Indiana Bartz

There's something that I neglected to mention in the last post that turned out to be important. I had briefly considered just switching classes to something that can use better armor and moving everyone to the back row. This would cut damage taken way down, but it would also reduce our damage output to a trickle, with several counter attacks on the party for every drip. I had simply discarded the strategy.

 

I had failed to consider the whip, which the previous boss so conveniently drops at a 100% drop rate. Not only does it have the best attack out of any available weapon up to that point, but it also does full damage from the back row, and it has a good chance to paralyze on hit.

So Bartz is a back-row Freelancer for this fight, and now Galura is a pushover. If I get a paralyze in on Bartz's first hit, then everyone stays alive, and sometimes Galura never gets to attack. If not, then everyone dies except Bartz and we still win. Galura is hitting him for 0-4 damage a shot. It's still technically possible to lose if Galura gets 3 or so Rushes to connect on Bartz and drains his HP out, but it seems like a vanishingly small chance.

Looks like we get our date with Liquid Flame before implementing the Job system after all. I've mapped and pathed to Karnak.

Red Letter Day

Over the weekend the borg ran the game successfully. Nine times in a row. The tenth failed for a fairly predictable reason at this point: I should have a Recovery interrupt so we automatically heal during navigation. I've added that to my dev list.

It's time to move onward. I'm tagging the code and command queue as v1.0. I've also started contributing the memory locations I found to this page. Mostly just the Battle section for now. Need to add the rest.

As far as development is concerned:

 

I'm sorting out some of the memory keys needed to get cartography up and running on FF5. Should be able to start code changes by this weekend.

If I get bored or stuck with FF5, I'll work on getting the FF4 run to finish faster, or get started on a Cecil solo run.

Presenting...

Results of trial run:

 

 I am pleased to announce the first successful start-to-finish run of the FF4 Borg. The borg is an extension of the Snes9x emulator that plays Final Fantasy 4, using only the standard controller buttons as inputs, and reading information from memory that is equivalent to what's available to a competant human player, an atlas of the game (built step by step by the borg itself), and a list of high-level commands that reads a bit like a strategy guide.

The borg made it out of the final battle of the game in about 3,300,000 ticks, and if you looked at the game clock right before going into the final fight, it would read about 14 hours on the game clock.

Over the coming days and weeks, I'll be posting more about how the borg works, as well as where development is going to go from here. My most immediate goal is to put the current borg through its paces some more and get our success right higher. I'll continue to post failure reports and what I've changed to increase our chances of success on the next run. Eventually, I'll have enough data to start tracking statistics on the borg's success rate and where it fails the most.

Then it's on to the more interesting stuff. Did you know Square made more than one Final Fantasy game for the SNES? Because I knew.

Edit: Next run was also successful. Woo!