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05-06-24 04:23 AM |
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| Main - Posts by Heian |
| Heian |
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 Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 79/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Max, here's the story with the sound novels. Four items obtained from propositions -- namely, Oeilvert, Nanai's Book of Lives, the Fantasy Magi-ence Story, and the Tales of Enavia -- were plain items in the NA version, but were fully readable books in the Japanese original, like the Germonik Scriptures were. Not only were they readable, but they had many different paths you could take (kind of like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books).
They're quite a lot of fun, and if the text could be made to fit, I don't see why a retranslation of FFT wouldn't include them. I translated three of them myself (all but Enavia, because it involved a point system that couldn't be replicated in HTML easily, plus the story was on the hokey side), and put them on the net. Try reading them; you'll like them! Your browser needs to be able to jump to other places on the same page using the {a name="#blah"} code; not all browsers let you do that, it seems. Also, make the screen wide and short so that the next lines aren't spoiled for you. I included the graphics, and you can even hear the original FFT music if you have the right Winamp plugin. These are by far my best "hacks" if you broaden the definition of the word. I'd be honored if you or other FFT gurus gave them a run-through. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 80/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Pieguy, I'm wondering the same thing -- "Mario", "World", and "Time" could go into katakana (the phonetic script for foreign words) easily. I can only imagine that there was only enough space to include hiragana (for native words) and not katakana.
BTW, in general, Japanese uses western numerals in horizontal text such as that in video games, and the native/Chinese numbers in vertical text. Having two kinds of numerals is very convenient. For example, you could use kanji numerals for inning numbers and positions in the batting order, and European numerals for runs scored, like this: http://blog115.fc2.com/a/aqumari/file/070814kosien.jpg (In the old days, they used to manually add zeroes if the game went past the 16th inning, like this: http://thp.cms-labo.org/score03.jpg ...but we're getting off topic now...) |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 81/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
SMKDAN!!
If you ever need someone to, like, have your children or something, you just give me a buzz, y'know? (Edit: And here's a project of mine that's still just getting off the ground... "Baseball Stars 1908". Recently I got a new cell phone -- the Sharp 704i -- with a really nice number font and wanted to get it into a game. The rom-hacking bug, always lurking within, began to strengthen, and thus began an attempt to commemorate the Chicago Cubs' second world championship year in a Baseball Stars hack.)  |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 82/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
SMKDan, that looks amazing -- to finally be able to edit F-Zero would be a dream come true. Will your editor be compatible with BS F-Zero 2 also? That game might be more fun to hack, because (1) the four cars are more evenly matched than the original's and (2) are less familiar, and (3) there are only five or so tracks; perfect for a solo or two-person hack effort.
I made some new palettes and fonts for the original long ago: 
Fire Field was going to be a stark gray lunar surface called "Clavius Base". This game really re-uses a lot of graphics and doesn't give you much to work with. I'm amazed how the designers got such a good game into so little space. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 83/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Smkdan, this sounds great! Do you have a link to the physics documents? The speeds, acceleration, etc. were also complete mysteries back then.
Here's a very old thread featuring various discoveries, if you want to give it a bump (your project probably warrants one): http://acmlm.no-ip.org/board/thread.php?id=1550&page=1 That larger ROM size should help a lot. IIRC, the game uses one set of 256 tiles for the background (horizon) graphics. Did you get around that somehow? Being able to edit things at the 2x2 "macro-tile" level should really work well. The way Maximum Velocity did things, we were stuck trying to get 8x8-tile panels to sit next to each other, and it was impossible. (Guy Perfect did some amazing work decompressing them, though.) F-Zero mania is back! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 84/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Dan, this is going to be a lot of fun!
I agree that the primary problem with the big "panels" is the positioning of the stuff on the edges. When I tried to make courses in Maximum Velocity, it was almost impossible to get the barriers to line up exactly right -- they're 16 pixels in diameter, and that plus the shadow plus the course surface type has to line up! It was impossible, but wouldn't be if we took pre-existing panels and just edited the bits on the corners. In your Fire Field panel, for example, the top left and bottom left would need to be tweaked so that the half-barrier-circle on the top left were a whole one, and the one on the bottom left, where 5/16 of a barrier is visible, could maybe be turned into plain track, with the panel below lining up with the barrier circle to the left of that partial one. This is where being able to move little 2x2 macro-tiles would be handy. I don't think 2368 of them is too many -- it's less than 10 "pages" of the 255 in Climax, and we could separate them into plain course, barrier parts, dirt, and so on. Or you could set up a "main page" of a few hundred that are easy to link to other tiles, with all the "5/16 barrier + magnetic bit + two specks of dirt" complex ones in a separate menu. If you want to use my edited palettes as samples for people to work with, please do. I can send you my hack again if you don't have it. This is going to be a great project! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 85/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
SMKDan, this is looking excellent.
BTW, any newcomers who want to check out the original 2004 F-Zero hacking thread in which it took a bunch of us several months to suss out what SMKDan has done much more efficiently, have a look: http://acmlm.no-ip.org/archive2/thread.php?id=821 Regarding editing parts of the rows, I was under the impression that the most troublesome rows would be one-of-a-kind and that we could safely mess with them knowing that the other tracks would remain intact. What about creating new rows? Will there be enough space to define new ones? If there are 0x940 (2368) rows, can we define number 0941, 0942, etc. as we like? Did you figure out what's going on with the animation in some of the little background tiles, such as the moving water/grass/sand, or the buildings below the track in Mute City? It looked like the bits of data in between each tile graphic were connected to that, but I never got it solved. And needless to say, I'd love to beta-test your application as soon as it's ready! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 86/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
SMKDan, I just read your revised notes with the car physics -- surprisingly simple! Definitely worth looking into making new, more balanced, cars.
One thing I'm sure everyone wil want to do is edit track names. IIRC, the track names are handled as sprites (or something else unusual) and not as ordinary text. Any information on that? Going a little off-topic here, but this is a great F-Zero music remix that I'm grooving on these days: http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01672/ I went over Dan's documents while listening to that! And if anyone's interested in having a go at changing the sprites, here are some ripped originals for reference: http://www.spriters-resource.com/nintendo/other/fzero/" I tried getting the BSFZII sprites into the original once, and failed badly. 
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| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 87/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
SMKDan, my mistake, I got the rows and macro-tiles mixed up. If each track has 150 rows to work with, we should have room for new ones -- some of those courses, such as the smple Death Wind, don't use that many.
Deespence, while only one of the F-Zero 2 versions is playable, that's the only one you would want to play. That one contains alll new tracks, whereas the other Leagues that were creaated contain one new track plus several existing tracks. If you want to play Mute City IV, Big Blue II, etc., you want that one perfect BSFZII -- there are only five new courses in total. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 88/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Go, Dan, go!
Will this editor eventually give us a chance to indicate the places where the AI is expected to drive? Maybe dots on the course or an X-Y chart? How about gridlines between the panels? That might make things easier to manage. I'd forgotten that some of the letters were missing from the font. At least there are 26 or so spaces to work with. If we can't give distinctive names to tracks, there will end up being a new "MUTE CITY VI" and such for every hacker. Raccoon Sam, the black-and-white minimaps are actually visible in regular graphics editors and were presumably created separately and not automatically generated from the track parts. I wouldn't mind having to draw them manually. Getting a little greedy here, but how hard would it be to have a search function that pulls up potentially-connectable panels when you're in that PanelSelector screen? For example, if you're building a course and the most recent panel has barriers at (say) the 4th and 13th rows, and you want to find panels with barriers close to this so that you can extend the course? |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 89/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Chuck Norris is ON FIRE!
Please tell me you're editing the voices too! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 90/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Posted by Raccoon SamPosted by Heian Those maps are around position 791A0 in the ROM if you want to have a look at them. If their creation can't be automated, we can just make them in a graphic editor with some trial and error. I'm envisioning a group effort with each person making a few tracks. The higher the quality, the greater the chances that our tracks will be played by fans all over the world. This'll be quite a bit harder than Climax and its ready-made pieces, but should be a lot more challenging and fun! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 91/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Dan, the editor is looking great and I've had no trouble running it on my virtual XP machine in Mac OSX Parallels.
The paths look fine -- it'll sure be easy to edit paths if you can drag these points around! Some things that might make the editor easier to use -- and keep in mind that I'm suggesting these things without regard for how hard they might be to implement! * Gridlines between each panel, so that we can see from afar where the borders of each panel are. * A number in the corner of each panel on the big map so we don't have to fish around in the panel selector to find the panel we were looking for. * A 0.125x zoom view so that you can take in the entire track on a normal-sized screen before you start editing. * When you select a track map, have a sample screen of the course in action (starting line, maybe?) so that we can see what our new palettes look like without having to load the game and actually race on the track with each iteration. * Course name editing? How about adding the course names to the "Track" menu instead of "Queen 1", etc., which are hard to remember? (I see that on the opening screen for each course, it looks like you can use up to 27 letters without trouble, but the records screen only seems to hold 12 or so, which puts a cramp in my plans to have two-part course names in the style of the more recent games.) I was messing with the game font in Tile Layer Pro and a hex editor, and can't seem to get the letters Q, X, and J into the game without breaking things. The smaller font used in the credits and records screen has everything, and I managed to add a colon to that font in preparation for the two-part course names, but can't get any new characters into the bigger 8x16 main font. I'm working on a revised font that looks more like FZMV's, and am also fooling around with a metal-plate-like font like the one used in FZGX. It's hard to get that look with so few pixels! It's coming along great |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 92/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
That 0.125x view looks fine! It's perfect for overviewing the course before coosing an area to edit.
The panel selector is there in case the panel you want is not already on screen. I can do left- and right-clicks with the Mac with no problem; I just thought that having panel numbers on the screen would familiarize the user with which panels have which numbers, and also let the user know when multiple panels are made from the same one. It's really easy to accidentally place wrong tiles, since I (a left-hander) have the clicks reversed and have to consciously think about them. When I click from another window into the editor, it goes ahead and places a tile. Perhaps clicking from outside should just return focus to that application, rather than operating right away? I plan on having preview screens for the tileset / backgrounds etc. Simulating the track select would not be as easy because of the SNES features it makes use of. The preview wouldn't necessarily have to be the track select screen; just as long as it contains the track, background, and horizon, so we could see what the new palette looks like in the game. I'm playing around with the color cycling; can we add this to any graphic? If so, we can have the barriers flash like they do in Climax. It looks like the 23-letter alphabet is unavoidable, unless we remove some of the "POWER" labels and such. Maybe breaking the 8x16 alphabet into smaller 8x8 letters would work? We'd have twice as many characters and could make some special ones that contain condensed words, giving us more space. Let me know when you update the editor! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 93/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Matt, that's some great font work! I once attempted to hack Baseball Stars 2, which is extremely guilty of cramming many letters into a small space by reusing parts of fonts; it completely prevented me from creating a more stylish font in what should have been a luxurious 16x16 space. If we've got eight whole tiles to spare, may I suggest that the ten numerals be left intact with no reused parts so that people can make more interesting-looking numbers?
Your table also allows us to make a colon (for use in course names like "BIG BLUE: TEST" or whatever") using tile AB for both top and bottom. In the game, course names are stored separately for use in the Records screen. There, the 8x8 font has special characters for Roman numerals I, II, and III; they're placed at the right edge of the tile so that a space doesn't have to be inserted between them and the last character in the course name. During our last attempt at F-Zero, I made a new number font that looks a lot like the one used for the speed; you can see it in the middle of this table: http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/1065/fontsamplesaw9.png (I also fixed the numeral "8" in the speed -- in the original game, it's missing part of the shadow. Annoying once you start noticing it!) Anybody like this? My past attempts at font making have been just the opposite of F-Zero's -- translating from Japanese means that you can safely dump the dozens of kana and kanji that Japanese games use, so I made all kinds of ligatures, accented characters, and the like. SMKDan, thanks very much for the borders! May I nitpick for a moment? Your borders cut a few pixels off the edges, and that's going to make it harder for us to line up the adjacent panels. Could you use one-pixel-wide borders around the tiles rather than cutting off the outer edges? I'm in the middle of analyzing just how many panels are actually being re-used in course maps -- it looks like the vast majority of them are only used once, which means that we can edit the rows and tiles without worrying about breaking the rest of the course. Basically everything except the straightaways and pits are used just once. Death Wind reuses some stuff, but Sand Ocean/Silence and White Land have very few such panels. We should be able to get a healthy variety of modular panels and one-use-only panels! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 94/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
I finished counting up the panels!
This spreadsheet: http://www.geocities.com/heiankyo794/f-zero/F-Zero-panelcount.xls ...will, provided that you have Excel's HEX2DEC function, display all the course layouts and, to the right of that, a list of how many times each panel occurs. (Download it!) If that number is "1", then you know that you can edit that panel any way you like without messing up any other parts of the course. One interesting thing I noticed was that in Red Canyon, panels 0x91 to 0x95 aren't used, but 0X96 is. I wonder why they went out of order like that...? SMKDan, how about indicating in the track editor whether or not a panel is used multiple times by giving the panel number a different color in PanelSelector, or on the actual panel, or both? (Edit: I added what I could discover of the BS F-Zero 2 panel data to the spreadsheet. It seems to be in the same format. I couldn't always tell which courses were which, and some of the original courses seem to be included.) |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 95/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Posted by MattrizzlePosted by HeianIf I knew an easy way to rip all of the voice samples from the arcade versions, I would. MAME runs games extremely choppy on my computer(a Dell with Windows 98 and a Pentium III processor). Yeah, I remembered that as soon as I posted it. I loved those voices in the arcade version, though. If this M1 sound emulator lets us hear them, it'll at least bring back the memories! |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 96/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Riko, in addition to the attention-grabbing Thwomps, I love that font, and how the score is kept in units rather than in meaningless hundreds.
How about making separate letters for the word "SCORE" that lean to the right? Then you'd have a little more symmetry in the status bar. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 97/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
Anybody who hasn't clicked on Ailure's link to read the explanation, do it. At first I thought this was just some goofy thing with excess sprites , but no -- this is the best hack-related video I've ever seen, and the guy's reason for doing it only makes it that much better. Awesome. |
| Heian |
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Red Koopa Level: 27 Posts: 98/126 EXP: 111976 Next: 4183 Since: 03-08-07 Last post: 5856 days Last view: 5856 days |
SMKDan, I think not all versions of Excel contain HEX2DEC and the other functions that change a number from one base to another.
There's a basic description of them (it's pretty obvious) and instructions on how to install them here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052091111033.aspx Once you have it installed, you should see the original track code in hex on the top, then a decimal equivalent (in color) below that. To the right will be a list of all the panels and a counter indicating how many times they're used. Off to download your latest revision now! And now that I've done that... OK; I finally found panels 145-149: they're the replacements used in RC1 to cut off the extra areas in RC2. It was a bit confusing since panels 0-144 and 150 appear in both forms of the course rather than having the extras stuck on to the end. (And I now see that Mute City does the same thing with panel 123, the jump ramp that occurs only in Mute City 1.) My panel counter only includes the "basic" forms of the course as stored at those points in the ROM. If you can't get HEX2DEC running, I'll see if I can make a new spreadsheet with just the values pasted in, so that you can at lease see the breakdown. (Most courses use one of the basic background tiles over 300 times, and the vast majority of the course panels only once each.( Your editor looks great with the gridlines and panel numbers on. Very easy to navigate, and the 0.125x view is perfect for flipping through the courses with F11 and F12 until you reach the one you want. The panel numbers could be a bit smaller in this view, though -- a three-digit panel ID will overwhelm the actual panel. That's not all that important though. I've managed to make some trivially-different courses, like a Mute City with the big circular divide from MC2 combined with the jump ramp from MC1, but nothing really exotic. As soon as we're able to fiddle with the rows a bit, we'll be able to do anything! Here's a more advanced Death Wind course (to compete with SMKDan's "junior" version). Thanks to the highly-modular nature of the panels in this course, there's only one place where the tiles need to be adjusted -- over on the right where panel 6 meets panel 40. The long strings of panel 16 and panel 39 might be boring in an actual race:  |
| Main - Posts by Heian |
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