Another Topic To Find The Rom

[Chrono'99]

I kind of like how you can sort of do one last hurrah and go talk to the townspeople and such during the ending.  I do agree though they shouldn't have any battles.

A minor issue also is that the switch party menu is accessible. There's no character to switch but it's very strange to see Belthasar's face right after we left him. The bigger issue is that the player can save on the overworld map, and if he does his save file would be totally screwed for that playthrough because he won't be able to go back to before the last battle.

If we cut the access to the overworlds, it would solve these two problems (we can block the switch party menu with the storyline flag trick). Perhaps we could have this part be a series of consecutive locations: when Ayla leaves Mystic Mt, she directly arrives in one of the Ioka huts (which one? and how many of them?), then after that when she leaves the unique or last hut, she arrives in Singing Mt. As for Glenn, the series would be Truce Canyon -> One or more locations in Truce -> Guardia Castle. For Crono and co.: Lucca's House > ??? etc. > Guardia Castle. Thoughts?

[Agent 12]

Maybe we can let FW/Lenophis comment  on how they felt about it?

--JP

EDIT: Hm.....Lenophis had a bug for disabling forms of saving.... I'll make a post in the questionairre.

[Agent 12]

I just had an idea...I already have a bug to have them make a save game after the "The End" screen.  With some event tricks I can probably make that be at the mammon machine room in the DBT?

--JP

EDIT: This still doesn't solve the change screen thing, if we do the storyline trick the dialogue won't even be the end of game dialogue. Though technically this is work around able because i think for frog and ayla we don't have dialogue for "pre change party"

[FaustWolf]

I thought it was really cool how you could explore even after fighting the last boss. I'm not sure how often that happens in current RPGs, but back in the SNES/PSX/Saturn eras, I considered that a real treat. Very few games let the player do that back then.

[Agent 12]

Chrono'99 do you think these events would make a save game at the final location

In "The End" events:

Darken (06)
Fadeout Screen
ChangeLocation (variant E1)  Mammon Machine DBT, coordinates of SavePoint

In Mammon Machine DBT

if( StoryLine is During Ending)
  Text( " Do you want to save? ")
  if Yes
      Show Dialogue(Save Dialogue)
  ChangeLocation TitleScreen


--JP

     
 

[Agent 12]

Hm...during OW cutscenes isn't the menu disabled as well?  Perhaps we can find that command?

--JP

[Agent 12]

Sigh, i looked into the OW events for stuff like the ferry and it doesn't seem like it has a "disable menu".  For OW's there seems to be something more akin to exploremodeoff and exploremodeon.  (Mem.OWActions = 0, Mem.OWActions = 1).  For the ferries it just never sets Mem.OWActions=1, while the normal chain of events does.  When you set Mem.OWActions=1, it also enables walking with the menu.  I also tried just doing a value to mem for Mem.DisableMenu but that was a no go as well.

Personally I think the best solution is using location events to make sure there's no battles as discussed above, allowing saving but at the end of it we let them do a save that puts them back at the DBT's mammon machine.  The change character screen is a price to pay for the free roaming ending.


--JP

[Chrono'99]

I thought it was really cool how you could explore even after fighting the last boss. I'm not sure how often that happens in current RPGs, but back in the SNES/PSX/Saturn eras, I considered that a real treat. Very few games let the player do that back then.

Yeah, it's a good idea to let the player explore after the last battle. I think one of the earliest game to do that was Dragon Quest 1; as archaic as the game was, that end game stuff was a nice surprise. The problem in CE however is that you can save during this part, and if you do you're screwed because you can't go back. FFVIII had something like that too... It was before the final battle, but there was still a point of no return and I remember missing pretty much every side-quest in that game because I had saved after the Lunatic Pandora.


If we prevent access to the overworlds by hacking the location exits as I described above, we could block every menu without doing the storyline trick (7E0110 blocks both the main and party switch menus). The con is that you couldn't backtrack since the exits would lead to the next location each time (for instance you exit Lucca's House and appear direcly in the Cathedral, and when you exit the Cathedral you appear directly in Guardia Castle). A good workaround would be to give the player a textbox choice when leaving a location: you exit Lucca's House, and a textbox (on a black screen) lets you choose your destination. We can have more than four different choices in the textbox with submenus (for instance by grouping the Truce locations in a Truce submenu). That way there's still free-roaming between all the locations, just with no overworld walking.

I guess the DBT Mammon Machine loop is a nice solution too, if the storyline is re-set to a pre-ending value while keeping the NG+ flag active (kind of like in CTDS). The pre-ending value would have been stored away in a different mem holder like it was for the DBT party split at one point. My only concern with this solution is that, since the ending is rather long, this "loop" back to the Mammon Machine kind of dilutes the ending impact, and makes things a bit confusing for the player trying to digest all the information he's receiving.

[Agent 12]

My only concern with this solution is that, since the ending is rather long, this "loop" back to the Mammon Machine kind of dilutes the ending impact, and makes things a bit confusing for the player trying to digest all the information he's receiving.

How does it dilute the ending impact? I think it's pretty common for games to have a "save game" after the credits roll  isn't it?  We'd basically be going that but placing them at the mammon machine.  I guess the player could be afriad to save their game at the "The End" screen because they don't know where they are saving to... maybe we could give a warning?

The black screen location is another good compromise.  My main concern when you first gave the location=> location=> location ending was how linear it felt but the black screen decision box get rid of that.

--JP

[Chrono'99]

I assume that since so many story arcs are exposed and tied up in the ending sequence (and implied, in the case of CC-related details), a "metagame" warning would kind of break the mood and keep the player from pondering the various implications of the ending. CT and CC had relatively short or straightforward endings so they didn't have to deal with these sorts of considerations. But maybe it's just me, I don't know... Well, another point to consider is the players won't know until the end of the ending that they can go back to before the last battle, whereas the decision box stuff removes the ambiguity so that players might be more at ease. If they ask themselves "Should I save? Should I not?" throughout the ending it can also take away from the effect, especially since they may not know that it's the ending (the Dream Devourer is still out there after all).

If we do the decision box stuff, the different choices would be as follows (some lists go up to 5 because the location that you are leaving doesn't count):

Ayla: 1/ Mystic Mt, 2/ Ioka (submenu), 3/ Singing Mt
In Ioka: 1/ Ayla's Tent, 2/ Meeting Ground, 3/ Trading Post, 4/ Hut, 5/ Leave Ioka

Glenn: 1/ Truce Canyon, 2/ Truce (submenu), 3/ Guardia Castle, 4/ Cathedral, 5/ Zenan Bridge
In Truce: 1/ Inn, 2/ Residence, 3/ Banta's House, 4/ Leave Truce

Crono/Lucca: 1/ Lucca's House, 2/ Truce (submenu), 3/ Guardia Castle, 4/ Cathedral, 5/ Zenan Bridge
In Truce: 1/ Crono's House, 2/ Leene Square, 3/ Mayor's Manor, 4/ Ticket Office, 5/ Leave Truce

In Prehistory, this leaves out two caves and one hut, but they don't say anything different in the ending anyway. In 1005 AD, this leaves out one residence in Truce that I can't fit in the list, but the two NPCs concerned can easily be moved to Leene Square instead (to fill the emptiness of the Telepod Exhibit for instance).

Anyway, Mammon Machine loop or black screen decision boxes... The second solution gets rid of all ambiguities, but I'm fine either way.

[Agent 12]

I think you only get 4 spots per decision box?  I feel like since the meta warning is after the ending, credits, belthasar scene it shouldn't detract from the game too much.    Your second point is definitely valid though (the part about them asking themselves whether or not they should save). 

IMO I would just say let them worry just leave it because it's be a  pain to make each of those locations exits be events. But I wouldn't complain if you made it into decision boxes.  Like you said it reserves all the good while removing the ambiguity (both the should I save worry and the belthasar change screen).  It's also annoying to have to walk from mystic mountain to the village haha.

What's a little more troublesome is we only have 4 choices per text box..... and adding another layer of textboxes would be annoying so if you want to take the text box route I would drop

Prehistory:  ....hut I guess...maybe move another NPC into ayla's tent though?
Present:  mayors manor

It's totally up to you, the work is falling on your shoulders and the textbox was a good compromise to make everyone happy.

--JP

[Chrono'99]

Yeah there are only 4 spots, but for instance when you leave Lucca's House her house doesn't have to be listed in the box so only 4 spots appear. Three of them are self-explanatory, and one of them is Truce which gives another 4-choice textbox (the fifth spot "Leave Truce" don't appear). Basically there's always one option that's redundant so we never have to list all 5 spots at once. The player can of course backtrack by choosing a location and then exiting and going back to where he was with the different textbox.

I actually just finished tweaking the last battle cutscenes and implementing the stuff from the "New 1005 Ending" thread, so tomorrow I'll import into the latest posted ROM and I'll post a patch. Then I'll try to code this decision box stuff (I have a mini-momentum going so I gotta take advantage of it ).


EDIT: Aw, ahah, I just realized what was the problem you pointed at. If you leave one of the Truce locations and choose "Leave Truce" you'll have to have 5 different choices... Didn't take that into account... Removing the hut would be okay; the Mayor's Manor is a bigger chunk though... Well, I'll ponder the different possibities tomorrow.

[Agent 12]

ah so I was useful! haha.  Do we have new   Should have had the fall of guardia take out one more location haha.

Check out for a  little bit.

--JP

[Agent 12]

I fixed almost all the bugs I found that can be fixed with TF. Others are stuff like item shops/prices, some enemy AI stuff  and those horribly horribly annoying save points.

--JP

[ZeaLitY]

Just a heads up; I'm getting destroyed by real life right now. This next month is the final stretch of school before finals, so I've got to chew threw three or four projects while single-handedly planning a huge trip. I didn't think these difficulties would be so severe, but other circumstances have made them so.



Giving it hell.