Wayward Winds

...I sense Fa x Shiori stuff coming. I guess I could give something a go. Perhaps a humourous one shot focusing on some of Hoikade's common mooks. I need to get my writing muse back into shape anyway. First though, exams demand my attention.

Because apparently an actual Marc unit stumbling around the map and getting abused every which way the average twisted mind can conceive is strangely therapeutic. I'd like to take part in one of these one day, but I'm not going to go from someone who "dabbles" and can design and insert maps/insert music to ragefest making in one go. I somewhat doubt I'd make something worthwhile without some proper experience under my belt. Maybe next year.

I did try to be the voice of reason for as long as I could, but there's just no resisting some things. ...Anyway, Alfred? If you're still taking level ideas, I've got another concept you might be interested in. [spoiler=Don't worry, no squick potential here] This idea works on the basis that there's a powerful force somewhere off map that you would rather not fight. Said force is looking for you. You need to seize something/defeat a particular enemy, and you've got the usual array of opponents already. But this other force is going to turn up and wreck your day if it gets wind of your position. At certain points during gameplay, either turn based (probably easier to code given that I don't know of an "X turns after event Y" condition) or when you reach certain locations, a scout from this other force arrives on the map (a low leveled flier or hoofed unit). You've got about two turns to kill him, or he'll vanish from the map and go to report your position. If this happens, a couple of turns later some much more powerful units spawn where the scout was and actively start chasing you down. These reinforcements shouldn't be impossible to beat, but they should be a serious threat. If someone thinks they can leave the scouts alone then powerlevel from the reinforcements, they should at least have to take some serious risk - undroppable Brave and Killer weapons. Throw in a flier or two, and they can worm their way around the physical barricade units and hit the healers. Basically, something you can't just cheese for exp (Hmm. Better yet, if that 0 exp trick from Dream of Five can work on FE8, use that). Plot connections? You're sneaking into the DK's lands and don't want to face his OP centaur things. Or the king of Lazulis has ordered his most elite force to find and destroy you before you bring the fighting any closer to his capital. Story justification is the easy part.

The Contessa? Yeah, she was a despicable villain all right. Probably one of the tamer monsters though, when all's said and done. For spoiler tags, use <spoiler> (replacing < with [ and > with ] - I've changed the symbols to avoid Serenes mistaking this for a spoiler) to start, type whatever you want to hide, then use </spoiler> (again, replace < with [ and > with ]) to finish it. You can also set a subject by adjusting the opening to read <spoiler= Insert subject here>. So: <spoiler=The Contessa> Nasty villain from Sly 2: Band of Thieves</spoiler> shows up as [spoiler=The Contessa] Nasty villain from Sly 2: Band of Thieves By the way, it's usually better to upload pictures to a separate site (I use photobucket) and use IMG tags to display it here. Serenes doesn't give you much storage, and images will eat into it quick. <IMG>Image link here</IMG> - same symbol substitution. Example: <IMG>http://i1275.photobucket.com/albums/y451/WaywardWinds/FE%20Hack%20-%20Echoes%20of%20the%20Mist/Prologue2Sceneonly6C00A36E10X15_zpsbc8433a3.png</IMG> (Serenes has auto-shortened that address) Becomes:

Yeah, that has the potential to be worse. Where is it laying these eggs exactly? Are we talking chestbursters here? ...You should have kept the Baelstrom quiet Alfred! What have you started here?

Seeimg as female spiders often eat their mates after the business is done, there is actually a good reason for the critter to be a honey trap. It probably doesn't even matter which part is female. I just hope food is the only objective, because I do not want to see steamy spider stuff on screen. Seriously, I'll have nightmares if that thing starts every battle by humping the enemy.

Hmm, that's interesting. I'll have a go at fixing it so I know what to do if the problem shows up again, but like I said, I'm probably not going to use that particular song anyway. Sure it's got an epic opening perfect for boss theme, but there's no way to loop it without being particularly jarring about it. I've found other good songs since then. Thanks for the directions!

I want to know where Alfred said the bottom end was going to the human half. Or that it only had two legs. The image I'm basically getting is a centaur, only replace the horse body with a spider body. In other words, heavy use of the original Bael sprite as the bottom end.

Who said this unholy spawn of the DK's fevered imagination is going to be unclothed? I assume the bottom half isn't going to be showing its, uh, bits, and the top half can't be any worse than any other human sprite/portrait. Unless Alfred really goes mad combining features and chucks a Gorgon's head up there for good measure. I assume the poor sap is a cursed human or something who joins up because Shiori might be able to get rid of the spider half. Or it's the spider half wanting the human half gone, in which case Faratrass looks like a good bet... ...This topic seems to be the latest thing for proving there is no bottom to the depths of the human imagination.

Usually. Sometimes it gets subverted though; none of Dream of Five's Lords carry the usual anti-armour/horse effectiveness based weapons, and the second Lord of Death or Glory had (last I checked) a reaver based weapon (and okay, that did have effectiveness boosts as well).

So why can a female Baelstrom work but a male one not? Besides this... ...just freaks me out. I was sort of "Hmm, that isn't so bad...", then I scrolled down to the smaller panel where the extra eyes became visible, and... Yeah, that'll be a triple strength brain bleach with extra lemon for me, thank you.

I'd also say that, at least for hacks that do more than just change stats and portraits (so those that fiddle with mechanics, classes, and of course anything that uses custom maps of one level or another), that trying to do the entire hack and then releasing it actually makes it harder to do overall refinement. You've got a 15 chapter hack, you keep it under wraps until you release the "finished" product, then it turns out you made a critical misjudgement in chapter 3. Turns out the way you expected people to play it isn't the way the typical player actually picks, and now their party isn't balanced to deal with what you chuck at them in the remaining 12 chapters. Imagine having to fiddle with most of your hack to account for your earlier error. But if they'd released an alpha once the first five chapters were complete, it would be easier to fix the problem and adjust whatever was coming next depending on what you saw players do and what other feedback you received. Plus you get more encouragement that way. The best hacks in my opinion, are ones that are adjusted due to player input as they're being developed. And in my case I prefer chocolate as opposed to reskins, because story is a big draw in pulling me onwards. It doesn't matter what changes are made to gameplay, there's only so many times I can play through the FE7 maps and story. That said, I do think properly done reskins (such as FE7 Chaos Mode) are well worth playing. It's just not my sort of thing. Preferred gameplay, map design, art etc. is bog standard; no lazy shortcuts. No just plonking a few units on a map without thinking about how they'll affect map flow. As little tile spam as possible, maps that lend themselves to more freeform gameplay, and maps that actually look interesting. And at least try to throw in interesting ideas every so often; I don't want to look at a map, think of a plan and then find it works flawlessly every time. I don't want each map to play in a similar way to the last. Every so often I want to be caught off guard; not in a cheap way that doesn't give you a chance to react before you (or those newly spawned escortees) get ploughed under, but in a way that changes the battlefield mid map in an interesting way. Mass tile changes (e.g. simulating flooding or the arrival of an enemy ship into port), new enemy forces, new ally forces etc., It requires more thought and more intensive programming, but it makes a hack more interesting for me.

...Well, it inserts and you do get something that sounds pretty good (if a little unbalanced on the volume front) for the first bit. And then it starts to destabilise (best word to describe it) around the 30 second mark and goes outright berserk by the time you hit the 50 second mark. It's hard to describe; if you want to hear what I mean, here's a patch. http://www.mediafire.com/download/vnhwa2kvchb6jps/Music_Patch.zip (I'm not asking for anyone to fix it (because I've got backup music in mind now), but I am curious if anyone knows just what's going wrong. It only happens with this particular song!) It took me a while to get the thing working as well. Eventually I figured out that somewhere down the line, the computer had learnt to associate .S files with .txt, and that single problem was grinding Sappy to a halt. Then there's getting drum tracks working properly (thanks again for that hint a while back Agro!), and the requirement that you need Midi type 0's to get looping to work. But once you've got the hang of it you can effortlessly insert a song in under three minutes. Much better than hex fiddling! You can find midis all over the place when you start trying to track down that one elusive song. [spoiler=Possible midi sources] Good sources: VGMusic (remember to check the "new files" section there!), KHinsider, the Midi Shrine, Musescore (that one's a bit iffy on user rights though, and most will be one instrument only (usually piano)), etc. Sometimes you can find a whole batch from a Japanese site just by typing e.g. FF11 Midis (That gives you http://www.geocities.jp/kurogeki/page015.html). Then there's the time I found the entire soundtracks of Touhou's 6 to 8 by following a link from Youtube. Google is your friend. Then you can try ripping midis from ROMS. The NDS Sound Extractor available on Blazer's site (http://www.feshrine.net/hacking/musiceditors.php) is a bit hit and miss; sometimes it produces brilliant midis that can easily be cut down enough to fit into FE7 without sacrificing any of their main component parts (Endless Frontier is an example), but other times you get midis that sound atrocious; instruments all over the place, notes missing etc., generally bearing only a tangential resemblance to the original song (And unfortunately Fire Emblem's 11 and 12 are in this category, so no sneakily grabbing Liberation or Footsteps of Fate with minimal effort!). And sometimes you'll find a ROM that the NDS extractor just won't work with; e.g. the Luminous Arc games (Shame, the second game had a few nice songs). ...And then there's Sappy itself. Throw a GBA ROM in, search through the songs until you find the one you like, then click "Tasks > Record to Midi". Again, you aren't guaranteed to get something that sounds just like it did in the game, but it seems to be more reliable than the NDS extractor in this regard. Sappy doesn't work for the Super Robot Wars games, but most others do work - and quite a few SRW tracks can be extracted from Endless Frontier with the NDS extractor! The trick to finding midis is simply to persist. As for editing them to fit and sound all right, that requires a little more effort. The most basic tricks are to merge tracks that sound similar to each other/two parts of the same whole, and to delete tracks that are mostly lost under the rest. Careful with your trimming though, it's easy to go to far and cut out/drastically change the sound of an important part of the song, and if that happens you have to reload the original midi and start again!

...Readying the brain bleach.

I think the problem is more "It's old". Sappy is much faster and generally works better (once you get past its quirks, although even it can't correctly insert "Release of the Far West Ocean" for me - at least it gets further with that than manual insertion), but I don't think it was around when the Ultimate Tutorial's music section was written. I haven't got Skype, so I'm out of this by default. I'm okay with cutting midi's down to size and inserting them anyway.

Given that there was no hint in SRW Original Generation 2 that defeating the supposedly undefeatable Inspectors would give rewards, and people still found out about it, yeah, lost cause. It's the encouragement given by a supposedly droppable item that I'm iffy with.

Hmm... >Google's "Mid2agb" >Clicks first option (http://www.hackromtools.altervista.org/index.php/en/main-page/20-miscellanous-eng/81-sappy-mid2agb) >Looks around page. Sees one heck of a lot of google ads declaring "DOWNLOAD"! >Hovers cursor over each "download", finds one that isn't an ad. >Downloads, opens, sees folder with "Mid2AGB" with all components present. Easy enough when you knew the trick of separating advert from actual download. It's this one by the way:

Oh hey, it's the same discussion as over in the Bloodlines topic. Why not just think of the things as "gunboats" or something? If you think about it, a proper sized ship could hold quite a few ballistae/cannons, so this small "fleet" unit that only carries one isn't that much of a stretch. Perhaps you could edit the sprite? Maybe get rid of the sail and add a hint of a (single) weapon - that way it'll look less like a sea going ship and more like a floating weapons platform.

Hmm. The height difference seems fishy to me. Given the stairs, wouldn't the wooden floor be level with the top of the wall? In which case that locked room with the sniper is actually in the open air. (The sniper room is the only bit which is outright setting alarms off for me). Apart from jumping at non-existent map errors, why do I get the impression we'll be hijacking that dangerously-close-to-being-beached ship? There has to be a reason for those enemies to be down there, which suggests to me the chapter objective isn't inside the "fortress". Or this is a Skirmish battle, in which case that theory goes up in smoke... ...Either that mercenary there has 6 move, or there's something you're not showing us off the top of the screen...

Meanwhile, Alfred sneakily removes the "up to" progress from his signature... To clarify, didn't you previously say that v2 would be both routes to Ch. 16 (and the Lord Promotions)? If so, that really is going to take a while... ETA: 11:57pm, 31/12/2016

[spoiler=I remember that as well...] But I actually have no complaints about the prank. It's a chance to see just how far Elibean Nights has come by looking back at its roots. I actually prefer it to the Advance Wars stuff creeping into the FE IVa prank hack. Don't get me wrong; I liked that particular prank, but there's not much reason to take a second look. This on the other hand I'm actually going to try playing to its finish for curiosity's sake.

... [spoiler=Hmm...]That's one of the earliest Elibean Nights releases isn't it? I only found EN around v5 (via an old v4 patch included in a collection floating around the web), but this seems a definite step backwards in so many areas. Hah, knew it had to be an April Fool!

So is the old "Game Over" wave still there as well, or do the new marathon running monsters replace them? If the former, it shouldn't really change things too much unless you're an obsessive turtler. But whatever, it's sort of telling you to hurry up and...