Severed Sundays – January 1st

Hello and welcome to our first news article for 2023! Drew here, wishing everyone a Happy New Year as we continue trying to escape 2016. Monoxide and I have been quite busy, so pardon our belated recap.

Menu Code Re-write

The general plan, as outlined from the get-go, is that the game engine is being optimized and re-written piece by piece. In this case we’re talking about the game’s various menus. There’s the main menu as well as shops, load game, overloaded inventory, and so on. All of that is being refactored to run better. As a byproduct, this also allows us to enable mouse support so you can literally click the Buy/Sell buttons, as well as scroll through your savefiles with mousewheel. Pretty handy. There’s still more work to do on this front – for now, menus only work with the mouse (and limited keyboard support – escape to return to the previous menu). Don’t worry, full keyboard support will come soon.

Full Disc Unpacking

We all knew Legend of Dragoon was big. Turns out, it’s over 400,000 files big. This brand new feature lets us do a lot of the game loading up front. The first time you launch the game it will unpack all of the files and transform them (decompress, patch, etc.) Subsequent launches will launch instantly. Not only does this remove almost all of the remaining load time from the game, you can edit any game file you want.

Battle UI Customization

An all new feature from Zychronix, this allows you to change the colour of the combat UI. This is currently done in the debug tools (F12) or the config file. An in-game menu will be added for it in the future.

Debug Tool: Map Warping

Another feature courtesy of Zychronix, this allows you to warp to any map by its ID. Just open the debug tools (F12), enter the map number, and press warp. (Did you know you can also use the debug tools to start combat encounters in the same way?)

More Platforms Supported

Linux and Steam Deck are now officially supported. We are also distributing Mac builds, but none of us have Macs, so these are untested. Got a Mac and want to try it out? Get in contact via the #modding channel in the LoD Discord server!

Secret Feature: New Items

This was a big one. The first steps toward the future of modding. It’s not ready for the public yet, and therefore isn’t included in the livestream build, but we showed off a mod adding two new items to the game. Healing Poot, which heals a flat 10 HP, and Healing Tsunami which completely heals every party member’s HP, MP, and SP. Keep your eyes peeled, because this is just the beginning. 👀