More fascinating news on the Layer 3 gfx pack front, jsondag. It appears that some graphics, like Magus' Dark Bomb, get shoved to the corner of the screen when they're used with hit-all spells, like Lightning 2 or Dark Matter. Apparently there's a conflict when the game tells some spell effects to be centralized with respect to the screen. Therefore, lots of spell effects (especially expanding domes and ovals) work perfectly with Dark Bomb but get stuck in the corner of the screen with a hit-all spell. There's something about Dark Bomb that is *required* for certain Layer 3 gfx packs, just as there's something about Black Hole that is *required* for Lavos' Chaos attack and certain others. It's not simply the hit-all targeting property that's responsible, either. I can give Dark Matter an expanding red-dome graphic and give it an enemy zone targeting property, and the graphic is still shoved to the top-left screen corner.
I'm compiling a list of what all the Layer 3 gfx indices produce, and which ones need certain code to work properly. So far I've come across "Dark Bomb" and "Black Hole" special situations.
Also, I see there's some unknown bits in the tech properties. Is it possible that elemental info might be stored as bits? Let's see, it would probably have to be at least three bits involved if it's something like this:
000 = No element
001 = Lightning
010 = Water
011 = Fire
100 = Shadow
Or it might be something completely different, with the leading bit specifying whether there's an element at all, and the actual elemental scheme being like so:
00 = Lightning
01 = Water
10 = Fire
11 = Shadow
I wonder if something like this would be plausible? It might throw someone off during an investigation of the data at hexadecimal level, where we might expect 0x01 to be Lightning, 0x02 Fire, 0x03 Water, etc., etc. This is all hypothetical musing of course.
