Jul -- General Game/ROM Hacking: SNES F-Zero editor project

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Posted on 02-17-08 04:56:18 AM

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I actually just noticed that thread there today and was wondering where you'd went. At least I can finally comment on it...

The AI paths are neat to see. I wonder why a few of them seem to go in strange directions at points...

Also, the 0.25x zoom mode is nice to have. Perhaps another idea would be "Export track to BMP"? (Or PNG, whatever.)

...

The interface's handling seems weird. Right click selection, left click paste? It seems like it'd be a better idea to have left-dragging select things, with right click pasting; left-dragging a selected area could move it. (This is how LM does things, and it seems fairly intuitive and easy to get.)

From what I read, it sounds like you're applying some patches whenever a clean ROM's opened to make the game's format more flexible... or am I misunderstanding this?

(heh)

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smkdan
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Posted on 02-17-08 06:36:46 AM

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The AI paths are neat to see. I wonder why a few of them seem to go in strange directions at points...

I wonder too, but the odd placement doesn't seem to impact on the rivals at all.

Also, the 0.25x zoom mode is nice to have. Perhaps another idea would be "Export track to BMP"? (Or PNG, whatever.)

It's one of the first things I planned on doing, but I just went on to adding features. It saves a full size .png file which you could then resize / edit in photoshop or something. It looks much prettier doing it that way than to use DrawImage();'s resizing, and it takes 3 seconds on my end when all the panels are cached.

The interface's handling seems weird. Right click selection, left click paste? It seems like it'd be a better idea to have left-dragging select things, with right click pasting; left-dragging a selected area could move it. (This is how LM does things, and it seems fairly intuitive and easy to get.)

Personally it just seemed more natural to do it that way. I just based it off my personal preference, but I'll add options to toggle left / right and for anything else that gets recommended.

From what I read, it sounds like you're applying some patches whenever a clean ROM's opened to make the game's format more flexible... or am I misunderstanding this?

That's it. The editor signs the ROM with a version number and applies a patch if it has not yet been done.The game is littered with track specific hacks and not so flexible pointers (most are 16bit, some are 8bit (wtf)). A few examples include 4bpp -> 8bpp tile tracks, unique track names rather than simply adding 1, 2 or 3 to a predefined one, tilesets that are unique for every track rather than using a default, a not so ridiculous AI system where points are not stored in chunks of relative bytes, but just plain 16bit points. After running through alot of the game's code I can say for sure that an editor without a significant amount of hacks to make it more flexible would be quite painful to design and use. The ROM is expanded to 2MB to hold all the extra stuff.

Schwa
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Posted on 02-17-08 12:49:01 PM

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Wow, that's awesome. So this editor would do to an F-Zero SNES Rom what Lunar Magic does to a SMW Rom, though to a slightly lesser extent? Seriously, you're my hero... It takes a programming genius to be able to reconfigure the game engine like that. I'm not sure if F-Zero is harder to do that on than SMW or not, but either way it's an amazing accomplishment.

I've never played F-Zero... When this editor is released and/or reaches a stable version, I might have to play it just so I can hack it with this editor. :o

Well, I'm rambling again... Here's hoping this turns out to be quite a successful project.

--Schwa

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smkdan
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Posted on 02-19-08 08:20:02 AM

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Wow, that's awesome. So this editor would do to an F-Zero SNES Rom what Lunar Magic does to a SMW Rom, though to a slightly lesser extent?

I suppose so. I know LM installs a bunch of hacks to allow it to use ExGFX, ExAnimation and to bypass alot of the silly issues the original game had. There's be alot of features I couldn't add (or just couldn't work around) without a bunch of hacks.

Thanks, although it's not as much work as it sounds, there's a total of 2200lines~ or so in the .asm which houses all the hacks currently in there.

Here's drag and drop added, which is the last key part of the interface (rest is novelty).

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Posted on 02-19-08 11:01:36 PM

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So you removed unique tilesets and names, or am I misunderstanding? Wouldn't we still want a feature like this for greater customization? ._.; Maybe I am mistook. This editor does look amazing however

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Posted on 02-20-08 06:57:22 AM

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Actually it is very interesting how short those tracks look from the top-down view. In the game they seems very large and long (especially the road width) - due to Mode 7 resizing this is nothing special. Just stop on a jump plate, you will see the distortion/proportion (the car seems tiny, when it is parked on it), unlike you drive at normal and use the plates. This seems also present in current racing games. On one racer on PS3 (forgot the name, something with Forza in the name?), when you are about to outpace an enemy car slowly, the perpective gets really weird, just before the opponent is out of the screen. Especially seen on the front tires.

As for that editor, it really kicks ass, from what you show in these pictures. I would love to edit my own courses too. Along with ~~BGNG's~~ GuyPerfect's existing (and the coming revamped/reprogrammed) F-Zero X editor we will have two very powerful tools in future

smkdan
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Posted on 02-20-08 09:30:36 AM

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Erika: That list I made had improvements over the original, and one of the improvements is the unique track names. I removed the defaults which didn't allow much customisation at all.

Surlent: It's only quarter size, here's a map with the grid / numbers like shown up there at actual (and pretty impractical to work with) size. Right now I'm trying to get a panel editor working. Each box shown in that grid is a panel which is sort of a complex metatile (256x256 to save on space in the original). On the upside you only have to manage a grid of 32x16 of these panels, but you need to spend some time in a panel editor to get some custom panels for something really original.

http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/184/actsizeqe6.png

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