ZOOOOM- HOW TO INCREASE THE ATB SPEED IN 2K3 TO INSANE LEVELS

post=139479
I just wish there was a way to change the way the algorithms work, you know? So if I wanted to copy FF6's damage calculation or Breath of Fire III's defense calculation (or emulate it entirely or make up my own!), I could. Or better yet, get rid of that 'status effects are counted by EVERY TURN ANYONE DOES' shit.

me
God I hate RM2k3


I hate RM2k3 with all my being. Opening it up to check game information for this made me cringe. There's a million problems and the best you can do about it is to try your best to hide it.

The Number One Cause of Bugs: Variable operations. If you bet a dollar that a random bug was caused by a fucked up variable option you'd get your starting dollar out of this game. In the original release Song Yong went down like a bitch because of the way the game calculated damage to him (it was 'SongYongDamage += (SongYongMaxHP - SongYongHP)' per RM2k3 turn and SongYong dies when SongYongDamage hits a certain threshold. Whoops!)I found plenty of bugs that were due to my own inability to read Rm2k(3)'s variable operation page. I'd often overlook the operator if I wanted an assignment since Rm2k3 defaults to it unless you had a variable operation with a different assignment. I can't blame RM2k3 too much for this but I still don't like it. Plus the window for battle events is four lines tall and reading event code in it is really annoying.

Mass Enemy Turns: Enemies with the same agility will always act at the same time. Individual enemies simply do not have their own ATB gauges. To prevent this annoying spontaneous mass damage is to avoid making enemy parties with the same type of enemies and making sure every enemy has a somewhat distant agility stat from all other enemies. It isn't too concerning since I never planned on having a fight with four of the same enemies beyond the initial stages of the game but its annoying all the same.

Interrupted Turns: I always play on Wait. Active can go jump in a bonfire. Especially the way 2k3 handles actions while you are telling a character to do with the spontaneous loss of control while enemies are taking turns and the likelihood that the character you were about to heal spontaneously dying between moving the cursor from "Attack" to "OhGodHealRightNow".

Enemy Stats Meaning Something: There's a silly limitation where enemy stats can only go up to 999 (and player stats too but I couldn't find a way to bypass that). One way I could make enemy stats mean something is to make them insane so the Attack/Mind influence equation will pull most of its damage from the enemy's stat instead of the skill's base damage so that (de)buffed enemies would actually have a noticeable change in attack power. It wasn't the best solution which was use RMVX hack the elemental influence so an element can do more than the 2k3 max of x10. That would mean the attack/defence of targets would get a huge multiplier so they can contribute a meaningful amount of damage to a skill while the skill base damage can be set to trivial values so it doesn't affect the skill at all. Unfortunately I found this too late and changing the multipliers would require changing everything so I did the quick fix in this situation.

Player Stats Are Meaningless (Except Agility): See above, but worse. One mistake I made is that I knew Rm2k3 had an effective cap on stats at 1998 instead of 999. Except I thought that this cap was applied when base attributes and equipment were combined. The 1998 cap is applied to (Stats + Equipment) * State Modifiers. For Stats + Equipment the cap is 999. I had balanced more than half the game before this neat discovery. And of course the solution for Rm2k3 is to change equipment, stat growth, and enemy stats! Thanks Rm2k3!

Also lol agility, defense is next to useless followed by intelligence (despite magic damage modifiers which were also applied to everything and not just magic so that didn't help) and attack is in there but is meaningless with Berkuts. Three cheers for stat balancing to equations I can't do anything about!

2k3 Bugs (or Misunderstanding): If a character changes class into its own class and it doesn't change its level, "Add Skills up to Current Level in New Class and Delete Old Skills" doesn't work. No I can't test it now and I might've been missing something but a loop that just nukes every skills did work and I certainly didn't have that loop with the initial full release.

I also got a weird bug to occur once where a character (Nishan) hauled ass to smack an enemy and decided that he spent enough effort getting there and decided to sit his ass down until he got a new command (where he decided that teleporting was the new fad). To be fair, bugs like this aren't exactly game breaking or anything. Isn't that right Mr. ICan'tBeRevived Fugger?

2k3 Things You Can't Do: Embargo. Storing each item has to be hard coded. As in 'Store # of Dark Souls into the variable pointed to by TempVar1, increase TempVar1 by 1, Store # of Demonic Auras into the variable pointed to by TempVar1'. Restoring items is what you'd expect 'Give the variable pointed to by TempVar1 quantity of items specified by TempVar2 to the player, increment TempVar1 and 2'. One is tedious as fuck, difficult to maintain, and scales like a tower made of wet shit. The other took about five minutes of work and if there were any issues it wouldn't take any time to fix them. This is why Embargo doesn't wipe your entire inventory like I originally intended, but just the usable items is good enough for 2k3 (which is a terrible train of thought and a reason why I hate RM2k(3)).

Of course it didn't help that I fucked up when Embargo gets called which could result in inventory wipes. Whoops!

TORG REFUSES TO BE EJECTED: So I changed Dragon Chimeras to do an Eject attack. Except I forgot to copy battle events and it only worked in one encounter! So since I can't make any changes to the battle system and the only way to have any somewhat different skills in the battle system involves copying a painful amount of battle events to a painful amount of encounter parties which results in, using Big O notation for complexity, a giant FuckYou. Making changes once and having that propagate across the board is an infinitely better way of doing things and I won't be missing copy&paste hell.

You Can Tell What States Enemies Have But Not Your Characters: Well, you can see one. And they have a habit of overwriting each other if the priority of one is more than ten than another. Should've accommodated that better (fewer states) except then I'd lose enemy variety. I like my script that cycles through all the states a character has so the player can actually tell what states are on their party more than what Rm2k3 does.

Also x2 stat multipliers are ridiculous. Does any commercial game uses such insane multipliers?

MEMORY STREAM ERROR: Still a mystery (?)

RM2k3 Says I've Got 30 Classes: Which are the same ten copied twice but with different battler animations because class determines battlers! ps I enjoyed making change to one class and then having to propagate that change to the other duplicate-but-with-different-battler-animation classes.

DEMON LEVEL 3: Okay now I'm reaching.

As for the whole stats mean nothing rant, just do the 500/1000% trick and you'll see with even a few points in a stat you will get stronger/more durable/powerful/etc.

post=139511

As for the whole stats mean nothing rant, just do the 500/1000% trick and you'll see with even a few points in a stat you will get stronger/more durable/powerful/etc.

What trick is this exactly?

post=139536

1) Use David or Goliath patches

Worst message formatting ever. ):