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Main - ROM Hacking - Link's Awakening's room designers were rather bad. New thread | New reply

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Xkeeper
Posted on 04-21-07 11:43 AM Link | Quote | ID: 28493


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Hover over rooms highlighted in blue for more information.

How it goes
Yeah, I'm bored.

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MathOnNapkins
Posted on 04-21-07 10:56 PM (rev. 2 of 04-21-07 10:57 PM) Link | Quote | ID: 28585


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Isn't there anyway to expand the Zelda 4 rom? I would care about saving bytes in Zelda 3 but it's just way too easy to expand it up to 32 megabits and forget about it.

edit: for the record there are objects in Zelda 3 that would have saved the room designers space but they didn't even use them.

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Xkeeper
Posted on 04-22-07 03:37 AM Link | Quote | ID: 28646


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There probably is, but damned if I know how/feel like it.

This is actually kind of fun...

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HyperHacker
Posted on 04-22-07 05:37 AM Link | Quote | ID: 28678

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So is it only Firefox that uses standard Windo...


...ws tooltips to display title attributes, resulting in your very long titles getting cut off like that? Or did you just not check them?

Xkeeper
Posted on 04-22-07 01:19 PM Link | Quote | ID: 28769


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Opera and Internet Explorer use standard tooltips and show everything (there is no limit to tooltip length)

Firefox does not use standard tooltips and cuts the length of it.

I do not tweak my design for stupid browsers.

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HyperHacker
Posted on 04-22-07 06:30 PM Link | Quote | ID: 28854

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Hm, I've had issues with the standard tooltips cutting off my text before.

Squash Monster
Posted on 04-22-07 08:03 PM Link | Quote | ID: 28896


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Heh, that's kinda cool.

I couldn't find it when I just looked, so... how does that game's level format work? Objects with width and height? Objects with just width? I think I could write up an algorithm to optimize levels automatically.

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Xkeeper
Posted on 04-22-07 08:48 PM Link | Quote | ID: 28913


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Posted by Squash Monster
Heh, that's kinda cool.

I couldn't find it when I just looked, so... how does that game's level format work? Objects with width and height? Objects with just width? I think I could write up an algorithm to optimize levels automatically.
Objects with either width or height (not both).

In some cases, I've acually found objects that are totally pointless sitting under other tiles in a giant stack.

Sometimes I think that their editing tools were even worse than Nephi.

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HyperHacker
Posted on 04-23-07 01:39 AM Link | Quote | ID: 28993

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Nintendo seems to love these akward level formats, especially when space is important. I guess it does save space defining levels in columns (Zelda 1, Super Mario Land), but how do you design like that? And don't get me started on OoT, I suspect crack was involved.

Mario Kart 64 has some interesting design choices too. The biggest ones I noticed were not using structures where they should or not putting everything into them (player stats are spread all over, a level's sky colour is not in its header but another table) and not taking advantage of padding (the polygon structure has an unused byte that would be perfect for alpha, but they use some other method instead, a few methods in fact).

Xkeeper
Posted on 04-23-07 01:41 AM Link | Quote | ID: 28997


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Yep.

I should really recode my level viewer to support macros (by viewing how Nephi displays them, I guess), but to also draw straight to an image instead of just parsing the final image to the drawer...

Mostly because that way, I could find some way to "layer" objects instead of only showing the final ones.

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Acmlm
Posted on 04-23-07 05:04 AM Link | Quote | ID: 29062


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Flurry
#&postrank&
SMB2 was a bit weird too ... object heights were relative to the previous object (anything above 15 required "page skip" objects), there were 2 types of door/entrance pointers (one of which couldn't be used after 6-1), enemy data had no "end" byte at all (probably depended on the level length), each level had 10 areas in the pointer table but many were unused, putting objects behind others sometimes required the use of "back to start" objects followed by page skips, and I'm probably missing some

But at least SMB2 didn't waste space like this for level data, they only wasted ROM banks instead by leaving so much empty space ...

Posted by Xkeeper
Firefox does not use standard tooltips and cuts the length of it.
I use Firefox and the tooltips work perfectly

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HyperHacker
Posted on 04-23-07 07:22 AM Link | Quote | ID: 29094

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Heh, ROM bank 0x13 in Pokémon G/S is completely empty. This was probably a compiler bug, since the previous bank is completely full. I think there's a few others too.

<-- hover here

TheGreatGuy
Posted on 04-23-07 07:49 AM Link | Quote | ID: 29103


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I don't know about you, but the tooltip stops at the p in partway. I use FireFox, yes. It's not too big a deal though, since you can still see the entire thing by right clicking and going to properties, and highlighting to scroll through. And yeah, it does seem that when assembling the rooms, nintendo really doesn't care much about space, all the better for us though, easier to add stuff.

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Tyty
Posted on 04-23-07 08:55 AM Link | Quote | ID: 29119


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Well, rom hacking has gotten pretty far in coding, right? well, maybe back then these were to stop hackers from adding that many things to rooms...

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BMF54123
Posted on 04-23-07 10:02 AM Link | Quote | ID: 29129


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Posted by tyty210
Well, rom hacking has gotten pretty far in coding, right? well, maybe back then these were to stop hackers from adding that many things to rooms...
Uh, no.

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[citation needed]

Ailure
Posted on 04-23-07 12:02 PM Link | Quote | ID: 29133

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More like bad coding and grey goose.

But seriously, that's the worst theory I heard so far. It's probably just crappy optimization in the end with their editor.

...reminds me how I thought about making a SMB3 editor once and how it would handle space.

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Drag
Posted on 04-23-07 10:55 PM Link | Quote | ID: 29283


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To be honest, unless you can kill like 4kb from that rom by optimization, they probably didn't care that much when designing, since they probably knew how many banks the game would take up.

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Xkeeper
Posted on 04-23-07 11:01 PM Link | Quote | ID: 29285


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Even then, it begs some questions.

- If they didn't care about space, why not just use plain tilemaps? They only take up 80 bytes (8 * 10)
- Why are there so many 3-byte empty rooms, or even multiple copies of the same room?

And so on, and so forth. It's just weird.

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MathOnNapkins
Posted on 04-23-07 11:44 PM Link | Quote | ID: 29296


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I honestly don't think that game programmers and designers get as down and dirty with data as we do when they're making their stuff. They often have middle ware programs and once they're written, they trust their output as long as it works and they don't have massive problems.

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HyperHacker
Posted on 04-24-07 06:55 AM Link | Quote | ID: 29432

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I get the feeling they just hack something together, then if it's fairly close to a power-of-two size, optimize until it fits that size. Maybe they'd save 32K by doing this and that but when that's in a ROM that's 1.8MB, they have to use a 2MB chip anyway, so there's no point spending extra time doing it. (Example numbers only. )
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Main - ROM Hacking - Link's Awakening's room designers were rather bad. New thread | New reply

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