Research: Adding New Moves to Gen 3

[Jambo51]

Originally Posted by itman

I just did everything that JPAN said in his post and it worked without any problems, so to be honest you probably did something wrong. I would just start over and try again. Make sure you correctly repoint ALL the pointers to the new locations of each table, since there are A LOT.

JPAN?! WHAT?! How very dare you?! Lol.

In actual response, I've tried it several times on both clean and pre-hacked ROMs, and every time it's worked, and I followed my own tutorial to do it, I may add, so it does work.

[itman]

Originally Posted by Jambo51

JPAN?! WHAT?! How very dare you?! Lol.

In actual response, I've tried it several times on both clean and pre-hacked ROMs, and every time it's worked, and I followed my own tutorial to do it, I may add, so it does work.

I am so sorry! I meant Jambo, I get you two confused because I've used both of your resources and such so much. AH. I'm sorry. :'(

But yeah, you're way definitely works. Would you be okay if I made kind of a more tutorial? With pictures and things, since this is huge and I don't want this to not be used, it's just incredible.

[timson733333]

I'll try it again for FireRed, I'm doing it for Ruby right now to see if it works, but roms.ini doesn't have the attack animations. Can someone tell me where that is?

[Mr155555]

can you do a video explaining everything so it can be less complicated

[DoesntKnowHowToPlay]

So I figured out a nifty trick that would have been nice to know earlier:

The command 2A can be used in battle scripts to read arbitrary halfwords and jump depending on their value- by checking x02023D4a, this can be used to detect which attack is calling the script. This is actually done by the game to detect Surf and Whirlpool so it can make them pierce Dive. For example:

2A 00 4A 3D 02 02 5D 01 FB 85 1D 08

This command will cause a jump to x1D85FB if the move being used is x15D- Dragon Dance. If the move is not Dragon Dance, the script simply continues. We can utilize this to map different effects to a single effect byte- this allows us to make our new attacks AI-friendly by mapping them to similar effect bytes. For example, if we put Shift Gear's script after this check, we can give it Dragon Dance's effect byte, and the AI will treat Dragon Dance and Shift Gear the same way. It also allows us to easily take advantage of effects that aren't handled by script- we can make Flare Blitz defrost the user by giving it script x7D (Flame Wheel) without losing the recoil effect, for example. It also means there is no need to repoint the battle script table, as we only need to branch off the existing scripts rather than add new ones to the table.

Speaking of defrosting- if any moves in the expanded move table have effect byte x7D (such as Scald and Flare Blitz), they will produce garbage text when they defrost the user. To fix this, go to 0xD7E96 and place six 00s there.

[Jambo51]

Originally Posted by DoesntKnowHowToPlay

Cut for brevity

Indeed. That is how I should have done it. Retrospect is a wonderful thing.

On the downside, this only works for moves which have a similar move already in existance. I know the AI needs modified to support the new moves either way, but at least with using your method, that amount of work is cut substantially.

Battle Script Editors are being worked on to make this sort of work easier, so maybe I'll go back and retrospectively change the system to use the style you show above.

It would certainly make any modifications to the AI easier!

I thank you for pointing this out!

[Darkrai Lv.1000]

Wow, it's been a while since I've been on this side of the forums. xD
Anyways, I've got my hack stuff back on my new computer, and I'm continuing work on my project, but one problem still persists:

How do I give my new moves proper descriptions?

[pawell6]

Originally Posted by Darkrai Lv.1000

Wow, it's been a while since I've been on this side of the forums. xD
Anyways, I've got my hack stuff back on my new computer, and I'm continuing work on my project, but one problem still persists:

How do I give my new moves proper descriptions?

You can use XSE to change descritptions of moves.

[gogojjtech]

Originally Posted by pawell6

You can use XSE to change descritptions of moves.

Not just xse
search for it in advance text, add it to the ini then edit the description

[Omega Zero]

Originally Posted by Darkrai Lv.1000

Wow, it's been a while since I've been on this side of the forums. xD
Anyways, I've got my hack stuff back on my new computer, and I'm continuing work on my project, but one problem still persists:

How do I give my new moves proper descriptions?

Find the pointer for move descriptions
Copy all of it plus 4xnumber of new moves

and paste it somewhere in the rom,
then repoint everything to the new move descriptions place.