No Traffic Regulations Necessary

I'm pretty sure that the Boco used during the intro of Final Fantasy 5 isn't actually a vehicle, and neither is the boat inside the Torna Canal. This was throwing me off for quite a while trying to figure out which memory key stores the current vehicle. I'm betting Boco the vehicle isn't actually used until things open up at endgame.

Anyway, the walking/boat barriers thing is sorted out until we get the hiryuu, and then one minor code change and we'll probably be good after that. This allowed me to map and path up to the WingRaptor fight. When the cartographer got to this fight, it had understandably already been through enough fights to level up a bit, and we actually killed it before it ever covered itself with its wings. Go straight to the boss without leveling up, though, and just mashing A to get through the fight isn't enough.

Out of curiosity, I tried using the dumb timing interval I set up for the Mist Dragon from FF4, just to see what happens. The party actually stopped attacking at about the right time, but waited way too long to start attacking again, and the bird had covered itself again by the time they restarted. Well, fair enough. We'll add some conditionals to our battle strategy and call it good. We've made it to the tier 1 jobs.

I told myself I was going to completely refactor how characters are handled once I got this far, and then build out support for the job system on top of it. Now that I'm here though, I think I should stick with the development strategy I used for FF4. When I started this project, I only wrote enough code to get past the problem right in front of me. This would be a poor strategy for some software projects, but I want to continue seeing where it takes this one, for the sake of experience.

This philosophy often means using some pretty ugly code for a while. But it also means that ugly code gets prettier because it was insufficient, or because it needed to be generalized to solve a related problem. So far, the result has been progressively cleaner code that does exactly what I need it to, without any unused edifice that I built because I thought would be useful later.

So I'm just going to put some manual menu commands into my command queue and turn everybody into Monks. This will almost certainly be enough until the Liquid Flame fight. Expect a shameful battle report when I get there.