Disable Clive's quest time requirements

If you are stuck in the Dunan Unification Wars; or wish for more details on the gameplay systems, this is the place.
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Takanit
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Dec 22, 2016 6:24 pm

Disable Clive's quest time requirements

Post by Takanit »

Hello,

Long time lurker of Suikosource here, can't believe I hadn't registered until now.

I'm contemplating a new playthrough of S2 in the near future and I'd like to know if there's a way to disable the time requirements for Clive's quest. I prefer to take my time, farm rare drops, etc.

I'm aware of the Gameshark codes available to reset the game timer, but I seem to recall causing issues to rare finds and kindness stat in previous playthroughs with that method. Perhaps I'm remembering wrong though, so please correct me if you've used such a code without incident.

Thanks in advance.

Edit - After looking at the "Time always 00:00:00", I noticed that it has 3 lines of code. Am I correct in assuming that they correspond to hours, minutes and seconds on the game clock? If so, I could probably just bring the timer back to what my clock was after each event.
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Pyriel
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Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2004 1:20 pm

Re: Disable Clive's quest time requirements

Post by Pyriel »

Yeah, I just periodically reset to the hours to 3 when I feel like I'm getting too close to the limit. The game doesn't constantly poll to see if you've passed the limit; it just checks when you reach the area where the event would occur. As long as you don't walk into one of Clive's events with the time set too high, you won't fail the quest.

You can also set the minutes part to 30 or 00 to keep some things refreshing (Kindness rating). I've never noticed resetting the timer having much of an effect on rare finds. For those, the game stores the time you last accessed the shop in total minutes of play-time. I can't recall if that gets derived from the play-clock, or from the actual frame count value. In any case, even if it works off the play-clock, it will just store a new value the next time you access the store, and I think the most you'll have to wait for the finds to refresh is 30 minutes.
Takanit
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Dec 22, 2016 6:24 pm

Re: Disable Clive's quest time requirements

Post by Takanit »

Great, thanks for confirming.

I'll just lower it right before his events and set it back to the previous value after I've done the event, this way I'll be sure to not mess anything up.

My last playthrough was a while ago and memory is a fickle thing, but I believe that the value you mention for rare finds is derived from the game clock. If you set the timer and keep the code active, I'm fairly sure they would never refresh. Would be interesting to test.

Based on this theory, this could also mean that if you checked a store at a certain time and temporarily reset it to 0, it would take a long time for that store to refresh. For instance, if you're at 180 minutes of play time when you check and the store refreshes after 30 minutes, it will expect 210 minutes. If you reset it back to 0, you would then have to wait the full 210 minutes before that store would refresh.

Then again, I don't have access to the game code or have anywhere near your level of knowledge and I'm not basing this on any specific research, simply my own potentially unreliable memory. :)
Omnigamer
Posts: 324
Joined: Wed Feb 13, 2013 11:48 am

Re: Disable Clive's quest time requirements

Post by Omnigamer »

Mechanics for Rare Finds are fairly well understood at this point; your theory isn't too far off. When you open a shop menu, it saves the current total game minutes. The next time you check that particular shop, it subtracts that saved value from the current total minutes. If it's over a particular threshold (varies by shop), then the rare finds will update. Similar things happen for trading.

However, if you're setting the time to be lower than the previous time you accessed the shops, most likely it will update. This is just due to the way they handle checks; I believe they treat the result of that subtraction as unsigned, so a negative number will instead be a really big positive number. It's been a little while since I saw that code, however.
Takanit
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Dec 22, 2016 6:24 pm

Re: Disable Clive's quest time requirements

Post by Takanit »

Interesting! In that case, you'd only need the code to reset it to 0 instead of having to manage bringing the time back up to what it was before the events.

I'm also looking forward to trying out Pyriel's patch. Played this game many times, but always the original version. It manages to bring out a bit of the "new game" feeling.
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