[Guide] Food, Glorious Food

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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wataru14
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[Guide] Food, Glorious Food

Post by wataru14 »

I was leafing through my old Prima guide for S2 and in the section where they list the food items, they list a "deliciousness rating" under each one. I guess it means the higher the score the better the rating it will get from neutral judges? I have never heard of this mentioned in any other place, so I was wondering if it's a real thing or if they just made it up for the guide?

Also, has anyone fooled around with the food items' code and seen what other kinds of data are there? Like which items are considered "French" and which ones are considered "Chinese" and such. For purposes of matching them with judge tastes. Fu Tan Chen mentions Japanese, Chinese, French, Western, Fish, Sweets, and Hot/Spicy as modifiers. I was wondering if there are actual flags for these distinctions or if it's just a narrative thing.
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Raww Le Klueze
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by Raww Le Klueze »

That probably comes from the Japanese guide, but it's old information that wasn't actually implemented. They had this whole complex system thought out for the cook-offs but it relies entirely on multiple hidden values so it might as well be random from the players point of view, and in the end the actual system is just "base value x RNG". So mostly random.

But apparently they wrote the guide before they finished the game so the official guide actually has incorrect information in it.

In reality there's 12 different tastes for judges and each food item has a base value of 1-5 according to each taste, there's no actual "french food" category it's just a type of taste.

There's also some dishes that count as Surprise Dishes that have a random chance of ignoring the base values and grant all 5's.
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

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Raww Le Klueze wrote:Hey Pyriel,

I was wondering if you ever had a look at the code for the cook-offs in Suikoden II, or if you could be persuaded to take one if you haven't.

I've been working on converting a master list from a Japanese guide book of all the foods and their scoring here but when testing it doesn't add up as it should. There appears to be some randomization going on that will bump or lower the score. Unless we can figure out what is going on there won't be much point to finishing this. The actual guide isn't explaining it very well (or I'm not understanding it correctly.)

I tested by resetting the game until I got Klaus 4 times and always gave the same food. In ( ) is what the base score is according to the list:

Tomato Salad: 3/2/2/2 (2)
Matilda Course: 5/5/5/5 (4)
Cake: 3/3/3/4 (2)

As you can see, something is affecting the base score sometimes, or a lot of the time.

There's also the fact that 0 is a viable score but no food is actually rated 0, the lowest is 1.
Pyriel wrote:I'll see what I can dig up when I get a chance. It might be a couple of weeks before I can look at it.
Pyriel wrote:The game is actually trying to build a score out of 100. I imagine later, ranges are assigned to a value 0-5 or 0/100 is always zero and the rest is at least 1. I see the special path for surprise dishes, which looks a little wonky, but I'll figure it out.

Two random numbers are generated, and then apparently forced to a value from 0-200, then added together. At the same time, 20 appears to always be subtracted from your original score (after multiplying, it tests the first random number for > 0, which will always be true because rand() always returns positive values, and they haven't multiplied by enough to underflow, and then subtracts 20). The combined value of the random paths is divided by 10, so a random bonus from 0-40, and then added to your total.

I still need to look more, as there are three or four paths that can be taken. One of which is the ultimately -20 to 20 random bonus; another is the "surprise" dish path, and the others I don't know what they are yet. But in the main it looks like it's BaseScore * 20 + rand(-20,20). If they did the conversion to 0-5 sort of poorly, Klaus with a base score of 4, might tend more towards 5s. Say if > 80 is the threshold for a 5, all you'd need is a bonus of 1 out of the random values, and it wouldn't be possible for him to go lower than a very high 3.
Raww Le Klueze wrote:I probably should have mentioned this earlier but I forgot, but I did find the "rules" as they are. Not sure if this is any help in figuring it out, but the guide says there are 4 criterias to judging.

1. Completeness - This is represented by the blue bar while cooking, you'll ideally want it completely filled.
2. Category - E.g. using appetizers only as appetizers
3. Judges taste - Each judge corresponds to a specific taste type.
4. Deliciousness - Hidden stat, the higher it is the better.

I've checked the first criteria, while you can raise the blue bar by mashing buttons, re-loading a save-state suggests this doesn't actually affect the scores so either it doesn't work or the value is already set before the blue bar finishes.

I'm starting to think the system is so convoluted and reliant on hidden values that it might as well be totally random for all the control a player can have over it.
Pyriel wrote:I've also never noticed any difference mashing buttons. I just gave up at some point and let the game play itself.

I didn't see any checks for recipe type or deliciousness or any of that factored in. 3 seems to be the only rule that matters in the main calculation, but like I say, I have to find where it translates the 0-100 mark to a 0-5 score, and figure out what the purpose of the other path(s). Given everything else in the game, I'd hazard a guess that it's just random and the guide was either based on plans that were never realized, or it was written that way to give an illusion of intricacy.
Pyriel wrote:Oh, I should add that the table you have for recipes and tastes is stored in RBATTLE.BIN, pretty close to how you have it. I don't know if you got that from a guide or not, but it's in your order of taste/preference for each food item. The food items are in index order (see the GameShark item digits guide for reference), so the whole array is just Food Items X Preferences, with Tomago-Yaki(Plain) in the first position.

Let me know if you ripped it out of the game data. Otherwise, I'll do so just to make sure your guide book doesn't have an errors.
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by Raww Le Klueze »

Pyriel wrote:Oh, I should add that the table you have for recipes and tastes is stored in RBATTLE.BIN, pretty close to how you have it. I don't know if you got that from a guide or not, but it's in your order of taste/preference for each food item. The food items are in index order (see the GameShark item digits guide for reference), so the whole array is just Food Items X Preferences, with Tomago-Yaki(Plain) in the first position.

Let me know if you ripped it out of the game data. Otherwise, I'll do so just to make sure your guide book doesn't have an errors.

Hmm? This message never appeared in my inbox.
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

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Got me. This forum randomly logs me out, abandons my posts, and now it's apparently protected by some CloudFlare captcha annoyance that keeps telling me I should ensure my system is free of viruses. Not delivering PMs wouldn't be that out of character.

Edit: Looking at the message again, it shows me as the recipient. So somehow when I replied in that thread, it must've thought I only wanted to talk to myself.

Might as well dump this too.
http://herrvillain.net/suikoden/gs2/DISH.TXT
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by Raww Le Klueze »

I just thought you lost interest... so, uh, did you ever figure out how it translates 0-100 to 0-5 and what the other paths do?
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

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No, I thought you'd lost interest when it turned out to be mostly fixed value + random modifier. I'll pull it up again this weekend maybe.
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by KFCrispy »

amazing, guys! still cracking into the games!!
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by Skrybe »

This thread mentions that there's a different scoring mechanism for "surprise" dishes. Do we know which foods fall into that category?
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by Raww Le Klueze »

http://www.suikosource.com/games/gs2/guides/cook1.php

^Is the unfinished guide, so most of the information is bull, the DELICIOUS rating doesn't count but all the way to the bottom is the Surprise category. Exactly how those work, if they need to be placed correctly within appetizer/main dish/dessert as well is a mystery.

Base ratings and judges tastes are correct though, pyriel verified those with the actual code barring any misprint on my side.

I did manage to get one of those dishes to trigger the perfect score once so the mechanic is there even if we have no idea how it works. The base rating for most of them are so low that it seems almost pointless unless you happen to get a very specific group of judges. Soy Rice Omelet seems to be the best bet in general unless all judges fall outside the categories.
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by Skrybe »

Oh, this is awesome! Thanks!
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by wataru14 »

One small note: Blackened Sole and Red Hot Ramen are missing from the food list.

But this is incredible. Thank you for all your hard work!!!! You are amazing!
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by Skrybe »

You said the deliciousness stat on the chart isn't used, but is it present in the code? I'm wondering if it might be used when calculating profits from the restaurant. Suikoden 3 uses a system like that.
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by Raww Le Klueze »

Does Shiro not sit at the table if he's a judge or something...? Cause I'm looking at the sprite sheets for the judges and for some reason he has a full body sprite when everyone else has a half-sprite cause the table is in the way anyway.

As an aside, they included Hai Yo and Riou sprites as well as the big animals who also have full bodied sprites.
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Re: Food, Glorious Food

Post by wataru14 »

Shiro sits off to the side of the table. I've only ever gotten him as the fourth judge so he can sit off to the right.
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