Looking for a Mod

[sweeten2213]

Don't usually venture over to the Mods Forum, so forgive me if this has been asked before.  Right now I'm playing the CustomForce Mod for  :ffvstr:.  I chose that Mod because you can use custom chars (I.E.  DC and Marvel characters), and it has a long campaign mode.  As a matter of fact, I've never played the campaign for  :ffvstr: with the FF characters.  I have about 300 custom characters split up into about 40 "teams" based on current (and some past) affiliations/teams, and have their progress saved as I go.  I also update the characters as they evolve in current comic continuity, and plug the update into the saves.  I also move all 40 "teams" along together (meaning I'll play a mission with a team, save, and move on to the next team until they all get to the same spot, then repeat).  Sounds anal...well, yeah, it is anal.  Problem is, I'm afraid to beat the game, because, like the hundreds of video games before it, I know once I beat it I'll never play it again (that's why I move all the teams together).  Finally to my question - is there any other Mod that is similar to CustomForce.  In other words, a Mod that you can use custom characters with a campaign mode?

[kkhohoho]

Don't usually venture over to the Mods Forum, so forgive me if this has been asked before.  Right now I'm playing the CustomForce Mod for  :ffvstr:.  I chose that Mod because you can use custom chars (I.E.  DC and Marvel characters), and it has a long campaign mode.  As a matter of fact, I've never played the campaign for  :ffvstr: with the FF characters.  I have about 300 custom characters split up into about 40 "teams" based on current (and some past) affiliations/teams, and have their progress saved as I go.  I also update the characters as they evolve in current comic continuity, and plug the update into the saves.  I also move all 40 "teams" along together (meaning I'll play a mission with a team, save, and move on to the next team until they all get to the same spot, then repeat).  Sounds anal...well, yeah, it is anal.  Problem is, I'm afraid to beat the game, because, like the hundreds of video games before it, I know once I beat it I'll never play it again (that's why I move all the teams together).  Finally to my question - is there any other Mod that is similar to CustomForce.  In other words, a Mod that you can use custom characters with a campaign mode?

Techinally, you could have used custom characters without Customforce.  However, if you're referring to using more custom characters in the offical campaign, the closet thing you'll find is Customforce-X for the original FF.  In case you've never played the original, you should know that FF2's campaign mode is short compared to FF's.  And the Customforce X mod is better.  Oh, there will be times when you have to use pre-chosen characters, but ussaly, you get to bring more custom characters.  And, while you may not care about the upcoming peice of information, there are several brand new built-in characters, and the orginal characters have been updated.

[Alphanaut]

You should also look at Dr. Mike's Patriot City mod and Prem's Heroes mod.

[Previsionary]

my heroes mod isn't really based on the FFVTTR campaign and it's more of a solo hero mod (since i never got around to the custom team missions). So...you'll probably only want to get it if you're attempting to challenge a singular hero/villain and see how well they hold up to different challenges.

[sweeten2213]

Thanks for the replies.  I probably should have been more specific, but I felt I was already a longwinded bore.  I actually already played the first FF with CustomforceX (which I played in the same fashion), and then bought FFVTR and downloaded the Customforce for that game (which I fiddled with and made FFX compatible).  I do know that you can use custom characters in the campaign w/o Customforce, but I guess I'm just kinda into the Marvel and DC characters, not so much the FF characters.  I have about 40 DC and Marvel comics on my pull list which explains why I can't decide on which characters (all of which DC and Marvel - no characters that I created on my own) to use and I have such a rediculous number of saves. It can get kinda boring doing the same section so many times in a row, but I figure at least I get a chance to use all my created characters.  I'd say, as much of a geek that this is going to make me sound like, I spend 90% of my time downloading skins and meshes, researching characters (I have two notebooks and a folder full of character stats which were created based on TaskmasterX's conversion chart), and updating characters instead of actually playing.  I bought the game when it came out, and I'm just now past the mission where you travel through the caves to find the Red Witch lady. Also, truth be told, w/o the ability to download DC and Marvel characters, I probably never would have had interest in the game.

You should also look at Dr. Mike's Patriot City mod and Prem's Heroes mod.

I actually do have Patriot City downloaded, but haven't tried it yet.  I hear it's good, but I'm usually more of a linear campaign guy over an open ended guy.  Plus, I believe you can only use one character at a time.  The Heroes Mod sounds similar, but I'll probably check it out.  I guess it would be near impossible for a Mod creator to write a gripping script with only custom characters - you really couldn't have cut screens or much of a plot.  I would be interested, but I may be the only maniac who plays the game the way I do.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

I guess it would be near impossible for a Mod creator to write a gripping script with only custom characters - you really couldn't have cut screens or much of a plot.

It could be done, just hasn't yet.  I also have a rather detailed plan for creating a random story campaign generator that, while maybe not having a "griping" story, could still product decently coherent ones, with dialogue.  Unfortunately, I have enough modding commitments already.

[sweeten2213]

I guess it would be near impossible for a Mod creator to write a gripping script with only custom characters - you really couldn't have cut screens or much of a plot.

It could be done, just hasn't yet.  I also have a rather detailed plan for creating a random story campaign generator that, while maybe not having a "griping" story, could still product decently coherent ones, with dialogue.  Unfortunately, I have enough modding commitments already.

Thanks for the reply, Cat.  I would be extremely interested, but I have no skills whatsoever to help out in creating one.  Maybe someday.  BTW...I love the CustomForce Mods (as if you couldn't already tell). 

[Previsionary]

On the gripping part, it "could be done" but it would be nearly impossible. What's gripping to one person isnt gripping towards another and not all stories fit every character. So sweeten was right with "near impossible." Not to mention that several coding hooks require specific names, but that probably wouldn't be so hard to rig.

Anyway, My crisis mod allows you to play several missions (like 9-11) with custom hero and villain teams in rumble room. So if you wanna give that a try, it might give you at least a new set of sections/missions to put your heroes through. Just offering some suggestions. :P

[sweeten2213]

On the gripping part, it "could be done" but it would be nearly impossible. What's gripping to one person isnt gripping towards another and not all stories fit every character. So sweeten was right with "near impossible." Not to mention that several coding hooks require specific names, but that probably wouldn't be so hard to rig.

Anyway, My crisis mod allows you to play several missions (like 9-11) with custom hero and villain teams in rumble room. So if you wanna give that a try, it might give you at least a new set of sections/missions to put your heroes through. Just offering some suggestions. :P

I'll definately give it a look see.  Where are your Mods located?  One problem I may have with something like that is, even though I have like a zillion heroes, I have no villians created to fight against.  Whatever the case, I always have an open mind, and I like to at least give a good look at all the hard work the creative teams on these forums come up with.  Also, for whatever it's worth, I would give up a "gripping" story for a campaign of any sort where I could use custom characters.  I didn't mean to sound demanding about wanting a good story - beggers certainly cannot be choosers, and I really don't care much about the story line considering I play with all sorts of heroes anyway.  Just being able to run my guys and gals through a series of missions, coordinated with a storyline or not, would be a geeky dream come true for me  :D

[Previsionary]

All my mods are available at FRP

[wickerman]

I actually got reasonably far into the development of a custom character only mod for FF1 at one point, but I kinda let it slide.  Here's the issue:

As mentioned above, what makes a good story to me may not make a good one to you.  That I don't think is the major issue though (although I agree it IS an issue)...

The hard part for me was coming up with dialogue  for the customs.  The problem is, to make it truly engrossing for the player, you have to have the characters interacting in the world.  That gets tricky because you have no idea what customs they are going to create and how they 'see' them behaving.  Writing a script for 4 guys with spider-man's personality vs 4 guys with Batman's personality would be a radically different mod.

Likewise, as the characters would be built ins, power tiers and the like would not exist.  As such, you would have to make the mod one consistent difficulty level or try to guess how much the characters would advance and what kind of powers they would end up adding to their arsenal - basically impossible.  Imagine a guy who creates a full powered Green Lantern to start vs a guy who creates the Punisher with 2 basic attacks with the thoughts of upgrading him as they go.

Now that's an extreme example, and a prestige cap at the begining would help keep things reasonable, but even within certain point restrictions, you can have 2 VERY different characters.  My green Arrow, for instance, costs alot of prestige because he has so many different arrow types.  My Thing on the other hand is actually right around the same cost - the Thing, however is much more powerful in all but the most specialized situations.  So, as a mod designer, how do you make the first mission equally challenging for Green Arrow and the Thing?

Can it be done?  I'm sure it can.  Will it be easy or perfect?  No and no.  I will probably take a crack at it again some day for FFVTTR, but no promises!

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

The hard part for me was coming up with dialogue  for the customs.  The problem is, to make it truly engrossing for the player, you have to have the characters interacting in the world.  That gets tricky because you have no idea what customs they are going to create and how they 'see' them behaving.  Writing a script for 4 guys with spider-man's personality vs 4 guys with Batman's personality would be a radically different mod.

That's actually fairly simple, thanks to a little-know feature of FFX for both games.

FFX allows you to categorize customs into personality groups by voicepacks.  By setting up dialogue by personality, you can manage this fairly well.  There are already custom methods which will pull up the appropriate personality for a given character, which you can then use to generate an appropriate line.

[wickerman]

Indeed it is little known!  Thanks for the info!

[Previsionary]

wouldn't that mean that the character would have to use said voice packs? As far as I know...not everyone uses voice packs and I'm pretty sure not everyone uses the same coding/ID system when installing said voicepacks...so that really doesnt rectify the problem. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Either way, categorizing is still a problem because of differing opinions among players as to what their "toon" should say or do...and I would imagine it'd be quite a feat to write up that much dialogue and still get a story flowing from it...even worse with 4 custom toons running around all responding to each other in a cutscene.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Not for a decent writer.  It's all doable.  Many games do this sort of things all the time.  A lot of RPGs, for example, are designed for all customizable characters, and they are not usually half so flexible.

Note that I didn't say it would be a super character-driven story full of constant banter and chatter between characters.  You seems to think that's the only way to do dialogue.  It isn't.

[Previsionary]

Thank you cat, for once again making it clear as to what I mean when I'm being realistic and voicing my opinion on something. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have you making it clear as to what I mean.

I never mentioned constant banter or chatter and I didnt say that was the only way. I said it would take time and a lot of coding/dialogue for it to work out in a meaningful fashion especially among 4 characters who respond to things differently. Anyway, the only thing I brought up in my post was the workload and the differing of opinions so get the snooty atty with someone else. And even in the games that allow customization arent really deep and have tons of variables included to attempt to satisfy the players and even then they guess at generic reactions.

P.S. just because I voice something you don't happen to agree with doesn't make it ok for you to attempt the high and mighty attitude. I think we've had that showdown already and I'd rather not go there again. Thanks.

[Shazam]

Now thats been coming. Not one to stir, but Cat you deserved that.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

P.S. just because I voice something you don't happen to agree with doesn't make it ok for you to attempt the high and mighty attitude. I think we've had that showdown already and I'd rather not go there again. Thanks.

If you think I'm taking a high and mighty attitude then I apologize.  From my point of view, I was merely disagreeing with your opinion.  I think it's not as bad as I make it out to be.

I never mentioned constant banter or chatter and I didnt say that was the only way.

That's what I got when I read your post.  If that's not what you intended, then I apologize, but I really don't see how it's as big a deal as you say.  What I am saying is that a mod made for customs need not be anything that requires anything like you're describing, especially if it is written properly.  A fun mod, especially the one I mentioned that would generate a random campaign, need not have an epic story, nor need it focus heavily on dialogue to be fun to play.  Some clever dialogue writing would make it doable.  I also never said it would be really easy or take two seconds to do.  Of course it would be a lot of work.  Modding is anyway.

[Previsionary]

I'm still unsure as to what you think I'm describing. I never brought up a super deep epic story that requires every hero to respond to it differently while bantering among themselves and the villains present. What I'm saying is that either way you go about it with trying to implement dialogue for custom heroes, even if it's a one word response, you're still gonna need several different variable sentences just so the character can respond...even in a simple story. Just for clarification, I never brought up epic stories at all in this thread. I said it was near impossible to begin with. Writing skills barely matters, it's still a large load to work with. I say this knowing full well how hard it is to write dialogue for built in characters while trying to progress a "simple" story. Of course you can just go with generic dialogue for every character, but that'd surely get dull after awhile, no? In every custom mod I've seen, thus far, has had the villains and such talk while the player is silent, which I think works a lot better because that significantly cuts the workload and the player can think up their own responses (since FF doesnt allow players to manually choose a response that they may want to say).

Of course an even better route is to utilize the tools given to us by m25 and create our own custom stories and these points become naught, no?

So I hope everything is clear now. Sorry to Sweeten for knocking the thread so far off track.

[sweeten2213]

No problem - at least if your arguing on my post, it means your responding to my post.  BTW - on the matter of prestige points and challenge level.  In every video game but this one, I enjoy a good challenge.  With FFVTR, I actually used the prestige points cheat to be able to put together more "accurate" teams - therefore, the JLA may cakewalk through a mission while a "Bat-Team" may struggle mightily.  Where the fun part of most video games for me is the challenge, the fun part of FFVTR (at least the CustomForce version) is running all the characters in their respective teams through a variety of missions.  So I guess for me, just stringing together a series of various maps and missions strung together in some sort of way to be able to "beat the game" would be plenty.  Unlimited Prestige, don't really care about a plot, just some variety and some sense of progress.  I actually don't even increase the levels of my characters in the game - I just keep them at their base levels based on the research.  I could always increase the difficulty level to add cahllenge.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

even if it's a one word response, you're still gonna need several different variable sentences just so the character can respond...even in a simple story.

Yes, of course.  It's part of the fun, at least to me.  Dr. Mike did it in the Strangers, at least to some extent.  It's not terribly extensive, though.

[wickerman]

No problem - at least if your arguing on my post, it means your responding to my post.  BTW - on the matter of prestige points and challenge level.  In every video game but this one, I enjoy a good challenge.  With FFVTR, I actually used the prestige points cheat to be able to put together more "accurate" teams - therefore, the JLA may cakewalk through a mission while a "Bat-Team" may struggle mightily.  Where the fun part of most video games for me is the challenge, the fun part of FFVTR (at least the CustomForce version) is running all the characters in their respective teams through a variety of missions.  So I guess for me, just stringing together a series of various maps and missions strung together in some sort of way to be able to "beat the game" would be plenty.  Unlimited Prestige, don't really care about a plot, just some variety and some sense of progress.  I actually don't even increase the levels of my characters in the game - I just keep them at their base levels based on the research.  I could always increase the difficulty level to add cahllenge.

Ah,  I misunderstood you then.  If it is simply a 100% custom character friendly mod w/o a lot of effort focused on custom speech and storyline, that is not the hardest thing in the world.  Time consuming as most modding is, of course, but not hard.  I may do something like that with EZ script someday.  For now, I am working on Metal Storm 2 - but a custom mod may give me the outlet I need when I am getting fed up with MS...

[USAgent]

hey Sweeten, for a quick fix have you ever played any of M25's EZscripts stories that came with FFX?  One that I recomend that is kind of what your looking for I think is the "on Patrol"  EZscript story.  You get to choose your group of custom heroes and then choose all the custom villains as well and you your heroes play through a series of a handfull of different encounters with the villains you choose (which is never ending). The heroes and villains all have scripted lines which use the characters portraits as the taliking heads.
Currently you get to encounter one villian at a time and complete whatever objective it may be, but I changed my script so that my heroes encounter 2 or 3 villains per encounter for more of a challenge.

It might not be what your looking for in a mod, but it allows you to inject your custom characters into a little story to play around with.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Well, this conversation at least inspired me to get back to work on Liberty Bay.  So that's one positive outcome, at least.

[sweeten2213]

hey Sweeten, for a quick fix have you ever played any of M25's EZscripts stories that came with FFX?  One that I recomend that is kind of what your looking for I think is the "on Patrol"  EZscript story.  You get to choose your group of custom heroes and then choose all the custom villains as well and you your heroes play through a series of a handfull of different encounters with the villains you choose (which is never ending). The heroes and villains all have scripted lines which use the characters portraits as the taliking heads.
Currently you get to encounter one villian at a time and complete whatever objective it may be, but I changed my script so that my heroes encounter 2 or 3 villains per encounter for more of a challenge.

It might not be what your looking for in a mod, but it allows you to inject your custom characters into a little story to play around with.

No, I haven't tried those yet.  As a matter of fact, I didn't know they were there.  Maybe I'll take look.  Thanks.  Also, I still haven't finished CustomForce yet, so I still have some time before I'm stuck.

[HumanTon]

Cool, I'm looking forward to more Liberty Bay!

I myself have vague plans for a mod based on the Irrational characters, but with no required characters in missions so you could play through the whole thing with 4 customs. The FF characters would tag along with the player's customs as computer-controlled allies using EZ Script.

At the rate I'm going it will be a decade or three before I'm done, though.