Inflicting Poison/Lock/Darkness status on enemies?

[Topaz Light]

Hello! I hope it's not poor form that this is my first post here, but I'm not really so great with introductions.

I was wondering if the Poison, Lock, and Darkness statuses functioned correctly when set on enemies, since if there is a way to inflict any of those in vanilla I'm certainly not aware of it. IIRC Final Fantasy I has a few status ailments that, in vanilla, are inflicted exclusively by either allies or enemies and don't function correctly, if at all, if set on members of the party that would never receive them in vanilla circumstances, so I figure it's wise to check whether or not that's also the case in Chrono Trigger. Lock feels especially ambiguous to me, especially seeing as I'm not sure if the game actually differentiates enemy actions under the hood in a way that would be permissive to suppressing only those that would be considered "Techs" if given to player characters.

Thanks for your time and response!

[IHBP]

Get Temporal Flux and the plug-ins from this topic.
https://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php?topic=12793.0

Then you can add those effects to weapons or spells and test them yourself. I'm pretty sure confuse is broken and will stop the enemy from taking action.

[Mauron]

Most will work fine, but I don't believe Lock will work at all. Chrono Trigger does have an under the hood difference between techs and attacks, but the relevant code doesn't check for Lock status.

Use the tech editor as well.

I haven't personally tested berserk and confuse. I know AI code for them exists though. ...On second thought, skip berserk on enemies. You can't make bosses immune to it.

[Topaz Light]

Just to clarify, I do know it's very possible to give the player the ability to inflict these statuses on enemies by editing weapon and tech properties! What I'm asking about specifically is if the effects these statuses are supposed to have are actually properly applied to enemies inflicted with them.

Get Temporal Flux and the plug-ins from this topic.
https://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php?topic=12793.0

Then you can add those effects to weapons or spells and test them yourself. I'm pretty sure confuse is broken and will stop the enemy from taking action.

Huh, that's odd. Confusion is one of the ailments you can inflict in the vanilla game, so it seems a little strange that it would be nonfunctional like that. Guess it wouldn't be the first time for Squaresoft, though.

Most will work fine, but I don't believe Lock will work at all. Chrono Trigger does have an under the hood difference between techs and attacks, but the relevant code doesn't check for Lock status.

Use the tech editor as well.

I haven't personally tested berserk and confuse. I know AI code for them exists though. ...On second thought, skip berserk on enemies. You can't make bosses immune to it.

Gotcha. Good to know! Yeah, Berserk probably wouldn't be balanced to allow the party to inflict on enemies, haha... I guess you could set a limited duration on it when an enemy is inflicted with it, but that might be more trouble than it's worth depending on how complicated the process of doing that ASM hacking would be.

For some specific context here, I'm sorta rolling around ideas for my own "eighth party member" hack, and, since Chrono Trigger already has a pretty well-balanced cast, I'm thinking about how to make the eighth character unique. Access to status ailment-inflicting techs in CT is kind of sparse in the vanilla game, so I thought that could be a fun specialty for them. While I do want them to be, y'know, good enough to consider using, I also don't want them to be overpowered or anything; just another party member within the same bounds of general strength as the official party members who you can use if you want to.

[Mauron]

Do you know much about ASM hacking? I can share my notes, if it would help.

I think IHBP is mixing up a test of my AI rewrite for a future plugin and the vanilla game.

It would be possible to set "permanent berserk" as "immune to berserk" instead for enemies, but a limited duration would be a must. As far as I can tell, there isn't a "berserk wears off" code, at least in my current notes.

Anyway, it really depends on your hacking skill for how much you can do.

Most status effect code is shared between PCs and enemies.

[Topaz Light]

Not too much, unfortunately, which would... admittedly be a considerable setback here. I've been learning C++ (which I realize is not the same, but it's something), and I do know what things like pointers, hexadecimal, endianness, etc. are, but I'm not at all versed in actual Assembly, 65c816 or otherwise.

[Mauron]

Getting a working 8th character still needs a fair amount of ASM work. Berserk working as an applied in battle status effect would also need ASM, but not as much.

[Topaz Light]

That's alright! Honestly I'm not overly invested in Berserk specifically or anything. Plus, I'd want to be sticking to the "eight single techs per character" pattern from vanilla, anyway, and I don't want all of them to be status inflicting abilities, so I decided to mainly focus on Slow, Darkness, and Stop for the ailments they'd have single techs to inflict.

Is there someplace I could get feedback on the concepts I have in mind for them, by the by? Like, in terms of how well-balanced they are, the concept for them as a character, etc.? Kajar Laboratories seems to be the appropriate subforum for that, but I'm not sure if there are some restrictions on what it's for that I missed that would preclude this.

[Mauron]

Plus, I'd want to be sticking to the "eight single techs per character" pattern from vanilla,

There's actually a limit of 8 techs per character or group (bitflags of techs currently known). Expanding beyond that would be quite tricky.

Technically you can learn techs out of order, but the game doesn't have a mechanism in place to handle that.

Is there someplace I could get feedback on the concepts I have in mind for them, by the by? Like, in terms of how well-balanced they are, the concept for them as a character, etc.? Kajar Laboratories seems to be the appropriate subforum for that, but I'm not sure if there are some restrictions on what it's for that I missed that would preclude this.

Kajar Laboratories should be good.

[Topaz Light]

Gotcha. I didn't know if it was a hard limit or just the only way the developers happened to do things, but I'm fine with it, honestly!

And, thanks for letting me know, and just for your responses in this thread in general! You've been very helpful!

[Zakyrus]

Getting a working 8th character still needs a fair amount of ASM work. Berserk working as an applied in battle status effect would also need ASM, but not as much.

We should get to this soon I almost have the time to get into ASM myself and this was something I wanted to do a long time ago back in 2008 actually but things kept distracting me it is almost time... Especially since I have most of the tutorial series done and recorded I just have to edit it and put it on line.

~Z

[inuksuk]

Lock will not shut off the enemies' Techs as you might hope.

So true.

Also, Like in the tutorial series,.....

PoisonBarb(just made out of a random x-d out accessory, adding poison or slow as a status affect....) so when you walk through a trap in EVENT(pc.xy.position) auto equips that accessory, ....VERY USEFUL if in a "MINI-DUNGEON" (where you cannot access the menu, etc.)

~Z

[Zakyrus]

I covered this in one of the TUTORIALS.

You can totally have an Event (auto-equip) Party Members with an ITEM (for instance use the UNUSED RELIC item) (say the player walks through 'thorns' ITEMNAME: ThornyBarb, DESC": "You walked through this..." then give it auto-poison or slow at start of battle...

then when Event equips, trigger a battle where you cannot run away (thus the "status/item effect, is stuck until the battle is over)

Too bad, we can't stack status's yet.
 

~Z