/vr/ - Retro Games

Hey, you know how Hourai High is a brilliant concept for a turn-based RPG (a massive island high school campus run by the students in factions, where you have anime-esque school adventures, meet loads of characters / optional party members, and customize everyone with FF5-like multiclassing by joining your choices of clubs) with loads of charm, utterly destroyed and rendered unfun by a MASSIVE encounter rate that is both irritating as fuck and overlevels the shit out of everyone?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/odnh8pe2gcdvj87/Hourai%20encounter%20reducer%2070%25%20overworld%2033%25%20dungeon.ips

Enjoy.
~70% of original encounter rate in overworld (and other low-encounter areas), ~33% in dungeons.

Dumb ASM ramble:
There was a cheat code floating around that tried to disable just one component of the encounter-RNG, thank you to whoever posted that so long ago! Knowing the address of the step-counter was a clue that led me to finding where the actual encounter-triggering code is so I could look at that section unassembled, figure out what the game does, and modify it.

Hourai's encounter generating code is VERY strange, like it was written by one dev to use a 1/16 chance per step and then force one at 256 steps, and then ANOTHER who's in charge of dungeons goes "fuck that" and says certain environments should just add a random number to the step counter *itself* every single step, forcing most encounters to trigger by hitting the step limit instead of the actual chance (which is still there too).

They also used a BIT test against FF00h + a branch-if-zero for the step limit instead of a sane compare-against-number + a branch-if-under, so I had to rewrite code instead of just values if I DIDN'T want to multiply the step limit by powers of 2 (which was the case). Zero difference in cycles/space so that one's down to crazy fucking Japanese programmers.