The Legend of Dragoon: LoD Encounter Rate Bugfix and Modifier

A bug in the original game causes the enemy encounter rate to be much higher if the player is running down and/or left.

This patches fixes that and also allows the player to modify the encounter rate to double or halve it.

See the README for more details.

"LoD Encounter Rate Bugfix and Modifier" by NoOneee
V1.2 - 17 December 2016

This is an unofficial patch for The Legend of Dragoon game.

A bug in the original game causes the enemy encounter rate to be much higher if
the player is running down and/or left.

This patches fixes that and also allows the player to modify the encounter rate
to double or halve it.

How to apply:
Instructions:
- Put all your American disc images in the same folder you've extracted the
patch, renaming them as follows:
LOD1_USA.BIN (disc 1)
LOD2_USA.BIN (disc 2)
LOD3_USA.BIN (disc 3)
LOD4_USA.BIN (disc 4)

- Run one (and only one) of the following batch files according to your
prefered encounter rate and wait until it is finished.
See the table in the "More Info" section below for more info.
"encounter_mod_half.bat" (Less Encounters)
"encounter_mod_normal.bat"
"encounter_mod_double.bat" (More Encounters)

- Rename the disc images to the same name they had before (or update
their cue files).


More Info:

This actually was noticed by some players (see the post by pika25 in
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/197765-the-legend-of-dragoon/61575987, or this
entire thread http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/197765-the-legend-of-dragoon/73965670
where the bug was mistaken by some as 'the game has higher encounter rate when you are backtracking',
which is only true because in those cases you are usually walking down towards the camera).
I also noticed that while playing the game, so I tried to investigate and fix it.

The game is supposed to detect if the player is moving too fast and adjust the
enemy encounter modifier, but due to an oversight the check only works when the
current position coordenates is higher than the previous coordenates.

i.e. it does something similar to:

if(currentPos - previousPos > 9){
//Moving fast, increase encounter rate
encounterMod=4;
}
else{
//Moving slowly
encounterMod=1;
}

Instead of calculating the absolute difference, it simply subtracts one value from other.
So if you go from position X=0 to X=10, that works correctly (10 - 0 = 10, which is higher than 9).
But if you go from position X=10 to X=0, the game logic doesn't work (0 - 10 = -10, which is lower than 9).

Just fixing the bug increases the encounter rate by a lot and this is obviously
not what the game was balanced/playtested to, so I decided to make three different
patches. The "Mod Normal" should provide you a similar encounter rate of the base
game, but without the bug. The "Mod Half" should provide you about half of the
random battles, and the "Mod Double" should double it.

The following table illustrates the original and patched game rates when moving
in each direction at certain speeds:

Slow Fast Fast Fast Fast
Directions (Unchanged) (Original) (Mod Half) (Mod Normal) (Mod Double)
UP 1 1 1 2 4
RIGHT 1 1 1 2 4
DOWN 1 4 1 2 4
LEFT 1 4 1 2 4

Now that you know this, you may find it interesting to play the original game
avoiding going to down/to the left :)


Compatibility:
This patch is compatible with the "LoD Rose's are Red" and
"LoD Battle Voices Undub" patches.

Other patches may or may not be compatible.

Disclaimer:
This patch is distributed without any warranty.
You are not allowed to redistribute the patched disc images or bundle the patch
with pirated copies of the game.

This patch includes an unmodified version of cdpatch contained in the cmdpack:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130504220128/http://www.neillcorlett.com/downloads/cmdpack-1.03-win32-i386.zip

The executable name (cdpatch.exe -> cdpaatch.exe) was changed to avoid making
some versions of Windows assume the executable needs admin privileges(it doesn't).

Changelog:
Version 1.2
- Now using cdpatch(from cmdpack) to extract and insert only the modified file

Version 1.1
- Updated readme

Version 1.0
- Initial Release

Special thanks to:
Martin Korth aka nocash (for his no$psx PS1 emulator/debugger)
All the original The Legend of Dragoon staff members


This patch is for the USA version of the game.

File hashes:
File: LoD1_original.bin
CRC-32: 24cb8f5c
MD5: acf7717e2192c78d8c5859cfacfc384d
SHA-1: 8dfe525bd348531ac69f0a025e04ce08b8f6079f


File: LoD2_original.bin
CRC-32: 8139792a
MD5: 29972b15701425ae7a36b1cef5c818ef
SHA-1: a2046ee273d42e6891732450f3d5358cacd8b65d


File: LoD3_original.bin
CRC-32: 405da729
MD5: afdc3f87d20b8a19aec8acc709056091
SHA-1: 59089410344f082f5ac9b5e269f21dd6e5a19cdf

File: LoD4_original.bin
CRC-32: 7430eaed
MD5: 5c6a9a0395dcb75bd20cccd6a84d2da0
SHA-1: 1c07f8b37b2cd2c3d65e6ca6dba707a877e949a8