FFv3R Incredible bug when you upgrade an active defense

[fosforo]

I've played (and loved) FF and FFv3R from their beginning till now, but only yesterday I've noticed an incredible bug in the standard campaign.

If you upgrade an active defense like Alchemiss's Arms of Goodess from level 1 to level 2 (and more) NOTHING changes in the game!!!
The duration, effect, energy price are still the same, altough the upgraded power costs more than the level-1 version.

The same thing happens on other active defenses (like ElDiablo one)!!!

I've tested this phenomenos on rumble room, hoping that an upgraded version of an active defence can absorb more HP than the normal one but nothing again.
In synthesis: a level 1 Arms of Goodess has the same, identical propeties of the level 5 one (that costs double). So why do I level up my active defense during campaign?

Can you confirm this bug?
Or do I misunderstand the active defence upgrading behaviuor?
Sorry for terrible english.
Fosforo

[fosforo]

Can someone help me with this question about active defense upgrade?
Thanks,
Fosforo

[spydermann93]

Yeah, I've never noticed any bonus for upgrading those powers other than a higher CP cost.

[fosforo]

From the manual, I've understood that if I upgrade an active defense, I can raise a little its duration.

In fact, Active Defense upgrading must have the same behaviour of upgrading a melee attack (with duration instead of damage) but unfortunately this doesn't happen and this bug it seems a big bug to me (and future patch will save us :-( )

Do anyone of the modders know where/how the game handles this aspect (power level increasing)?
Thanks,
Fosforo

[stumpy]

You are correct - increased levels in an active defense do not make it last longer. Which is too bad, because, other than duration, there is nothing about them to upgrade, since they provide 100% protection from the given attack and damage type.

I don't know that there will be an easy fix for this. It's been a while since I looked into this sort of thing, but I seem to recall that the durations at a given power increment are hard-coded in the engine. If activating an active defense triggers an event 21 sink, then it might be possible to script in an extended duration for the given power. But, it would require a bit of python coding to work properly.

[Previsionary]

I seem to recall this shield issue coming up before a few years ago, and I thought someone coded an attribute version of the active shields to mimic FF1's system. Am I wrong about this? I'd check it out myself, but those posts were in archive, I believe. :S

[stumpy]

That sort of fix is doable using fairly straightforward FFX cleverness if using an AD causes an event 21 to fire. But not all powers triggered that event properly and I honestly don't think that ADs did. My recollection was that all of the FFX-triggered ADs were done using custom actions. (E.g., we couldn't easily do power swaps on ADs.) I know that I was working on an heuristic for power event detection using mlogreader and one of the motivations for that was that it would catch AD use (and other event-21-neglected powers like area and special powers, but that's another topic).

The archive will be back soon, as a searchable, read-only board as it was before we went down. Sorry it's taken so long, but I have my fingers crossed for mid-January.

[fosforo]

Thanks for your response, I'll wait until archive will be available again.

Fosforo