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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Gideon Zhi |
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Gideon Zhi Keese                   Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| It should speed up if you hold the A button. | |||
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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Extremely early prototype of the starting area. Just showing off a few structures. |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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Okay so I'm on-and-off hacking a platformer game (blaster master.) A lot of the fun here is exploring, and while conceptually I've got the level design in my hack down really awesome, I'm having trouble building rooms that aren't really really bland. So I thought I'd start this thread here, especially since there was that whole discussion surrounding the Zelda Parallel Worlds hack. What makes a good platformer? Not necessarily in terms of difficulty - I've got a good idea of where I want my difficulty to lie, and I know all about fair jumps and enemy placement and all that. What I'm more interested in is the actual level design. What makes a platformer more interesting than another? How does one keep from making lots of Really Boring Straightaways? Discuss! Someone throw me a bone here. (Yes, I know, big translation man actually doing something not translation related? Gasp shock horror :p) |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| I wasn't really planning on putting in a whole lot of "puzzle" elements. Blaster Master is an action game with a dash of exploration at heart, and should remain such. The closest thing you might get to a "puzzle" is a powerup behind a destructible block underwater, that you know you need the Dive function to reach. | |||
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| CAN I HAVE A MOUNTAIN DEEEEEEW | |||
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Gideon Zhi Keese  Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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To quote Ian... La-Mulana is a freeware free-roaming platformer game designed to look, sound, and play like a classic MSX game. It's heavily influenced by the classic Konami MSX game "The Maze of Galious" and anyone who has played that title will probably recognize the similarities very quickly. You play the whip-wielding Indiana Jones-esque archaeologist Lemeza Kosugi as he investigates the ancient ruins of La-Mulana in an attempt to find its treasure and one-up his father, who is trying to get the same treasure as well. The game is huge, with many different areas to explore and dozens of items and weapons to find. Each area has a large variety of puzzles and traps (many of them quite fiendish) and you need to solve the puzzles in each area to discover the Ankhs and Ankh Jewels, which allow you to fight the eight Guardians of the ruins. To solve the puzzles you'll need to be able to read the tablets scattered throughout the ruins, which will require a Hand Scanner and translation software for the portable MSX that Lemeza has brought along on the adventure. Your Hand Scanner will also allow you to find items and search the bones of less fortunate adventurers. La-Mulana is one of the longest freeware games I've played in quite some time--my first playthrough took me 26 hours, and even if you knew exactly what to do for each puzzle in advance I'd still bet the game would take at least 10-12 hours to complete, not counting the bonus dungeon. It's now completely translated, and fully enjoyable by an English audience! Enjoy! Relevant linkage: Aeon Genesis |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| Personally, I loved every minute of Shadowgate 64. I still replay it on occasion. | |||
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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Originally posted by C`aos Pun not intended, right? Hah. Yeah, it's Super 3D Noah's Ark. |
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Gideon Zhi Keese  Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| Just a note - some odd glitches may be the result of an unfortunate limitation in the IPS format. IPS is made such that its patch addresses are 24-bit; that is, it can only patch the first 16 megabytes of any file. The unfortunate truth, but there you have it - if Doubutsu no Mori is greater than 16 megabytes, then IPS may not function correctly. | |||
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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Originally posted by Dootuz  |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| That's Vortex, for the SNES. SFX game. | |||
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| My apologies; I haven't had time to look through Gran Historia yet. The last few weeks have been... busy, to say the least - I ended up doing a text routine hack for my Ys 5 project, a font width hack for my Dark Law project, and a new level for a Blaster Master project; further, Majin Tensei's demon dialogue finally got dumped, as did Solid Runner's script and Rejoice's script, and translator extraordinaire/cyborg-typing-machine Tyria handed me another ten chapters of SRW Alpha. And this doesn't even include the extra-internet stuff that's been going on :p
So yeah, it's been crazy. But I haven't forgotten about you! You just happened to pick one of the harder projects for me, is all  |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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Three different fonts. Opinions? Top one's my favorite, I think. |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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Aeon Genesis has released a new version of the Ys 4 - Mask of the Sun patch. It includes a new font, various code fixes, and a completely rewritten script. This time, it will work on your copier. La-Mulana has also been upgraded to v1.01. This release includes various bugfixes and typo corrections. Get your fix at Aeon Genesis. |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| Looks like Syphon Filter to me. | |||
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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Goddamn, this took way too long. The routine was supposed to take me half an hour, not six hours 
The subscreen is an absolute MESS. Rather than store each tab or statistic as an individual string, it just chucks a mass of tiles to the screen then loads a tilemap from SOMEWHERE (haven't figured out where just yet.) What's worse is that because of this, it's expecting a lot of 16x16 characters for everything that isn't a string variable; if it doesn't get what it's expecting, bad shit happens. Rather than try to VWF the entire thing, which would be a huge mess, I'm probably just going to hackjob it and use painted text for my statistics, tabs, etc - in other words, everything that's static. ...need to move the sprites for those item icons up a bit, too. Note that none of the items you see here actually exist in the game. They're "fake" items Haeleth created (although they're missing most of their data at present) to aid with testing. The "Sharp Melon" comes from a blunder on the kanji artist's part - instead of attacking you with sharp claws, some enemies attack with sharp melons. This has been fixed in the script :p |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| Well... let's start with bitplane graphics, since that's the core of it.
Basically, a byte is made up of eight bits. In bitplane graphics (specifically 1bpp graphics) each bit of these bytes represents a pixel. If a bit is set, a pixel is displayed, If the bit is cleared, a pixel is not. In theory, yes, this means you can edit graphics in hex. You may see various "BPP" modes in tile editors. This stands for "bits per pixel." In 1BPP, you have 1 bit per pixel, so your graphics are monochrome. In 2BPP, you have two bits per pixel, so you have up to four possible combinations of on/off per pixel (on-on, off-off, on-off and off-on) so you have four possible colors (usually, one is reserved for a transparency or background.) In 4bpp, you have four bits per pixel; thus, 16 possible combinations. And so on and so forth. Tiles then are simply bytes, stacked on on top of another, so that when rendered as bitplane graphics, they make a picture. As far as fonts go, your 8x8 fonts are just that - their letters take up a single 8x8 tile each. For 8x16 fonts, they take up two 8x8 tiles per letter. For 16x16 tiles? You guessed it - four. Variable-width fonts are another story altogether; they're generally stored as 8x16 or 16x16, but when they're rendered in RAM the tiles get shifted or rotated, then are melded into a "picture" of the text via logical OR. Since nearly (?) all old systems are tile-based architectures, having something that doesn't conform to standard tile sizes either needs to be displayed as sprites or as a straight-up picture. As for the difference between variable-width and fixed width, well... what you're reading right now is most likely variable width. This, on the other hand, is probably fixed width. Notice the spacing on the characters, how the letter "i" is perceptibly thinner than something like, say, a letter b or a letter g. Then look at the fixed-width text in the code tag - the "i" takes up exactly the same amount of screen space as any other letter. VWF code is... messy. It's a lot easier to write something that simply stores the full font in RAM and updates the on-screen tilemap than it is to do all of the bitlogic required of other font routines. You can drop a variable-width font on top of a fixed-width font, sure, but it'll come out looking weird unless the code is properly in place. For an illustrated example... 
Compare the printout of the name Gideon at the top of the status screen (where VWF -has- been implemented) to the printout in the quick status bar at the bottom (where it hasn't been implemented yet.) This code is for a 16x16 VWF - it accepts characters up to and including a possibly 16 width, so the font itself is stored as 16x16 tiles. Without the VWF code, it still displays as 16x16 tiles, and looks rather ugly in comparison to the rest of it. |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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Not posting the title, 'cuz I like it too much to show it off just yet  Here are the first few paragraphs, as written some time ago and touched-up slightly just now...
I'll be posting excerpts as they come. I've got a fairly good idea for where I want the plot to go and how I want it to develop, a great way to end it, and lots of interesting folks with which to populate the story. (One of my favorites is a guy named Teeth Saltzmann, named for his grin which is purported to be able to open beer bottles.) At this point, I just need to connect the dots and fill out the middle a bit more... but goddamn, I love this story. |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| Man, this is annoying, 'cuz I know I've seen that HUD before. After all, that's really the only thing that distinguishes FPS games... :p
Edit: Hah, I knew I'd seen it before! It's Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter. (edited by Gideon Zhi on 02-12-07 04:12 AM) |
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Gideon Zhi Keese Since: 12-05-05 From: ...behind you! Boo! Last post: 5910 days Last view: 5907 days |
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| I'm no N64 hacker, but my hunch is that the first thing would be a whole lot easier than the second. Your basic removal-of-notice could be as simple as removing the call to a particular subroutine or just erasing the graphic entirely. The other thing, however, involves remapping an automatic action to a controller button, and making sure it doesn't happen automatically anymore... It doesn't sound like too difficult a task, provided you know the hardware and have some decent tracers, debuggers, assemblers and disassemblers for it, but it would almost certainly involve more work than removing the Wrong Way notification. |
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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Gideon Zhi |
