I have shamed the family: I've discovered a huge, fundamental flaw in Dragoon X Omega II.

To mitigate the damage range of enemy attacks in the game, I made it to where all enemies hit for criticals 99% of the time. While this worked to that end, it came to my attention recently that when Final Fantasy does the math for a critical, it ignores Sargon's defensive value.

This means that all armors are USELESS in the game for the most part, barring the Myra Armor which actually does cut PSI damage in half like I intended, and the Implants that have special effects bound to them.

How in the name of god this got by myself and the roughly 60 people who beta tested it is amazing...

So, this leaves me to ask a question: Should I just let this hack die and not worry about it? Or fix this stunningly retarded oversight in a point release of the hack?

I can adjust all enemy DMG stats and adjust the armors accordingly, which should just require a play through to make sure it balances out... I'll also have to disable criticals altogether, since getting hit by them by doing the aformention stat changes makes them hit *HARD*, to the point of being ridiculous.

If another version is released, there are also several other things I'm going to attempt to address:

1: Assigning all alphanumeric characters a transparent background color. This will make all dialogue boxes have a black background, drastically increasing readability. However, to prevent sprites from being seen if they're underneath the box, I'm going to have to intercept the drawing routine, disabling the sprite layer at $2001 on open, and re-enabling it at close. I don't really think this will be hard, depending on any code we gutted being in the same bank to give me the free space to write my routines.

2: Animating Sargon's battle sprite. I believe I can pull this off, but it's iffy. I'll try my damnedest, though.

3: Touching up a few of the songs, particularly the battle related ones. I got several complaints about them...

4: Clarifying some of the plot; there's some slight incongruities in the ties between DXO and DXOII that I feel need addressed.

5: Thaddeus has mentioned that he may do overhauls on some of the levels. This is uncertain at this time, however.

Anyway, I'd be most interested in hearing opinions on this. You have no idea how stupid this makes me feel. I figured there'd be some issues due to the sheer amount of hacking we did to the game, but nothing this mind blowingly severe.

Oh man you added that in? It was actually quite useful.  I missed the final test on it so I have to ask how does it work now?  Do you just have to do a regular battle each time or does it automatically do overworld at a certain point?

I didn't notice it myself, I guess the level ups and moving on to more difficult parts of the game covered it up.



A fix would be nice, this is a great hack, no sense in letting it die when you can make it even better.



Sounds good, I'll be sure to play it again (I was actually thinking about starting a new game yesterday but now I think I'll just wait for this fix).



I never had a hard time reading the text but this sounds good. Maybe shadow the letters with the old window background color (Like DXO1)?



This would be great, seems strange that he's static while the original characters were animated.



Two things I'd like to see if he does:

1. In a few places you have a shadow block next to an unwalkable black block, maybe make the shadows only one tile wide or something so the player can differentiate.

2. The treasure chests can be really hard to see, I've walked right past some of them two or three times before I noticed them, I think they should contrast against the ground more.



Meh, it happens to everyone, just look at all the missing effects in the original game. The nice thing about this being a hack is that you can fix this, think of how much worse it would've been if it was a commercial game and you found something like this after release.

1: Assigning all alphanumeric characters a transparent background color. This will make all dialogue boxes have a black background, drastically increasing readability. However, to prevent sprites from being seen if they're underneath the box, I'm going to have to intercept the drawing routine, disabling the sprite layer at $2001 on open, and re-enabling it at close. I don't really think this will be hard, depending on any code we gutted being in the same bank to give me the free space to write my routines.

2: Animating Sargon's battle sprite. I believe I can pull this off, but it's iffy. I'll try my damnedest, though.

3: Touching up a few of the songs, particularly the battle related ones. I got several complaints about them...

4: Clarifying some of the plot; there's some slight incongruities in the ties between DXO and DXOII that I feel need addressed.

5: Thaddeus has mentioned that he may do overhauls on some of the levels. This is uncertain at this time, however.


1 is finished: http://sliverx.panicus.org/Images/neodia.png (Thanks, Disch!)

2 is done... kind of. I did this: http://sliverx.panicus.org/Shite/muzzle.gif

3 is done. The two battle songs are different, now.

All armor now functions as expected; I also believe I've killed the routine for critical hits (I haven't had one hit me yet), but only playtesting it will let me know for sure. I've also fixed the shadow/unwalkable issues Dragonsbretheren mentioned, as well as fixing a couple of attackable tiles in people's houses.

The entire balance of the game has shifted due to armor, you know, working now. This is going to require going through the game and checking the new difficulty.

I'm starting a second job this week, which is going to kill my free time. So I ask if anyone would be interested in giving the game a go through to contact me at sl1v3rx@panicus.org (Unleet it, yo).

I can do it myself, but it will definitely take longer.

This, god willing, will be the absolute final version of the game; maybe then I can make due on my promise to retire from hacking.

This explains why every time I bought a new piece of armor the enemies were still smashing me for the same damage as before.

Power leveling isn't my idea of fun :-/