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I wanted to get you in a chatbox in game yesterday to discuss this with you, but you were busy PVPing. I hope you see this here.


First off, you have to understand, your first day joining the game (I'm a friend of a friend, so I remember when you joined since I was partied with him at the time) you were already asking about making super bosses. When someone new comes in like that and starts wanting to talk straight to the admins about adding content, people are wary of that person's intentions. Trolls have ruined good communities this way before so no one is too trusting anymore.

Second, There's varying degrees of difficulty. Genuine, artificial, *******, and so on. You have to remember that in FFL, it's a small community. People solo a lot. No one's going tow ant to spend 5 hours waiting for a party to take on a boss. The game was designed to be soloable (with a lot of work) and I took a look at a few samples, and your bosses fall into "*******" difficulty. Killing you in one hit isn't a "superboss" but rather a "Oh come on!" frustration, and that's not what FFL needs.

Finally, in game when you were saying things like "I don't care about my reputation or credibility" that one time someone was talking to you about your bosses. With an attitude like that, no one's going to want to let you program anything, I'm sorry to say.

Am I telling you to give up completely? NO! But! You're still new and low on the totem pole. If you have ideas for bosses, by all means, make suggestions! But it might be a good idea to drop the whole asking about super bosses in game thing for awhile. Leave the balancing and programming to the devs for now, and let's face it, they have enough to worry about right now with the class rebalance.

I'm level 91 right now and beat Archimus solo. All of my bosses were made for FF6's engine and can be balanced for this game so they don't "1-shot". I won't say anything bad about the bosses per-se; however, most of them that are end-game just seem to be trying to do 1-shots and leave you with 1 life.
New or not, I think I could still have made competent bosses. Regardless of being new to this game or not. I do have two and a half years of experience in making them after all.
In all seriousness and back on topic, I really want to see some end-game bosses. More than the three that we all know and love, Jumbo Cactuar, Gilgamesh and Archimus. I want something (and I can speak for about 10 others or more when I say this) that will keep us playing our 99's. Something to work towards. I for one work towards getting the best gear and having great stats so I can PvP, I know the developers loath PvP for whatever reason. Some of you guys probably do as well, so there should be some more PvE content, like bosses. I feel I can help with that, as much as I've stressed that already. I myself have been working on a rom hack called Final Fantasy Revelations for about two and a half years now and have burned out, so I know what it means to burn out. I can assume that a lot of the developers have burned out as well, so why not let a community member come up with a boss and they just import/implement it?

I hope I'm not stepping on any toes and getting on anyones bad side, but it seems logical to say all this.

First off, I'm happy to see that people are using this forum for discussion, it's what our community needs to grow more organized and stable.

In any case, while what Ranylyn said certainly is prudent, I wouldn't consider it true that people who are new to the community are less likely to be accepted into the dev team than oldbies. I should note in this context that Nielz had known me only for a few days when he trusted me with the source.

However, there are other criteria that I apply. This is not about joining the dev team, because I feel that would be too soon. This is simply about getting your ideas into the game, or helping the development in any way.

I must admit that when I read your post for the first time, I was hopeful to get some help. Boss development has been a challenging task, for coming up with original ideas requires time, and adjusting the stats properly is even more difficult.

So when I read this post for the first time, I was actually curious as to your skills. However, all that you pointed me at was a link at a collection of your work. Now, see, you are the one who needs to convince me of your skills, pointing me at a site without any further information won't do much.

You didn't point me at a specific piece of work, and you didn't explain the process in which you created it, either. In order to find out what you could do, I would have had to look through that site myself, handpicking the information I needed, and frankly, I'm too lazy for that.

The next time I read one of your posts, you suggested a boss. This one was slightly better, you provided me with an actual map, thus having put work into it, and you gave more details on the boss. However, once again did you not provide details on what ideas you had for this boss, nor did you make any indication that you wanted to discuss it with someone. You just put a rough sketch there, and expected me to take initiative. I didn't really feel tempted.

So, as you see, what you really need to do is to make it easy for me to work with you, rather than to throw out ideas and demands, and expect me to somehow be moved to make contact.

Wall of text; put forth a lot of time and effort writing.

I will be straight forward and honest, I don't have experience in making a boss in this game. I haven't had a chace to learn because I learn from what I see. I learned how to script bosses in FF6 because I saw how SquareSoft made FF6 bosses. (ie, I saw scripts from other bosses)
I cannot start making a boss unless I see a boss and am able to start fiddling around with the code and testing it in-game, or you telling me it'll work or won't.

I left you kind of hanging on the Iron Giant boss because I didn't know exactly what type of stats you'd like to apply. That comes with tinkering and testing in the game. If he's too powerful, you lower his stats. So on and so forth, you know this already since you script for this game. :p
I don't know what his stats would be, but what "I" would do first (and don't think of this as me patronizing you) is watch the video of the Iron Giant on the NDS and scale his damage into this game along with life. If he looks like he hits hard, I'd try to compensate with what would be decent in this game. That's what I do with bosses I made. If you mean by leaving you hanging, like a back story. Hmm.
The back-story isn't really relevant, same goes with Gilgamesh and Jumbo Cactuar.

What you see below may seem like gibberish, and even irrelevant but it's not because I'm going to explain to you what the script does, I created it from scratch. This is a script of my boss Maenad.
Screenshot.
Video link for Maenad.


This is step by step on the script below. Maenad always starts the battle first.
So this battle starts off with a conversation. After that, she summons Bahamut as a second enemy to fight. Once Bahamut is summoned, she becomes invincible until Bahamut is killed. You will see the "VAR036". That's like the introduction, almost like putting something in a quote on a forum. Think of "If VAR036 has all the following bit cleared: 0" as [.quote] and "VAR036 toggle bit: 2" as [,/quote]. It ends it, that last one. That means that she will only do this once in the battle.
When Bahamut dies, her sprite palette flashes yellow twice and she loses Invincibility and gains Haste. She gains haste because before Bahamut died, she was doing normal attacks and the haste triggers her next attack pattern. It says on the script that if she's affected by haste that she should cast Flare twice, Meteo twice the next turn and end it with Ultima. Before Bahamut died, she would just cast Flare, her special attack the next turn and lastly Meteo on the last turn.
Think of "End first wave of attack" as the conclusion to your essay. I have a special script created so that I can go past the 65535 HP limit in Final Fantasy VI. The script below makes it so one she dies, she's resurrected invisibly for 4 times. That means she has 4 times the normal amount of life.
And that's all, for her script. Bahamut just casts Mega Flare, which I created a special animation for.

Quote :

TEXT script:
If VAR036 has all the following bit cleared: 0
Trigger event: Wrexsoul intro text
VAR036 toggle bit: 0
Targeting: allies
Lore: Special
Lore: Special
End If and reset targeting
If VAR036 has all the following bit cleared: 2
Monsters palette flashes to yellow briefly
Monsters palette flashes to yellow briefly
Text: "Summon: Bahamut"
Monsters #2 , if hidden/dead, brought in with their HP restored, in smoke
Target self becomes invincible
VAR036 toggle bit: 2
End If and reset targeting
If VAR036 has all the following bit cleared: 1
If following monster is/are dead: #2
Monsters palette flashes to yellow
Target self loses invincibility
Monster gains hidden status: Haste
Trigger event: Gau want to come back
Monsters palette flashes to yellow
VAR036 set bit: 1
End If and reset targeting
If target self is affected by status Haste
Targeting: use normal targeting
Spell: Flare
Spell: Flare
Wait until the attack sequence is called upon again, then continue (reset targeting)
Targeting: use normal targeting
Lore: Meteo
Lore: Meteo
Wait until the attack sequence is called upon again, then continue (reset targeting)
Targeting: use normal targeting
Lore: Ultima
End If and reset targeting
If target self is not affected by status Haste
Targeting: use normal targeting
Spell: Flare
Wait until the attack sequence is called upon again, then continue (reset targeting)
Lore: Special
Wait until the attack sequence is called upon again, then continue (reset targeting)
Lore: Meteo
End first wave of attack
If variable VAR003 is greater than or equal to 4
If following monster is/are dead:
Monsters #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6 are killed, dies like a boss
End If and reset targeting
If following monster is/are dead:
Monsters #1 , if hidden/dead, brought in with their HP restored, suddently
1 added to VAR003
End If and reset targeting
End

If this is how Zeromus's older script looks, I can help make a boss or two.

Quote :

Zeromus
icon='monsters/Zeromus.dmi'
icon_state="1,0"
monster_x_start=1
monster_x_end=4
monster_y_start=1
monster_y_end=4
level=75
MaxHP=100000
HP=100000
MaxMP=10000
MP=10000
attack=100
defense=100
action = list("Attack","Attack","Attack","Attack","Attack","BigBang","Meteo","Flare")
give_exp=0
give_gold=0
obj_drop = list(/obj/Ability/Basic/Item/Cure1,/obj/Ability/Basic/Item/Cure2,/obj/Ability/Basic/Item/Life)

I'll have to be honest, those scripts don't really catch my interest. You will see that programming on BYOND is entirely different, and your ability to program in FF6' patterns won't get you far. What we need are not complex algorithms that describe how a monster act, but rather an idea how a monster is supposed to act.

I thus suggest the following: Our current CPU boss battle is still less interesting than it's supposed to be. For example, the "Charging" ability does not do anything at this point, the two nodes are only two additional enemies, but fulfill no special purpose.

If you can come up with a reasonable behavior for the A.I. and give some meaning to the charging abilities, that could prove that you know what you are doing. Don't worry about "what's possible" - Anything reasonable for an FF game(and probably more) will be doable. So if you just looked at a video of that battle, added a few interesting ideas of your own, and laid it out in a way that it works with FFL, that would already help me out a great deal.

Here you are, this may come as some help and may not.
http://users.sephiroth.ws/Zemious/Frames.zip


I don't know exactly how to import these, the source version I have of this game I have doesn't seem to have spell animations. o_O;
Lots of animations for the Globe199 attack, and the laser attack is included.
I used a program called "Animget" to capture these, it captured a lot of frames because Image was on him. Seems a little redundant so if you wish me to get it again without Image being captured, tell me.
As of right now, it's 4AM and I'm off to bed.



http://users.sephiroth.ws/Zemious/Globe199.dmi