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05-09-24 02:55 AM |
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| Main - Posts by Synthetekh |
| Synthetekh |
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 Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 123/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
I'm actually kinda surprised at how simple this is overall, though I suppose it makes sense since it's like a NES game (I just hate when compression or encryption are used, but fortunately none of that shit found thus far).
It took me a day to research how to unpack the Wad data, or really find a program to do it (not much info out there... about 3 webpages or so with some info and programs (somewhat hard to find downloads for most) with little info on how to use them, but very simple to use once you figure out what's what with the Wad formats), and a day to collect most of the info I have so far on the game data itself, and I've spend 2 more days collecting a little more. So I could actually very realistically see editing for MM9 and MM10 happen. I'd love to do it all myself, but my health is making it so I can rarely do much (not sure how long it'll take me to recover), so I'll keep gathering notes as I can here and there, but until I'm well the possibility of an Editor will be up to someone else (which is very much why I've basically stopped working on Wily Wars stuff D: ). --- Wad related info --- Btw, I've been using Sharpii (command prompt program, but easy to use) for Wad packing/unpacking (can quickly repack the game with 2 pretty simple commands); use the 'wad' command for the Wad itself, and 'u8' for the .app files inside ("00000002.app" contains all of the Game Data, except in the DLC Wad); the program will give you more info when you type them in. - Also Dolphin these days can easily run both the games (if your video card doesn't support DX10, DX11, or the later OpenGL versions, but will do DX9, Dolphin v3.5 will work great). |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 124/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Also, Mono is for running C# programs on Non-Windows OSes... so ehhh, what lol?
You're comment would make a good Troll post, so props for that, I guess....  |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 125/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Alright, I've done all I can do for now; I must rest. So, I'm just going to release what I have so far.
I'll include Sharpii for wad and u8 file packing and unpacking (less hassle for ya). MegaMan 9 Hacking Notes (WIP) Sharpii v1.7.2 Btw, I peeked inside MegaMan 10 and it does indeed look to be the same when it comes to most of the files and data structures etc. Edit: Also the .tpl files in these games are non NES-like images (like for the DLC download screen etc.), but if you want to open them up use ImageTool.exe inside of CTools. CTools (I had a hard time finding a download for this, so I'll put this here too) |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 126/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Looks very interesting. I like the way the overworld maps are themed and layed out. Something about it arouses some very curious feelings in me (and are familiar to elements in other games that I really like), not sure what words to use to explain it, but yeah it's got a kind of dreamy feeling of some sort lol.
I really like the graphics of those crystally looking blocks 3-10. I also really like the Leaf BG in 6-1. The palette in the World 4 Airship isn't terrible but isn't great on the eyes either, but I'm not sure if the NES gives you anything better to work with for it, so meh. I could comment on more, but I'm too tired lol. The whole game looks great really. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 127/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Also if you want to display text for your clickable link rather than the Address (if you feel like bothering with the extra work lol), format it like this:
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 128/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
I haven't looked at your game myself, so I'm not going to say anything about the changes you made, but rather give you some hopefully helpful general info.
On the level design, I would usually suggest changing the entire level layout. If however you're making a game that's supposed to be a lot like the original, for example a hard version of a game, or even a remix of it, then I would maybe only edit say something like 5% to 60% or so of the level layout (how much really really depends on what your intentions are though). By the name of your game it seems like you want to make something very different, so I would suggest probably changing the entire level layout and more (changing the graphics would be suggested usually, though it's not necessary). What is important to change depends entirely on the purpose of the hack, but generally you'll want to change the level design heavily even if you change nothing else (so the gameplay is different, so that it actually feels like a different game; it's about having a very different and thus new experience in most cases). When it comes to the palettes, they should be something that is nice to look at. Think about how it feels when you look at it, does it get irritating to your eyes or just feel annoying to look at, or even just kinda fugly even if it's not terrible, or does it feel enjoyable to look at. And if you can't stop looking at it because it's that gorgeous, than you know you've likely got something great. Making a hack can get pretty involved, and it will likely take you several attempts, or simply just more time spent on it than previously imagined. People often times end up working on these for a year or more. It depends on how far you want to go, and how efficiently you can make progress; everyone works at their own pace. It can be difficult to be sure how the result is when you make something yourself because you'd like your creation to be great, so it's easy to want to see it as that even if it really needs more improvement. It can also take time to develop your sense of what quality is, and especially to develop your ability to easily identify what specific components make something quality. Though, if you've been playing games for some time now, your natural sense (intuition) of these things should be able to guide you alright. Think about the games you've already played, and think about what games you liked more and which ones you liked less. Think about what specific things in all of those games were memorable, both the good and the bad. Go back and play though some of them again, and as you do take a mental note (or even write it down if you feel like it) of what you like and don't like, and in time you'll gain more and more of an understanding of what to do and what not to. It's just as important to pay attention to what isn't good, because the more you understand what you don't want, the better you can understand what you do want; the path to what you're after will become more clear~ this is true with anything in life. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 129/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Posted by shanem Well put lol. This is an issue I tried to point out a decade ago (or even just asshole behavior in general), and people just seemed to think I was stirring up trouble for nothing. These forums have been plagued with douchey behavior, cliques, and arrogant, harsh, overly critical comments for at least half of its existence, but fortunately it seems far better overall than many years ago, but it would be nice if it just ended completely. I see similar behavior on other game modification related forums, yet the opposite on computer programming forums (programming questions can take a lot of energy to answer as well, if not more, often times; people post their scrips and algorithms etc. and actually receive help with them, or at least a nice response if no one can help or wants to). Kinda strange. I never quite did understood what was so hard about just being decent, if nothing nicer. It's interesting how often I see a bunch of negative comments (sometimes several paragraphs in one post) where it would have been just as easy or even easier in those particular cases to have just giving the person a few simple tips, or even just simply and nicely let them know that what they were asking was too much. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 130/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
He meant that the games (like MegaMan 2) were made in the 80's (late 80's anyway lol), so the computers they had to develop them on were worse than Windows 95 computers. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 131/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
hehe lol ye.
Well anyway, I think you'll get things down pretty soon. You seem quite competent lol, just new to this. I can only ever recall one person who actually seemed pretty hopeless (any of you old timers remember DAVALAR? hehe~ I hope I spelled that right). I've been at this stuff for 12 years on and off, but I wasn't super awesome at it right away either, nor nearly as confident. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 132/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Wow, I just looked at my first hack (Super Mario World hack).... omg. In some ways it's good, but in other's it's pretty bad lol (level design). I did a nice job porting graphics from other games though haha.
Funny, I actually don't really have many hacks, and they're all very unfinished. I've mostly spent a lot of my time learning and screwing around for fun rather than getting that far on making anything serious. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 133/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Precisely. I remember the first level ever I made (or one of the first anyway if not the very first), and it was short. It actually felt like a decent bit of work and I felt good about the results. It was kind of a joke level, but a joke pretty well made lol (SMW: super fast auto scroll so Mario was always running at full speed and you had to jump at just the right times or you'd die). I didn't release any of my edits until I had been at it for probably half a year or so (I didn't even know about this place until around then either), and even then it was still majorly a work in progress.
I remember when I was just trying to figure out how to use Lunar Magic, and even though I figured it out myself, it took me at least a year to get how the whole program worked and the game's way of structuring things. I didn't know what an 8x8 Tile was, or a 16x16 Tile, and the Overworld Editor... hah, that was challenging all by itself. I felt very intimidated by Programming for a few years, just couldn't seem to grasp it and didn't have the slightest clue where to start just to begin to understand any bit of it. Today though, I almost feel like a master at Programming, and highly skilled at many other things (even though I need more experience with some things, I can figure out how things work and what's seriously important, just by thinking about something long enough, usually anyway). I also feel like I'm just full of great and even brilliant ideas much the time; they just flow out with ease. It really is amazing how far you can go after some time, regardless of how newb-like you once were. Hehehe yeah DAVALLR was very much fun indeed. It was sad, he really just wanted help lol. I actually really wanted to help him out, but like you said, he just seemed to young or something to understand how even the forums worked (or were supposed to used rather... lol) let alone game modification. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 134/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Posted by AnandastoonPosted by Model FZx I guess he's not that interested in making levels with Quickman Lasers? Maybe he wants to just remove them? |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 135/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Um Mike, I don't really see why this hack would need any Palette and / or any other Face-lifting changes. It's intended to be a hard mode of the original game. It's still supposed to be Mega Man 1, just with harder Level Layouts (similar to Hero Mode in Mega Man 9, but including more Level changes than just the Sprite Layout).
I noticed that the areas and paths of the Levels generally look somewhat similar to that of the original game's levels, which I would think is what would be most appropriate in this case. Personally for what this hack is intended to be, I would just rate it by whether or not the levels are challenging enough, interesting, and fun to play. Edit: Ahh well I see that dreamerman had to Edit his first post to make the purpose of this hack clear, so I guess disregard this then. But I'll still leave this here for dreamerman (if it helps at all), as it seems like he might still make palette changes after all... (I can't entirely tell from his response because "1." of what he quoted was a two part suggestion)? |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 136/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Oh well yeah some AI changes and such are good. I had gotten the idea that you had meant graphical changes and such to make it look much different. I might have just misunderstood what you meant though. And even Graphics and Palette, etc. changes aren't bad either, just as long as it doesn't lose the essence of what the game is supposed to be (certainly the original game has much room for improvement).
"A different way of mountain hiking to the boss" is mainly what I see it as too overall. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 137/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
The Editor can Patch the European version to make it better too, if you want to use the English version (basically remove the games Security Checksum by Patching, then change the Region to U so it plays as a USA game: Byte 0x1F0 in the Bin- it's shows the letter in Ascii text, or you can use the Editor to change the Region as well).
There's also this SRAM Patch (which also removes the Security Checksum and changes the Region to USA). http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/514/ Sorry I haven't updated my Editor in a long time also, I just haven't been able to work on it much at all. I still plan to overhaul it's progress, but it may take me a little bit longer to get back to it (I'm doing well enough physically to do that stuff more consistently; right now I just haven't had the time to do much though). I also have been needing to rework some of the Editor's Code, though I've thought of a way where I can continue work on it without redoing a bunch of the core stuff yet (while being able to adapt the additional features I'll add to the enhanced program core when I get there), so maybe I'll just do that for now. Also, I don't know what's up with my Comcast Storage Space right now. I can't access it and it seems to be completely down, so the link to the Editor is of course broken. Thanks for providing your own link Mike. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 138/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Life's going pretty well overall. Physical Therapy's been doing me very well. My body is prone to wanting to tense more easily than relax (I have some kind of an anxiety disorder, and it easily manifests physically in me), and that's where the problem comes in. As long as I keep relaxed enough I'm fine, which I'm getting a lot better at (it's a very subtle kind of tensing that's hard to identify well). It's only if I tense enough that I can even get worse, so at least I can control it, even though a bit challenging at times.
The Framerate issue is completely fixed by changing the region. What happens there is the Emulator runs it at 50 FPS to emulate the way it runs on a real PAL region Console, but as soon as you change the game's region, it runs it at 60 FPS. It's not anything that's a part of the game's code either, it's just 1 Byte in the Genesis / Mega Drive Header of the Game that determines the Region. There are some more bugs in the European game certainly so far that I've heard too, though nothing game breaking or really that noticeable so far that I've seen, and I've played it a lot over the past several years. So yeah the Japanese version may have some less bugs, but I didn't see much that's really significant just from playing the different versions. The major bugs that I'm aware of are also in the Jap version. So I don't want to discourage anyone from using the English version if they'd prefer not having the game in Japanese. Sorry about the Palette Editor, I just have a bug in my code with it. I'm going to completely redo the Palette Editor anyway though. Also I don't use Visual Basic, so I don't need it for anything, but thanks anyway for that. I use C# and I have Visual Studio 2015 all set up already. As I make progress on the Editor, I'll also make it so it can easily port data and such, so you can copy all of your work over to the Jap version and vise versa later on if desired. Another thing is that a friend of mine and some of his friends are disassembling the programming of the whole game (and if they didn't, I would do it myself), so at some point too I will fix the game up very well. One thing I'm already planning to completely redo is the Collision Detection system. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 139/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Thanks for the info, I'll keep this close.
I should be fine though, I just needed to plan things out farther than what I started over 4 years ago (it started out as somewhat of a rushed job too, since I couldn't be at the computer nearly as much then), and it took me these years to figure out how to make things totally adaptable for later purposes. But if for any reason I really need help, I will certainly talk to him. Edit: Hey Mike, in the link you provided for my Editor, the supporting files it relies on are missing, so it won't run (images and things). Btw, I think I know what's up with my Comcast Storage space. My account's basically locked right now because someone else apparently tried to log in, and Comcast auto changed my password. And I don't remember the answer to my security question, so I need to contact Comcast, which I'll do very soon. I forgot I could upload files here to board2, so here's a working link: http://acmlm.kafuka.org/uploader/get.php?id=4985 |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 140/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
Yeah I was starting to wonder if I should do that soon. Maybe I could handle the extra attention now. I think I'll make an update so it can actually edit and save the Level Tiles and Room Layout + Screen Boundary Properties first. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 141/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
The Sound Data in this game is something I really don't know much about yet. I'm still learning about how that stuff is structured with older games and programmed (I also need to learn some more music terminology, though I understand how music works fundamentally).
I don't know if there's a limitation in the Sound Engine, but I'm thinking it's probably that they used the same instruments from one song to another to more easily give all of the songs in Megaman a more distinct recognizable style (besides the ways they're otherwise Formulated), and it's less work. They seem to do this with any Megaman game (Megaman 7 often makes use the same instruments too, and I hear it in the other games). Either way though, here's some info that may be useful : Maybe you could effectively use this to trace your way to a specific Song or Effect (when it reads data from here), and then to the Sound Engine. 65774 - 657C5: Music list for Sound Test 657C6 - 65813: Sound Effect list for Sound Test or also : 1E4000 - 1E4C0B? : Sound effect data 1E4C0C : Involves Sound effects (volume and shit?) 1E5FCC : Music Data (Cutman) 1FEDE4 : Last Music Data ------------------------------------------------------ 1FF100-1FFFFF: Sega & Capcom Logo Graphics Those are from Matrixz's notes. I don't know if any of those include the samples and instruments themselves though, so you can add more. |
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Ninji Level: 35 Posts: 142/239 EXP: 261674 Next: 18262 Since: 08-15-10 From: New Mexico, USA Last post: 107 days Last view: 1 day |
That is one of the most impressive Megaman hacks or even fangames that I've seen, and really of any game series. I haven't been looking around actively anymore for several years, but I've looked around here and there. The music you made for it actually sounds really good and feels soothing to listen to. A lot of them I've heard out there in other hacks / fangames sound like something kind of randomly put together in hopes of it sounding good; though I understand that composing music isn't requires a lot of creativity and at least a good understanding of what arrangement of things will express which kinds of feelings / experience.
The Level design, the choice of graphics, and the use of enemies from other Megaman games and any custom objects / enemies you may have looks also well done. This looks like a hack / game that I would likely treasure (of course I'd have to play through it, but looking amazing from everything I can see). |
| Main - Posts by Synthetekh |
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