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04-27-24 03:39 AM |
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| Main - ROM Hacking - SNES F-Zero editor project | New thread | Thread closed |
| smkdan |
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 Ninji Level: 36 Posts: 121/238 EXP: 288665 Next: 19445 Since: 05-26-07 Last post: 4063 days Last view: 4012 days |
I finished the version functioning version of the panel editor. I suppose it works like a meta tile editor, just having more levels of indirection...Left
click selects a particular element (row, cell, tile etc.) and right click pastes it in the appropriate area. i.e. You select tiles from the tileset, and paste them into cells; select cells from the cell array and paste them into rows; and then rows -> panels. Left clicking not only selects but shows the source cell / tile / row on the lower level. It can be used for reference or a handy palette. OK button saves changes and updates the tracks. 
Here I composed a few attractor bar cells and made a few rows out of them, then the rows were pasted into a panel. 
Then I pasted it all over the track... 
And here we're ingame. The cells are unique to each track now so nothing is shared between tracks. They can be modified freely. Let me know how it works for you Heian. You generally might not be bothering with displacement for new designs. It's just to account for overlapping on the originals. Edit: Original ROM defiinitely needed for this one. |
| Heian |
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 Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 114/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
SMKDan -- Awesome! I'll be getting started then, and will post my successes and failures as they happen.
Will simply loading the game into the editor expand the ROM to 2 MB? Are we free to use all the panels up to 255 for our own purposes even if the original courses only used 100 of them? |
| Reini |
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 Koopa Level: 25 Posts: 82/104 EXP: 83426 Next: 6194 Since: 05-19-07 Last post: 5254 days Last view: 5240 days |
In the left corner of the screen, there's a small map that displays the track. Will that also be editable in your editor? |
| Kawa |
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 CHIKKN NI A BAAZZKIT!!! 80's Cheerilee is best pony Level: 138 Posts: 765/5344 EXP: 30946589 Next: 716392 Since: 02-20-07 From: The Netherlands Last post: 4499 days Last view: 2634 days |
Posted by ReiniWhy bother? ____________________ Wife make lunch - Shampoo Opera - give it a spin Spare some of your free time? <GreyMaria> I walked around the Lake so many goddamn times that my sex drive was brutally murdered Kawa rocks  — byuu |
| Raccoon Sam |
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 Cobrat Level: 56 Posts: 425/672 EXP: 1380103 Next: 18073 Since: 02-19-07 From: Hi Last post: 3468 days Last view: 2699 days |
This is getting better and better..!
Think you could post a video of how the thing works? ____________________ |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 115/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
Making a sample course right now! Keeping the barrier pieces "in phase", so to speak, is the hardest part. In Port Town, the barriers aren't aligned with the rows; one row will contain the top half and the row below it will have the bottom half. This makes it difficult to make, say, a course part branching off, because you have to implement parts of the "branch" in multiple rows.
One thing that would really be helpful: the ability to take a given row, and instantly duplicate it in the first free space (or last; doesn't matter) in the row data. Often I'll see a row that's very similar to what I want to create, and I'll want to base my new row off that. Same for tiles, though there doesn't seem to be much free space at the end of the tile data. Still working on this sample! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 116/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
Still making progress on the test course (haven't driven anything yet, but it looks decent in the editor), but I had an idea for Reini's question. Might it not be possible for at least the white parts of the minimap to be generated automatically based on which panels contain track pieces? Climax did it in a similar way -- they had pre-made map pieces for each pre-made panel -- but we might be able to at least eliminate the hard part of the minimaps. We could then outline it in black or even do something more exotic, like writing the course name in tiny 5x3 bitmaps, or something. |
| Kawa |
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CHIKKN NI A BAAZZKIT!!! 80's Cheerilee is best pony Level: 138 Posts: 773/5344 EXP: 30946589 Next: 716392 Since: 02-20-07 From: The Netherlands Last post: 4499 days Last view: 2634 days |
Draw the white parts as described. Then loop over the image and for each white pixel seen, loop over the eight surrounding pixels. Make 'em black if transparant. ____________________ Wife make lunch - Shampoo Opera - give it a spin Spare some of your free time? <GreyMaria> I walked around the Lake so many goddamn times that my sex drive was brutally murdered Kawa rocks — byuu |
| smkdan |
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Ninji Level: 36 Posts: 122/238 EXP: 288665 Next: 19445 Since: 05-26-07 Last post: 4063 days Last view: 4012 days |
I'd like to see what you come up with Heian. In a way adding new panels to courses is more difficult than making new panels from scratch, since you have to line up the barriers to fit the original course. With curves though I can imagine it'd be pretty hard to get a perfect alignment without looking odd...
I updated the editor with a row copy feature. Double clicking a row will have the highlight turn blue and pasting in the row viewer will paste the selected row. That should make duping rows a bit easier. For minimaps I planned on having a plain 32x64 bitmap editor with the option of having the track itself as an overlay, so you can trace over the track while being able to add these exotic additions. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 117/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
SMKDan, for the most part this course is a grid of perfectly straight streets in the style of F-Zero GP Legend's early story mode courses. I'm trying to make some forked roads where one path has a jump and one has a boost panel in front of some mines; stuff that will make the driver have to choose between different dangers.
I'm also trying to simulate FZGX's "Trident" by substituting jump panels for walls -- Silence II in the BS game did this. This just might work out really well. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 118/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
Making more progress on the track!
One more thing I think we really need is a panel duplicator. Just like with the rows, being able to select a panel and then overwrite another panel with a copy of it would make things a lot easier. I've been finding myself pasting all 16 rows of a given panel into a new panel and then adjusting only the parts I need to. An even better solution would be to be able to duplicate a panel and at the same time duplicate all the rows in it, so that if you copy panel 0 into a new panel 201, you can edit the rows in 201 without messing up the rows in 0. Also, and this might seem like heresy to some people, I just can't get used to having the secondary click do something instead of bringing up a contextual menu. At first I thought it was confusion stemming from me being a left-hander and having the left- and right-clicks reversed, but it's more than that. Having the "other" click perform an immediate action really feels unnatural. Are many other applications like this? I've never used a game editor before this. (Edit: Test course! 
This very-much-unfinished course features some altered rows, new panels, and many panels in new positions. The path mapping hasn't been fixed, so if you run into a wall on that newly-created backstretch, you'll be in trouble, but the other parts work! * Barriers are now purple; works fine. * Panel 125 contains boost panels, which don't normally occur on MC1, but they work. They're shaped like some kind of street-crossing zone rather than like a real boost panel because I didn't want to get into messing with 2x2-tiles yet, and just took what was available. * The bottom rows of panel 89 have a perpendicular jump pad inserted, and this works fine. (Some of the other rows, namely 109 and 110, now have bits of jump panel in them, which I'm trying to get rid of.) * That big ugly town-square-like area of panel 95 is just something I haven't figured out what to do with yet. It's supposed to give the driver a chance to switch lanes. Now for the problems: after using the editor, the series of practice courses is different - Red Canyon is the first one now. Without going back and editing that, I can't practice on this course, so I'm testing it in the Grand Prix. Perfectly drivable, except that the path is much longer -- about 30 seconds or so -- and so I'm in 15th place at the end of the lap, and will rank out pretty quickly in Lap 2 once the extended backstretch starts. Still, the course editor works as advertised and if you designed a course in which you didn't have to edit the path, you could make perfect courses. This was just a test run, and my next effort will be a little more ambitious. |
| smkdan |
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Ninji Level: 36 Posts: 123/238 EXP: 288665 Next: 19445 Since: 05-26-07 Last post: 4063 days Last view: 4012 days |
Raccoon Sam: Forgot to reply to this. I don't think I'll make a video, but I will try to write some decent documentation if I do 'finish' this.
Heian: I made a panel duplicator, you just type the panel number you want to source from into the textbox and click copy. If there's anything else you'll find convenient, mention it because you're pretty much forced to use it unless you only want to make minor changes the tracks. Path mapping is the next thing I have in mind (and minimap editor) since that's absolutely crucial in making a complete course. I'll start on it eventually and we'll have perfectly drivable courses. I look forward to progress on your test track. The duplicator should make fixing up those little different bits between panels much easier. 
Non-functioning minimap editor with track overlay and translusency. Each minimap has an offset to go with it, since when you compare for example Red Canyon 1 / 2 you notice the shared parts of the track are at different positions. That's why the map's position doesn't look quite right here. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 119/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
SMKDan, is the panel duplicator functioning yet? If so I'm going to start using that version, as it is indeed tiring to duplicate them manually. If I duplicate panel 1 into panel 201, and then edit the rows in 201, will 1 be affected or are the rows duplicated too?
(Edit: The other panels will be affected. You have to duplicate the rows at the end of the row list and then make changes to your new rows.) I actually put that Mute City track aside and am working on something a little more exotic -- I should be able to post a map, and then a patch, in a little while. Any chance we could have a little more guidance with the palette editor? For example, being able to see the horizon background after editing those colors would be a big help. The track palette updates right away, but with the sky and such on the horizon, you have to load up the course and actually drive around before you can see it. Important edit: is it possible to increase the number of available 2x2 tiles? There's plenty of extra panel and row space to work with, but not these 2x2 'cells' -- Big Blue has less than a dozen. I want to make new cells rather than edit existing ones, which are all jumbled up, making it tough to tell which ones are already being used and which aren't. Alternatively, is there a way to see which cells are not in use and are thus safe to edit? |
| smkdan |
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Ninji Level: 36 Posts: 124/238 EXP: 288665 Next: 19445 Since: 05-26-07 Last post: 4063 days Last view: 4012 days |
Since an actual BG tilemap viewer is a bit far off (no actual tilemap per track just yet), this tileset viewer should help a bit. It reacts to palette changes, which by default are in palettes 6-7. And yes, you need to dupe the rows you want to switch into 'free' space when you dupe panels. The 2x2 tiles max out the area of RAM they are allocated. It's not possible to expand without a rather awkward hack that would instead of loading the 2x2 tiles from RAM, would load them from ROM. As I did with the panel selector, I'll show usage (occurances) of 2x2 tiles and rows. I'll have that tomorrow, it's no trouble implementing. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 120/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
SMKDan, that tile set viewer is just fine for now -- I'm making a late-evening version of Big Blue and am having to reload the course all the time so that I can tweak the horizon colors. Seeing those adjustments in real time will be a huge help.
Regarding cells: If we know which cells are being used and which aren't, it shouldn't be a problem if we have to squeeze our own custom cells in by overwriting unused ones. Other discoveries: Boosters/zippers/whatever you want to call them -- they are effective even if the car is in mid-air! Fly over one and watch the car get flung forward (or sideways in my case as I'm making a course that conflicts heavily with the default path). I'm guessing that some use could be made of this. Those yellow arrows that are used on Death Wind to point at the pit area don't seem to get much use in the game. I was going to make some more use of them, but they seem to function as off-track walls (not barriers or pit areas). I think I can still do something with them, though. Given how hard it is to construct gentle turns, the test course I'm working on right now is very blocky and is somewhat like that heinous Manor Top course in Wipeout Pure (for those of you who've played this excellent game). I'm gong to try smoothing it out a bit. |
| Reini |
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Koopa Level: 25 Posts: 84/104 EXP: 83426 Next: 6194 Since: 05-19-07 Last post: 5254 days Last view: 5240 days |
Posted by smkdan Nice BG Tileset viewer. Hope the BG tiles are editable. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 121/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
Reini, the backgrounds are actually composed of two (?) layers, and are not trivial to edit. They did a good job of squeezing all that stuff into 256 tiles; I really wish there were more.
For example, the mountains on the horizon of Red Canyon are just palette swaps of the green-and-blue islands in Big Blue. I don't think I noticed this when I first played the game as a kid many years ago. I want to make more city-like courses, and for that we could probably get a few more by taking that weird structure in Port Town (in the 3x3 square at 0x10 in the chart) and making it into a three-story thing that only requires three tiles repeated instead of nine. Some of the sky parts might be redundant, too. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 122/126 EXP: 111896 Next: 4263 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5847 days Last view: 5847 days |
Ready to test-drive a track? (A construction-site of a track, but still a track.)
This also-very-much-unfinished course contains custom palettes, custom panels, custom rows, and custom tiles, and, while nowhere near done, can at least be driven on if you can manage to stay on the path! Big Blue has a nice convenient 100 panels, so I started using 100-119 for custom horizontal panels and 120 and over for custom vertical ones. All the custom rows were placed at the end of the row data, with displacement zero, and the custom tiles were squeezed in at the end in the roughly eight free spaces. I'm experimenting with using jump pads instead of walls, so watch where you land! There's a massive short cut at the beginning if you just want to get through the course and get a finishing time; otherwise you can make all the jumps across the back stretch. There are some diamond-shaped blocks on the right fork near the beginning of the course; don't drive into those! I thought they would function like barriers, but actually they function like walls. Panels 59 and 103 on the right side don't connect, so please don't drive on that part of the track or you'll get stuck. Also, because the path hasn't been edited, you really want to avoid hitting any walls when on the custom panels. Give it a go with this patch (and tell me if it doesn't work): http://www.geocities.com/heiankyo794/f-zero/Poseidon-Night.zip |
| smkdan |
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Ninji Level: 36 Posts: 125/238 EXP: 288665 Next: 19445 Since: 05-26-07 Last post: 4063 days Last view: 4012 days |
Well, there's the first track hack for F-Zero that hasn't been done with a plain hex editor. I'd like to see where you take this Heian, seeing a completely 'clean' course would be really satisfying. I've raced it and managed to complete it without any major trouble.
I haven't really touched it recently because of lowered interest (what, already?), but I will put out a release when AI editing is in there. Then there's enough to make a fully raceable track, and all the bonus features will follow after that. It's odd that the zippers work in mid air, considering all other ground interaction seems to be cut. Why the game even checks what's under the car while mid air is confusing... |
| Raccoon Sam |
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Cobrat Level: 56 Posts: 438/672 EXP: 1380103 Next: 18073 Since: 02-19-07 From: Hi Last post: 3468 days Last view: 2699 days |
I thought it had something to do with shadow properties, but I could be wrong...
Either way, a loss of interest is pretty understandable.. Hope you regain your interest someday. (Not meant in a 'oh well this project is dead' tone) ____________________ |
| Main - ROM Hacking - SNES F-Zero editor project | New thread | Thread closed |
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