only be able to get one and flipped a coin) Eclipse: Wolt, Dieck, Chad, Clarine, Geese, 55G remaining (Was probably too optimistic about winning good characters for cheap. Dieck+Chad+Clarine should be pretty solid though IMO) Cecilia looks over the short list of remaining characters, and banninates... Tate! (P.S. If anyone would like to do a bit of ROM hacking to produce a video of Cecilia pwning Tate with Aircalibur to insert here, you would officially be awesome for doing so.) ROUND 2 BEGINS, bidding on the remaining characters: Merlinus, Wade, Cath, Dayan, Douglas. Enjoy them, Eclipse. Unless of course there are late entries The biggest surprise for me is that Fir went for 1G. Honestly, I expected more than one of you to think "damn, Rutger's gonna be stupidly overpriced, and a swordmaster would be really nice to have". Second Pronoun drafted (if I'm thinking straight) a couple characters that won't be recruitable, due to not having drafted their recruiters who are also not free for those chapters. >:D Keep in mind that you aren't obligated to recruit who you draft, nor are you obligated to keep anyone alive except Roy. Due to an oversight that will definitely not be allowed next time and means that zahlman is getting extra detention, you can even let Cecilia die after you get the A support.

Ahhh right, you get another Knight crest from Aias, and I guess with 3 pallies you can do some convoying techniques with Tethys that wouldn't be possible with 2... it'll still be a treat to watch I'm sure :D I tag-teamed with Innes, Saleh and Gerik in the center area, but I guess I didn't really need to weaken that one extra knight with the Longbow... Damn. Almost an entire turn per chapter over what I thought was "close to optimal". Humbling. (There isn't really anywhere that massive RNG abuse would help, is there? Except against Fomortiis anyway...)

Renault.

WTF!? The secret shop is all the way around that corner, how can anyone get there in 7 turns even uninhibited? You must have some truly sick rescue/dance chaining worked out for it... ? 18 might well be impossible in 4 just because of the number of enemies. I had been hopeful though because my 5-turn had Artur as a warper and didn't use Summoner!Knoll or Purge. :/

Aha, so you did manage a 5-turn for Ch11, the 7-turn that I mentioned for Ch14, but Ch18 is still 5 :( Whatever, that's seriously impressive, major props to you sir My plan for Ch14 involved Eirika facing down the two mages (they can't touch her with Pure Water/Barrier) and one remaining Knight on EP while Seth has to hit Carlyle on EP and Turn 7 PP, while another cav takes out the knight if Eirika didn't crit on EP since he'll be in the way. Sound about right?

Seriously though, what's wrong with Lyn being 15? It's not like there are sex scenes

She wasn't very happy about that. Running things here is part of my punishment. (Seriously, though, see the disclaimer. To be totally honest, it's mostly there because I knew you'd see this eventually. That argument may have put the character of Cecilia at the forefront of my mind, but that's about it, really. I had the basic idea for the draft first and then came up with this characterization as a way of justifying some things, and creating some additional interesting challenges. ---- 2 hours left for round 1 as I post this update. gogogogogo zzzzzzzzzz

My guess is that user IDs are not reused if a user is deleted, while the user count obviously doesn't count deleted users.

In Karel's tale, if you use the start button to skip cutscenes between the maps, an EP will start immediately on the new map. (I'm not sure this is 100% reproducible, and it might have something to do with whether you finish the previous map on PP or EP)

To address the original issue, I strongly recommend configuring Windows (I assume you're using Windows if you're having this issue) to not hide extensions in file names. You're hacking ROMs FFS, you don't need your operating system to try that hard to make everything "user-friendly" (not really) and hide important information from you. You want the Folder Options control panel -> View tab -> uncheck 'Hide extensions for known file types'.

Yeah, I hear you, it's just that ASM programming is pretty much always just gonna be like that. Honestly, programming in any language is. You're not going to learn (much about) how to sprite from a tutorial, either. :/ (Or at least, you might, but it's still going to seem unbearably tedious until you get some experience. Unless I just suck...) Anyway, gl;hf next time you try it.

Well, yeah, I wouldn't want to bias things needlessly in favour of whoever has the next pick after my post. :P (Also don't forget the Gold there which could buy you an extra stat booster or promotion item of your choosing.)

I'm not here to register an opinion, except to disagree strongly with: People definitely give a shit, and "because it's Israel" is exactly why. The whole Israel vs. Palestine thing constantly recurs in American politics and media. In Canada somewhat less so, but I've found that articles on the topic in Canadian media are absolute god tier when it comes to generating angry Letters to the Editor.

Since this got revived, and since I have several years of professional experience in game development (including co-founding a startup): 0. Nintenlord has a very good point: there are a lot of ways to do it, and often a lot of possible audiences, even within a genre. Personally, I feel that a game is made more by a lack of weaknesses than by its strengths. Although no (explicit) story might be better than a bad story. 1. The "narrative through gameplay" thing. Narrative is like a piece of storyline that emerges through gameplay and fills the gaps. Because (despite what many modern game developers would like to believe, especially with the recent infiltration of so many people from the film industry) a game is not a movie. The story is interactive; you tell part of the story, and the player tells the rest by playing. Example: The gameplay of SMB is running, jumping (, swimming, shooting fireballs, flying, whatever else they have in the newer ones...). The narrative that evolves is "And so, Mario avoided dying in the dangerous area, maybe got some power-ups along the way, pwned and/or outwitted Bowser, and rescued yet another toadstool. Where IS that darned princess anyway?" Notice how only the last part is expressed by in-game (or even in-manual) text. Failing to complete the game's objectives tells a (tragic) story, too, BTW. It's actually hard not to imply a storyline (create narrative) in most genres of game. Pretty much as soon as you introduce a character - i.e. some graphical element on screen that is intended to represent either the player, or a sentient being under the player's control - you have a protagonist, and hence an antagonist (even if it's a Man vs. Nature situation, you can't avoid some kind of antagonist, because without a goal for your character(s), you don't have a game), and hence a story. This narrative concept allows you to put the player in control of part of the story. This gets to be a big issue in game design in the west, because there's always this push to make things open-concept and non-linear and sandbox-y, but these things are hard to get right while (a) not creating logical inconsistencies and paradoxes; and (b) actually motivating the player to go through the whole "story mode". So you usually get very limited, "additions" to the story-line. Support conversations in FE are a good example of this: the player chooses who to support, and correspondingly chooses an additional piece of the story to reveal. Another good example is found in the Elibian Nights hack, where (spoiler?) there is a special cutscene accompanying the Jumping the Shark achievement (and others?). By meeting the conditions, you alter the story (literally, considering the setting of the hack). 2. About graphics. I feel like you guys are missing an important distinction. There's flashiness, which matters little, and polish, which matters a whole lot, and has been attended to by well-recognized games since approximately forever. Polish is about taking care of the details, and making sure that nothing looks bad, as opposed to making sure that any particular thing looks awesome. Obviously, this is relative to the available technology. Artwork for NES games was designed to look good on 80s era TVs that would blur the shit out of things and produce somewhat unreliable colour, while working at a resolution that's not exactly native for the TV display. The good ones (IMO) paid attention to the sprite limit and avoided flickering by designing the UI to work within the limits. In the GBA FE games, I notice rather quickly how certain map tiles don't fit together properly, and it detracts from the graphical experience for me. The individual river tiles all look fine (and the animation is a clever hack), but it all falls apart when a corner is misshapen. A lot of the backgrounds also come across as pretty cheap. On the other hand, I have to give them really high marks for the sprites: there's a consistent art style within each game, they could have punted on hair but they didn't (it's detailed for all the characters, typically with 3 colours reserved for hair), and in FE7, you get several sprites for each lord because they're needed to tell the story properly, not because they had a whole bunch of space left over in the ROM (which they did) or because they wanted to show off a bunch of alternate takes on those characters. Consistency really is key. Palette swapping is not a cheap hack to get multiple sprites out of the same artwork - well, it is, but it also goes a long way towards achieving consistency. In the FE approach, a few specific colours are reserved as common, and get swapped according to the unit's team. The rest of the artwork has to be designed to look good with those colours being forced (and dominant), regardless of which set is used. It's not easy for the artists, but when you get it right, the result looks very well polished, because nothing is visually jarring - you have an expectation of what class X on team Y will look like, because of the palette consistency, and that expectation never gets broken. This is all important because the eye is drawn naturally to things that look wrong. It's much harder to criticize a game for not being flashy enough, because there generally isn't a specific kind of flashiness that you're expecting to be there but isn't. Hackers and spriters can go back and say "I have an idea to make character X look more awesome", but nobody notices a character looking non-awesome on the first playthrough unless the character looks noticeably worse than others (lol Dorothy - but that's mostly intentional), or unless the lack of detail in characters in general is really obvious. Keep in mind that GBA FE sprites are 16 colours; you never look at them and think "gawd, these suck, there's totally no excuse for not doing these in 256 colours" (actually there kinda is, but that's beside the point) because they're full detail. Say we hacked around the limitations: you could use 255 colours on the skin tones and clothing/armor designs, and 1 on the hair, and it would really suck. Similarly, for hacks, you can sprite the most awesome OC ever, and then have the person doing the insertion mess up and get the blinking frames misaligned by a pixel and leaving a blinking white horizontal line over the eyes, and guess what people will notice?

I'm guessing it's the whole cultural unity thing. The USA result isn't the surprising to me, although it's depressing. Notice they've improved since Bush was thrown out; economic recovery tends to placate civilians at least until they realize they aren't personally seeing the benefits. I wouldn't be surprised if the US rank drops again by the end of the year and/or throughout 2012 with all the OWS protesting. Apparently a lot of the US military budget is going to protect other countries (especially in Europe, I've been told), but in a lot of those cases I have to wonder how much of it is really necessary. Do European nations really need much protection from each other in the EU era? If not from each other, then from whom?

My guess is that they'd rather have the high-skill Echidna in a game where hitrates are just so plain suck-tastic all around, or maybe it has something to do with how he compares to Gonzo if you can actually tolerate getting him to 20/1 with those suck-tastic hitrates (I never tried using him but damn that's a nice promotion he gets). Of course, Gonzo does have a bit of an availability problem if you want to compare him to Bartre on that basis, and I'm certainly not denying that Bartre looks pretty manry here. Personally my temptation is to compare Bartre to FE7 Hawkeye; at least superficially, Bartre doesn't look so good in that comparison to me, but you might well not be able to do any better in FE6. But I am totally not here to do the tier list thing :O (also, "but Bartre" what?) Personally, I'm surprised it took so long for anyone to pick up a thief. This is a long game, and the Ch 6 treasure seems super-useful to me (the main advantage Chad has over Astohl, really - since yadda yadda average stats, Chad isn't realistically going to be anywhere near lv 10 by the time you get Astohl on any normal playthrough. Really stats don't matter all that much for thieves at all, but I do like them having a little durability just in case...). I noticed that Naglfar not only doesn't have a healer, but doesn't even have a magic user yet. And only Sophia's left. I wonder how well that will work out... (well, he did get Miledy and Rutger and Chad, plus Marcus is common, so it shouldn't be too bad) For Jake, it seems like it will be hard to recruit Zeiss without incurring a penalty with Miledy? :s Or at least she'll need an escort... The rest of that team looks really solid, except Dorothy IMO. Those first 5 picks should work really well together, with Dieck -> Shin -> Percy ensuring good combat for the whole game, Saul for healing, and Lugh as a rising star. Ward is massively stronger and luckier, and will eventually overtake Lot in skill. Lot is faster and more durable, also by a pretty significant margin. I would personally prefer Lot, because I find the hitrate problem more annoying in the early game than the late game (fuck Leygance, man. Seriously.) and because I'd expect to have the manry-Str (or Mag) role decently well covered by others in late game.

Yep, Eclipse got it. (Oops! Edited to stay in character!) Cecilia says: come on, everyone, send zahlman your bids and we'll see what characters end up in your treat bags tonight. You don't want me pulling a trick instead, ri~ght? :3

I thought it was supposed to be fairly light armor. Granted, lords and mages generally seem to just wear ordinary clothing... but anyway, I was thinking more along the lines that they know their way around the woods and can negotiate a path through the trees more effectively because they're accustomed to being in the woods for hunting. If you had a separate Hunter class then yeah, sure, but ISTM a fair number of FE archers have some hunting (in the wild-game sense) experience in their backstories. Maybe I'm hallucinating though.

GBATEK is pretty thorough, honestly. Assembly programming is something of a specialized skill, though. Especially with THUMB - single opcodes really don't do very much, so it can really exercise your problem-solving skills trying to get anything meaningful accomplished. (That said, the results can be very impressive; e.g. a decompressor for my improved text compression that fits in the space of the original routine, or ryru's half-body and 4th stats screen work, or any of soc's one-offs.)

Yep. STRB Rd, [Rb, #x] stores Rd at (value in Rb) + x. The available range for x is quite small, btw, putting an address in there won't do it. Use LDR to put the address 0x0202bd80 into another register, and then use STRB using that register as Rb and an offset of 0. You can supply a full address value like that to LDR by prefacing it with '='; this is a pseudo-opcode - the assembler will put the address value after the function (in the "pool"), and turn the LDR instruction into LDR PC, <some offset> such that it indexes the constant correctly.

In AW, indirect combat units can't move and attack in the same turn, and they seem to be pretty effective anyway. Just saiyan... (As long as we're looking for non-contrived ways to make archers not suck, how about giving them 1-cost movement through forest tiles?)

Spiffy. Having the three Lord tales together at the start is also a nice touch imo. I like having Wil in Ch1 pt 2, so he, Dan and Rebecca can all have a reunion. Ooh, this has potential. BTW, as long as we're doing a tale in the Western Isles, can we please have The Frontier and For The Commanders imported from FE6 for PP/EP music? Awesome tracks IMO. (Within the Magnificent Nature is also awesome, but I can see the logic for keeping Lyn's music for her tale...) Bluh, I didn't communicate that well at all. What I meant was, why is going way out there useful to the goal? Is Thorben (or whatever replacement), like, hiding or something? ---- Also, I am playing the 4.0ish update so hard starting in a few seconds. EDIT: ZOMGWTF I got credit for something I am totally in squeeing school girl mōdo right now. Also, using combat preparations music for the tale select is a very nice touch. On my first attempt, I tried playing around with the achievement and bonus content screens a bunch, and then selected to play Hector's tale, and it froze on a black screen :( after a reset it worked fine though. With text speed set to max, the villager comments in the opening scene for Hector's tale just flash and are basically unreadable, and seem to have oddly long pauses in between them. It might not be possible to do anything meaningful about that, though.