Register | Login | |||||
Main
| Memberlist
| Active users
| Calendar
| Chat
| Online users Ranks | FAQ | ACS | Stats | Color Chart | Search | Photo album |
| |
Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Stifu |
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 |
User | Post | ||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Alright, thanks...
By the way, about tracks... I supposed all decompressed tracks should have the same size (for having the exact same amount of tiles), but that's not the case... Weird stuff. Maybe they just end some tracks sooner when all the last tiles are 00 ones... |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
All I did was butcher each music to confirm their location in the ROM.
But I don't know shit about music anyway... I guess we gotta wait for Solar Soundtrack, provided we don't die before it's out. Oh and about tracks, I thought of something else... Maybe they're in RLE format after having decompressed them the usual way ? (edited by Stifu on 01-28-07 02:48 PM) |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Yep, that's actually thanks to it that I know tracks are in RLE format...
By the way, I'm working on it with a pal, and we're doing some progress... We have to figure out all those "Not tested" things though. That's the thing about mKedit, it compresses thing into the ROM, but can't decompress anything... |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Thanks, GC.
We already figured those out, but that's cool... And unless I'm mistaken, E40A16 would lay down 11 "16", not 10, as the "00" counts... Therefore you have to add "+1" each time. I'll spend more time on all that later, but we made a fair load of progress already, which is quite cool. We managed to generate track files that are very close to the TrackDes mkt files, so we are almost there... (edited by Stifu on 01-30-07 03:12 PM) (edited by Stifu on 01-30-07 06:14 PM) |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
3-up moons also come back, heh ? | |||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
I can't look at it right now, but that's cool, GC... Nice to see someone else is working on that. I'm also planning to make a complete track editor, and I'll share my RLE notes with you once I've managed to fully decompress tracks properly...
I'm hoping my C++ teacher will accept my upcoming track editor as the big university project he wants us to make... That way I'd kill 2 birds with 1 stone, and progress would be fast... I'm waiting for his answer. |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
First things first, let's wait for my track editor to work and to be pretty much complete before thinking of expanding it to other things... but your help will be welcome.
Our decompressor now works perfectly apart from one little bug when the RLE track has "00 0A" in it... Weirdly, our decompressor generates "0D 0A" rather than just "0A"... Anyway, here are our current raw notes for GC:
|
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Originally posted by Alice Personally, I'd say 16+(n+1), but that's just me. Originally posted by Alice It works, awesome ! Thanks. (edited by Stifu on 02-01-07 03:56 AM) |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
If you keep the first one, I think you should change the white part with another color... That looks wrong. | |||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
I meant the latter... | |||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
I found out TrackDes does things the way I thought: in a quite dirty way.
First, when you modify a track, it actually leaves the original track data as is, and copies your new track at the bottom of the ROM (once expanded), and changes the concerned track pointer accordingly. Bouche made it this way to avoid compressed size problems... The thing is, if you open a track and save it 10 times, it'll make 10 copies of it at the bottom of the ROM. It doesn't overwrite anything, but keeps adding things over and over again, until it reaches the ROM size limit. Some people reported that at some point, they couldn't change tracks anymore, TrackDes telling them their ROM is readonly or something... I'm pretty sure they quite simply reached the ROM size limit. I'll try to do things in a much cleaner way, I have a few ideas... |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Yeah, I thought about making sure the newly compressed tracks fit right into the ROM, by messing with pointers, moving big tracks where there is a lot of space, and small ones in small spaces... You get the idea. Or even redefining the space attributed to each track, when possible (basically, when tracks are packed together), changing pointers accordingly... That'd probably be the cleanest way, although the most bothersome one. And I think it'd be difficult to implement in an automated editor, too...
My other idea was to expand the ROM like Bouche did (not to 2 MB though, 1 MB is enough), copying the new track data at the bottom of the ROM, but defining clear areas for each of the 24 tracks... so that each track has its own space, so no garbage would add up each time you edit one, unlike in TrackDes. And yeah, we figured out the 8n compression fully. The 2 parameters following the 8n command actually form an absolute hex address. Example: 80 50 01 means "copy 81 bytes starting from location 0150 of the decompressed track". We're almost finished figuring out all the compression commands, I'll post our updated notes (reformulated and clearer) once we're done... Command 0xAn is basically the last command giving us problems... It's another block copy command, but it's quite weird (and rarely used)... (edited by Stifu on 02-03-07 06:19 PM) |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Originally posted by Dirtbag Yeah, huge thanks to Midwife who helped me getting started with track decompression and all... He's a much better coder than me, too. I've known him for years now, and he always makes the music for all of my game projects... Hopefully Epic Racers will be no exception. Originally posted by Dirtbag There's something I haven't figured out yet... See, replacing all the demo data with "00" of the first demo out of four (the Mario and Yoshi one) will leave drivers completely still, as you would expect... However, it's not the case of the other three demos. In the other demos, if you remove the data, drivers don't go forward anymore, but they still hop and turn their head from time to time, so there must be some data I haven't found yet... Let me know what you manage to do. This shouldn't require pure hex hacking, it should be possible to copy data from a ZMV file, but I don't know the details... |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Nah, I've already talked with Midwife about all of this and sent him the Epic Racers notes, so he knows where the musics and samples are located... but that's it. I don't know any more than that. | |||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Originally posted by HyperHacker That's what I thought of, basically... Except in the way I formulated the idea above, I thought I could allow more space than ever needed if I expand the ROM to 1 MB, so I wouldn't have to bother figuring out exactly what's the possible max size. However, I may want to put other data at the bottom of each track, like their graphics... And maybe object and AI data, if it's also compressed. I had another idea: somehow managing to pack all the track data together in the ROM, moving stuff around... All tracks being part of the same big pack would make space management easier... The difficulty to do this for me would be to change all the concerned pointers... Also, it may be confusing to users, as some things wouldn't be at the same place anymore (although I could explain what has been moved in a txt file)... Thanks for having answered my PM, by the way... Command 5 (0xAn) is definitely a "copy command" though, so it's not what you suggested it might be... I'll spend more time on all that later. |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Thanks for the help, blackhole (nice screen too)... Hopefully midwife manages to do something with that, or we could just wait for your editor... as we have plenty of other things to do before Epic Racers is ready, anyway. | |||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Originally posted by HyperHacker Nah, I don't know anything about that... I simply check how TrackDes behaves. What we use to figure out stuff: -The track decompressed with Lunar Compress, but still RLE (and stuff) compressed. or the track recompressed with TrackDes (reinserting it into the ROM and decompressing it with Lunar Compress) -The track totally decompressed (.mkt files generated by TrackDes) -The track decompressed with our own decompressor, to compare... (edited by Stifu on 02-10-07 04:49 AM) |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Nope, no exception for Ghost Valley, or any other track...
In case that helps, here's our C code for 8n, I added a few quick comments to make it clearer... unsigned int i = 0, j = 0, count, command; // "count" = "n" in our notes Let me know if that helps... (edited by Stifu on 02-06-07 09:27 AM) |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
Originally posted by GlitchCog Exactly. I'll just post our updated notes although they aren't complete yet...
(edited by Stifu on 02-10-07 04:48 AM) |
|||
Stifu Since: 11-18-05 From: Your mom's bed Last post: 6305 days Last view: 6303 days |
| ||
I didn't spend much time on it, but if I remember right, it's just that the program isn't complete. It doesn't have a "main"... |
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 |
Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Stifu |