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11-02-05 12:59 PM
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DavePhaneuf

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Posted on 06-17-05 11:16 AM Link | Quote
Good point. ^^

Though if there are any tracks pieces besides Pipes, Halfpipes & Cylinders that don't have texture changes for a long part of the course, like Silence 3. Then it may be difficult to tell where to put certain add-ons. Like for example, I think I'd have trouble finding the exact spot for the Ice in Big Foot, though through trail and error I'd eventually get it right.

I guess it's really just to save time. ^^


(edited by DavePhaneuf on 06-17-05 02:18 AM)
BGNG

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Posted on 06-18-05 01:28 AM Link | Quote
Fortunately, the track segments are long enough that they can't possibly be easily mistaken. The turns in Mute City 3 have groups of control points close together, but straight sections of the course really remove any possibility for error because the next control point is WAY too late and the previous is WAY too early.
Heian-794

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Posted on 06-18-05 02:46 AM Link | Quote
OK, here's more detail on that track that I could find -- I still haven't gotten the hang of using this editor to the fullest. (Specifically, if you're looking at an obstacle or other "part" such as a building or pit area, you can't see the numbers of the points that surround it... can you?)

Anyway, the rest of the details for DD-1:

Point 17: Building type 1
Point 25: Building type 2

Points 22-26: dirt type 2
Points 21-22: Pit type 1
Points 11-12 and 15-16: Pit type 4

Points 11 and 15: Rotating gate


What are "type 1", "type 4", etc.? Glad you asked.

Here are the numbers for buildings:

1 tall buildings on left and right sides of track; 2 left only; 3 right only; 4 short buildings L&R, 5 short L only; 6 short R only; 7 pointy buildings on both sides; 8 pointy L only; 9 pointy R only; 10 mountains on both sides.

Here's the coding for pit and dirt areas:

1 pit/dirt on left and right sides of track; 2 left only; 3 right only; 4 center

I'm going back to the US for a little while and won't have F-Zero X with me, so this is all I can provide for now. Sorry I don't yet have more, but please understand that FZX courses aren't as easy as, say, Climax courses to take down details of.

When I get back to Japan at the end of the month, and specifically when classes let out for the summer in late July, I plan to spend some decent time playing FZX and really mastering this course editor. It's incredibly powerful and a lot of fun, but not user-friendly in the least.

BGNG

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Posted on 06-18-05 10:01 PM Link | Quote
The Pit Area cannot be in the center. Only left, right, and both sides. You mentioned "Pit 4" in your list, but it should have been "Pit 1," as it appears in the game on both the left and right sides of the track.

Also, does Silence 3 in fact use the Regeneration music? That tune is not available in the commercial ROM, but I would like to know for statistical purposes.
RT-55J

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Posted on 06-18-05 11:45 PM Link | Quote
Originally posted by BGNG
Also, does Silence 3 in fact use the Regeneration music? That tune is not available in the commercial ROM, but I would like to know for statistical purposes.

Silence 3 uses the Regeneration music. Mute City 4 uses the Roller Coaster music.
BGNG

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Posted on 06-19-05 01:16 AM Link | Quote
What of the other 10 courses?
DavePhaneuf

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Posted on 06-19-05 03:31 AM Link | Quote
I think when heian said Pit 4, I think he meant the Dirt in the loops, must've made a typo.

Though If I recall correctly, I think you actually can put pit areas in the Middle on the Expansion Kit. I think it was an added option for the editor, and was never in FZX. Thankfully none of the DD-Cup tracks use that, so all of them can be ramade exactly.

By the way, the music for all the DD-Cup tracks is this:
(Though I only remember the name for the Silence 3 & Mute City 4 tunes)

Silence 3 - Silence 3 (Regeneration)
Sand Ocean 3 - Mute City 4 (RollerCoaster)
Devil's Forest 4 - Big Foot
Port Town 3 - Port Towns 1&2
Devil's Forest 5 - Devils's Forest 1,2&3
Big Blue 3 - Big Blue 3 (Japan, maybe)

Mute City 4 - Mute City 4 (Roller Coaster)
Space Plant 2 - Sector Alpha/Beta
Port Town 4 - Silence 3 (Regeneration)
Fire Field 2 - Fire Field/Sand Ocean 1&2
White Land 3 - White Land 1&2/Big Hand (Extended)
Big Foot - Big Foot

So 7 out of these 12 tunes use the Expansion Kit Exclusive tunes. 8 if you include the White Land Extended version. Once all are re-made, I'd suggest using these tunes for the Tracks:

Silence 3 - Silence 1&2
Sand Ocean 3 - Sand Ocean 1&2
Devil's Forest 4 - Devils' Forest 1,2&3
Port Town 3 - Port Towns 1&2
Devil's Forest 5 - Devils's Forest 1,2&3
Big Blue 3 - Big Blue 1&2

Mute City 4 - Mute City 1,2&3
Space Plant 2 - Sector Alpha/Beta
Port Town 4 - Port Town 1&2
Fire Field 2 - Fire Field/Sand Ocean 1&2
White Land 3 - White Land 1&2/Big Hand
Big Foot - White Land 1&2/Big Hand
BGNG

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Posted on 06-19-05 04:09 AM Link | Quote
I call those musics by their venue names, but they do have official titles that appeared on the Original Soundtrack CD. Here's the venue - title list of 'em. Anything with parentheses is the localized translation of the name:

Mute City - Endless Challenge
Silence - Dream Chaser
Sand Ocean - Fall Down to the Scream (Fall Down to the Screams)
Big Blue - Decide In Your Eyes (The Decision In Your Eyes)
Devil's Forest - Devil's Call In Your Heart
Red Canyon - The Long Distance of Murder
Port Town - Crazy Call At Cry (I have no idea)
Sector - Drivin' Through On Max
White Land - Climb Up! And Get The Last Chance! (Climb Up And Get Your Last Chance!)
Death Race - All Need Is 30 Deaths (All I Need Is 30 Deaths)
__________

And where did you get the list of musics for the Expansion Kit courses? I don't doubt that's what the musics actually are, but I would like to know a credible source just for peace of mind.

Also, did you know that the Mute City music in the Expansion Kit has different stereo mixing than the one on the Original Soundtrack CD? Because of this, it's technically a "new music" as well, even though there's no way you could possibly figure it out.
__________

As for your suggestions for the unofficial versions of the courses, I'm in a bit of a dilema.

The Space Plant 2 music, as you've stated, is the Sector tune, but the Space Plant music is Red Canyon. There's an inconsistency here. If I wanted to remain consistent with the original game, I would change the music to Red Canyon. But if I wanted to remain consistent with the Expansion Kit, I would keep it Sector. However, there are other musics that cannot remain consistent with the Expansion Kit, so...

I'm opting to use Sector in order produce as much consistency with the Expansion Kit as possible, but this is still bugging me.

Additionally, Big Foot has me stumped as well. The track uses the Big Foot music, which is not available in the standalone game. Using White Land's music would be consitent with Big Hand, but both courses are placed on different venues (Devil's Forest and Sand Ocean, respectively). I could use Sand Ocean's tune, but that's unoriginal because the venue itself is Sand Ocean. The music that's the most simlar to Big Foot, in my opinion, is Devil's Forest, so that would be an approperiate replacement. Lastly, the Death Race tune could be used as it is not present in any other course in the game.

I'm opting to use Devil's Forest, however, because Death Race is all high-pass and tinny sounding; different from all the racing musics. White Land and Sand Ocean are simply unoriginal, and I'd like to avoid that.
DavePhaneuf

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Posted on 06-19-05 04:48 AM Link | Quote
Ah I see, yeah, I wasn't too sure about Big Foot myself, I suggested White Land since it makes it seem like it's a sequel in a way. But the Original tune for it sounds nothing like that, so Devil's Forest would be a good choice in another way.

I heard all of the songs for the DD Cup tracks in a bunch of Max 2000's video clips, which I think are now on MFO in the video section.




(edited by DavePhaneuf on 06-18-05 07:48 PM)
BGNG

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Posted on 06-19-05 04:58 AM Link | Quote
Video recordings, you say? Sounds good to me. Thanks for the info.
Heian-794

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Posted on 06-20-05 06:11 AM Link | Quote
Originally posted by BGNG
The Pit Area cannot be in the center. Only left, right, and both sides. You mentioned "Pit 4" in your list, but it should have been "Pit 1," as it appears in the game on both the left and right sides of the track.



BGNG, I didn't actually make a course with Pit 4 and drive on it, but it was available for use and appeared in the center of the track when I selected it. I was trying to see if you could change the percentage of the course width that was filled by pit (e. g. make a really thin pit lane in the middle or some such), but couldn't. If you make the track 200 units wide, the pit area expands proportionally.
BGNG

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Posted on 06-21-05 08:24 AM Link | Quote
The old post is below. This first part is just an experiment... Reacting to VL-Tone's images in the Super Mario 64 thread, I just wanted to check and see if a picture is worth a thousand fans.
__________

Hey, kids! Look at the pretty picture! That's a scant 653 bytes you're lookin' at! Textures are loaded (and decompressed) from ROM and all polygons are calculated off of the natural cubic spline defined by the course data.


__________

Okay. Here's the old post:

With HyperHacker and VL-Tone doing all that wonderful stuff over in MIO0 land, I've really been inspired to knock out some of that F-Zero X level editor stuff.

Today, I bring you the official file format for the level editor's course files! I've successfully written a routine to dump courses from the ROM and into this new format. It makes use of both the North American and Japanese ROMs to extract both description texts; since the Japanese text is... well, in Japanese. The Multiregional support of this file format will allow patching of any course file to any version of the game, even though the Japanese version only supports Japanese ideographs.

After dumping the Mute City file, I wrote more API procedures to decode the file and store it in the same memory as courses read from ROM. What I've ended up with is a completely identical copy of the original track, but with two descriptions and a copyright notice!

The file format, after spending about two months on the specification, makes these course files ridiculously small. Mute City takes up all of 549 bytes, which means you can stick 2,750 of 'em on a standard 1.44MB floppy disk.

Also, the horizon rotation algorithm is a mystery. I ask anyone who is willing to help figure it out. I can provide a utility that will let you change the game ROM for experimentation if you wish to do so.

But enough chatter. Here's the debug output from the course file's decoding:

Track Filename: JCK-1-Mute_City.fzep
Track File Size: 549 bytes
File Type: F-Zero X Track (Tentative Specification)
File Format Version: 1

Creator Signature: 00 (Nintendo)
Source Length: 14
Multiregional: True
Name Length: 9
Description Length: 12
Multiregional Length: 6

Horizon Image Count: 6
Music: 00 (Mute City)
Venue: 00 (Mute City)
Sky: 00 (Pink)
CTL Point Count: 23

Source:
DavePhaneuf

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Posted on 06-21-05 10:20 AM Link | Quote
Awsome BGNG. That screen looks really great.

And, the file format, so small. It's also organized so well. I really like the way it focuses on one Control Point at a time showing all it's information before going to the next. I really like it. ^^
RT-55J

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Posted on 06-21-05 09:53 PM Link | Quote
Holy crap those courses are small! O_o I knew that they didn't take up that much space, but 21 Kilobytes for all the courses in the game. Yowza!
HyperLamer
<||bass> and this was the soloution i thought of that was guarinteed to piss off the greatest amount of people

Sesshomaru
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Posted on 06-21-05 11:49 PM Link | Quote
WOW.

So does the game use that format or just your program? If the game used a format like that imagine how many courses we could fit in a hack. Hell we could put them in memory card/save game files and hack in some kinda menu.
BGNG

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Posted on 06-22-05 12:17 AM Link | Quote
That's just the level editor's file type. The game uses more data than it needs to. Fortunately, it stores everything in full-size blocks of data, so we can make any course and put it anywhere in the game. All courses in the game, just track data alone (no horizons or text or anything) are 2016 bytes; so that's 52,416 bytes total, or 51.2KB.

The game has a fixed number of 26 tracks, though (24 circutes, Death Race and GP Ending), so it doesn't matter how many we COULD cram in the ROM. We'd have to reprogram it to put in more.
__________

Hey, kids! Here's another picture!



And another!


HyperLamer
<||bass> and this was the soloution i thought of that was guarinteed to piss off the greatest amount of people

Sesshomaru
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Posted on 06-22-05 04:57 AM Link | Quote
Yeah, like I said we'd have to program in a menu or something. Either way, though, that's damn cool.
Heian-794

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Posted on 06-22-05 07:06 AM Link | Quote
Awesome job, BGNG. I'm really and truly impressed.

Come to think of it, it's not that surprising that courses are so small. Keep in mind that the 21 kb total doesn't include the actual graphics and textures used to draw the courses; those are defined elsewhere. The latest GBA F-Zero (Climax) only needs about 300 bytes to store human-created courses, because all the graphics and tile definitions are in other parts of the ROM.

Looking forward to some FZX emulation!
BGNG

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Posted on 06-22-05 07:55 AM Link | Quote
Well, it's only 21KB because of my handy bytework. If I didn't implement any bit-saving optimizations, the files would be a bit larger. For example: Segments with "no track" don't need a track texture, do they? Because of that, track textures are removed for "no track" segments; thusly allowing the size of storage to drop by one byte. Similarly, pipes and cylinders don't have pit area/dart zone/slip zone/trap fields, etc., so they're cut out thusly dropping the required space by two bytes.

In fact, I still have two leftover bits for all of the control points... So I could theoretically make the file size up to 16 bytes smaller, but that's a lot of work for little worth.
richyawyingtmv

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Posted on 06-22-05 03:42 PM Link | Quote
This is just incredible

Actually appeals more to me than SM64, due to F-Zero X being one of my all time favourite games!

Just wondering, how would the controls in the editor be like? For example, how would it be used? Ive never seen the expansion pack for FZERO so I wouldnt know.
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