Big question time: Espers

Hi, started playing this mod, enjoying it a lot, you've done amazing work, great success etc etc. Currently at the Floating Continent, and I have 2 relatively minor question about Espers and menus in BNW.

1. Is there a way to check effects of summoning and Esper in-game?

2. Is there a way to check which Espers has a character levelled? 

I would greatly appreciate an early answer, as knowing these options would either immensely improve my enjoyment of the mod or allow me to argue for the absolute necessity of introducing these options, depending on the answer. 

1. At this time, no. We had to sacrifice the real estate to make room for the equip bonuses. There's theoretically a way to code it back in, but nobody feels like putting in the legwork right now.

2. No. That's been a wishlist item for a long time, but fuck trying to figure out how to code it.

#2 is sounds straightforward, but it's actually deceptively complex, because it requires having persistent memory (read: space in the save file) to store the allocation of ELs. Expanding the SRAM size isn't trivial, and neither is repurposing enough unused space within the existing SRAM. Some ideas have been tossed around, but it's far more effort than its worth for anyone to actually build.

Fair enough, I see your point. Glad to see I am not mentally challenged and these functions actually aren't in the game. Though I think it's odd that you can check quite detailed properties of every blitz/rage/bushido in the game, but have no idea what a summon does, unless you check the printme or do a lot of guesswork. Sure, most of the summons are like Ifrit/Shiva/Carbunkl etc where they do exactly what you expect them to do, but there are some outliers

#2 can be circumcizednavigated by comparing the characters base/current stats, so all in all, no big deal, but something something me being salty about a very minor QoL issue that most likely won't ever get fixed. 

The thing about the Esper descriptions is that the game's built-in description handler only handles things up to a certain length. The equip and summon effects can't both be crammed into one description for every Esper without violating the syntactical conventions that BTB has used ubiquitously throughout the rest of the menus, which would be undesirable. It was decided to use the equip descriptions alone as of a few version back — since they were the New Thing, and many summon effects are unchanged, as you noted. It's not ideal, but it's the best compromise that was available at the time.

There is a hypothesized solution that would display the summon description when hovering the Esper's name while its spell list is open, and it'll get done eventually. But it requires assembly hacking, and there's just a really limited amount of time and/or ambition to dedicate to it at the moment.

Would lavishing loads of praise and general geek-fandom help?  I would offer cookies but that requires known addresses - may still be on the table if that is what it takes

What kind of cookies are we talking, here?

Well - the best ones are my wife's... which are these Cheese Cake cookies (I like mine with dried cranberries & pecans but some are a fan of the plain).  

On 5/31/2021 at 9:35 AM, sandokan said:

1. Is there a way to check effects of summoning and Esper in-game?

Oh, so this is a thing now: https://github.com/SirNewtonFig/BNWSummonDescriptions/archive/refs/tags/v1.0-rc3.zip

Grab "BNW Summon Descriptions with Menu Edits" from the ips folder and apply to your ROM. You can ignore the rest.

(This was built on the 2.1 beta, and I haven't tested it on 2.0 — but I'd give it at least 60% odds it would work Backup your ROM first to be safe!)

PS: where's my cookies, Copper??!!

You do the work - you get the cookies!  I'll DM you for an address soon.