VL-Tone
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|  Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | I'm not sure where this 320x256 size comes from?
The biggest backgrounds are simply made of 8x8 32x32 pixels tiles, meaning 256x256. Of course the left part must match the right part as it wraps around, just like a texture. No supplementary columns are stored for padding the whole background.
Another thing to note: the relevant image part of each tile is actually 31x31 pixels. The horizontal and vertical 1 pixel lines that are left should be a repetition of the line before, or else you'll see "seam lines" in the sky around each tile. So the imported and exported background in TT64 will be 248x248 (8 lines are lost horizontally and vertically because they are repetitions).
Emoluvjd2: Your 96x96 example is just a small part of a bigger sky background...
There are some cases where tiles are automatically repeated like in the following backgrounds:
  
The parts with the red X are just repetitions of the previous tile.
But the rest of the backgrounds, including Bob-omb Battlefield are stored as 64 tiles (8x8 - 32x32 pixels) even when they seem to repeat.
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Well nobody should be blamed for anything here  We're doing this on our free time, and there's that "real life" thing outside of this virtual community.
The version I sent to messiaen is essentially v0.6, but the sky bg and model importer are unfinished and buggy. The goal was to test a version where some basic stuff was fixed (for example, the limit in the GBI command buffer and maximum number of textures), and releasing some intermediary version (0.5995b?) with the bg and model importers disabled. So I was asking messiaen to test the main functionality, because I changed a few things in the main interface.
But now I'm thinking of changing my plans... I may release the same version I sent to messiaen , as is (with the new importers enabled) right here in this forum but not on my webpage.
This version would be clearly labeled as "Pre-Alpha" and buggy, and not intended for real work. I already put some disclaimer in big red letters right on the title screen.
I do have more time these days than I had a few weeks ago. My main problem at this point is not the lack of time, but that since I've only seldom worked on it over the last couple of months, I forgot about many of the remaining issues, and I'm really stressed about the fact that I don't know where to start when it comes to fixing and finishing that thing.
The debugging feedback would help me get back into working on TT64, and focus on specific issues, without feeling alone in all this.
I just don't want this debug/pre-alpha version to spread into the wild. I don't want people to complain that this version corrupted their ROM or crashed before they saved their changes.
So what do you guys think about this?
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Ouch, that two years went so fast...
Yes my job took most of my time away, but I can't blame it all on not having enough time. I went short of abandoning the project, but I just can't do that, especially since there's not that much to do before I can release that thing.
I just sent links to an alpha version to a few users here two days ago, chosen because they were contributing members of this forum with a minimum of intelligence and maturity . If you haven't received the link it's not necessarily because you don't fit those criteria, it's just that my selection process was a little random and I might have forgot you.
I haven't received any replies from anyone yet, but I'm certainly not gonna blame them for taking their time, since I'm a prime example of doing that.
I will create a new thread with links to this alpha version soon (well let's hope I really mean it this time).
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by vinnyboiler
If VL-Tone were to realese this now I bet it would be really glichy, anyway have you tried messians importer. It does everything VL-tone importer can do and more (Messian is even planning on adding a music importer to it)
Oh well then I guess we don't need my importer 
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by messiaen
Not really possible to change the paintings position, just like you can't change any of the existing level geometry/collision. But it might be possible to replicate those in imported levels using the right collision settings (never tried it though).
BigBrain: Will get back to your question later, probably I'll reply it in the "Level Editing" topic since that kind of stuff is too useful to get lost in this huge thread.
I don't know where the painting positions and parameters are stored, this would certainly be a useful thing to find someday. There are objects where the painting are, but these are the exit warps.
While there is something in the collision map related to paintings, as far as I know it doesn't set the coordinates for the painting themselves.
Paintings can lead to three different warp (that may not even be in the same levels). The collision attributes on the floor in front and behind the paintings are used to determine if Mario enters from the left, middle or right.
You might want to read my "article" about this unused feature of the painting mechanism in an entry on my old blog http://web.mac.com/qubedstudios/Site/Blog/Entries/2007/5/22_The_Mystery_Of_The_Painting_Warps_Triplets.html (I almost forgot about my defunct blog, it's interesting to go back and see all the comments )
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by gamekrazzy
Lol, I feel wierd posting here. I havn't been on this site for like a year. Nothing against u VL, but I do find it funny that it's been about a year and ur still working on 6.0. lol. alot of the topics that were here then, are still here now. Im not rushing u, because honestly I gave up my hacking about a year ago!
Just thought I would check in on a forum I can't be on. No time on my schedule. BTW, I really miss hacking.
It's kind of obvious that I didn't work much on it over the past year.
The importer and its interface were not that simple to implement, but it's not like I worked on it several time a week for a year, it's quite the opposite. I was too busy with my job, had other things in my mind and simply lost motivation to work on it. Just look at how many level editors / homebrew programs suddenly stopped being developed, it's not uncommon for these things to never get finished or completely debugged. It's just the way it is, people like me are not paid to work on these and have other things going on in our lives.
Like I said a few times I haven't completely abandoned the project, I just put it on hold for a while.
I have more time now and I'm more motivated to work on it, but at this point I'm depending on feedback from the alpha private build users, and I haven't got a lot of it (It seems that most of the "trusted" users I sent the alpha build are not very active around here and simply didn't reply to me).
I just want to make sure that the biggest "show-stopping" bugs are gone, and that it can open at least the majority of .obj file that you can throw at it before I publish the alpha build here. This should happen eventually.
The last public version is actually 0.5994b not 0.5996b.
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Actually you can get Mario back in a Luigi ROM, but it requires some manual copying using an hex editor.
Two "Banks" needs to be copied back from a freshly extended SM64 ROM:
The Mario polygon bank which is at: 0x823B64 to 0x858EDC
The geo layout bank which is at: 0x1279B0 to 0x12A7E0
So what you do is:
-Open the clean extended ROM in an hex editor.
-Select the polygon bank at the range of addresses I provided.
-Copy the data.
-Open your modded Luigi ROM.
-Select the same range of data.
-Paste what you just copied from the clean extended ROM, which will replace the Luigi data.
Repeat the same process for the geo layout bank.
Be sure to make a copy of your modded ROM before attempting this, because if you screw up you might corrupt your ROM!
Note that if you only copy back the geo layout bank you will get some funny results
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by Zero One
Originally posted by VL-Tone
(It seems that most of the "trusted" users I sent the alpha build are not very active around here and simply didn't reply to me).
What about using more or different alpha testers? Or is there a specific reason that only a few get it?
That's what I'm thinking of doing right now, I just sent the link to a few additional testers. I only chose a few "trusted" users because I don't want this buggy/unfinished version of TT64 to leak all over the internet.
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by Colin
Fun fact: I was playing SMB2J years before Lost Levels. You have to *LOVE* rental stores that had a few pirate carts on the shelves. 
I also played SMB3 months before release. Same deal; pirate cart. 
Those were the days!! In Montreal, every single video rental store had those pirate Famicom carts (with a NES adapters), even the big chains. Nobody knew they were pirate copies from Hong-Kong, everyone thought they were simply Japanese imports.
We had SMB 3 almost a year before the official north-american release. It was sold for more than $100CDN. We also had a lot of multi-carts that were even pricier.
The games had special boxes and labels printed by the distributors. SMB2J was labeled SMB 3, and SMB 3 was labeled SMB 4. There was also a lot of other misleading labels, like that "Mario Baby" game which was a Konami game that had nothing to do with Mario, or a Castlevania 3 labeled game made by Capcom where the main character didn't even had a whip!
Back in the days, I remember seeing a "Doki Doki Panic : Dream Factory" game cart. Looking at the label, I saw that it seemed to be just like SMB 2 (US)! I always felt that SMB 2 was a weird Mario game, and having played SMB2J, I figured out the whole SMB2/Doki Doki Panic/SMB2j story all by myself (this was before this information was easily found on the internet, and before the Web itself.)
One day Nintendo paid attention to Montreal and the pirate distributors were busted and the carts disappeared from rental store everywhere, with only a few remaining in pawn shops and flea markets.
I still have a pirate SMB2J cart somewhere. The nice thing about it, you can start on any level by holding the d-pad in any of the 8 directions and pressing start on the title screen (and holding A+direction will get you to the A-B-C-D levels). I never managed to get to level 9-1 though.
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by Gecko
I'm getting script errors using the new alpha version.
When starting the editor: Director Player Error - Property not found #viewrect Script Error, next one is #foreColor.
When clicking on the obj importer, it tells me String expected .
I'm using XP home.
Hi Gecko
Since I didn't get any news from you I didn't send you the latest version where these things have been fixed. I'll give you the link.
Also I would rather discuss this in private, to avoid turning this thread into something full of "Can I be an alpha tester too?" or "How come he was selected and not me?". I'll make a thread when I release a more stable version publicly.
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by Flames540
Thanks guys for helping me out! questions 1 - 3 are well answered but Q4...can't I edit water in a Hex editor? (wich Hex editor shall I use? I have worked with XVI32, is there a better one?)
Edit: Ok I tried doing what Vl-Tone said but I continuesly crash my Rom! I use XVI32 as my hex editor.
ok first off I copied this and pasted it at 823B64 (open up in a hex editor)
The Mario polygon bank
http://www.mediafire.com/?o489jxrffjl6uxa
then I copied this and pasted it at 1279B0
http://www.mediafire.com/?o489jxrffjl6uxa
I always copy by clicking edit > clipboard > copy on XVI32 , so what do I do wrong? maybe a patch will do the trick? (with only the values changed?)
Flames540
Are you sure you're not inserting data instead of replacing? Make sure that the destination ROM doesn't change size when you paste the data.
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by vinnyboiler
I know it is too late for suggestions for this version of TT64 but for the next one, could you add a feature to change the size of the objects TT64 can edit to make them bigger or smaller
TT64 is missing a long overdue object viewer/editor that was part of the original specification for the program. Such a module would enable you to choose through the list of all objects in the game and watch them individually, rotate and zoom on them. As far as editing, it could show a list of color values found in the object (so you could change Yoshi's color for example). It could also feature a list of all the texture settings found in the model, so you could swap a texture with another one found in the same bank. Another list could give you all geometry resources used in that model, and enable you to swap them with something else (Putting Peach's head on Mario for example).
Other parameters for each object could be set, such as the size. Unfortunately not all objects contain the "scale" command in their geo layout script, some have it in their behaviour script, and some others in the asm part of their behavior code. One way to get around this would be to scale the polygon vertices data itself, but also the skeleton data coordinates in the geometry layout script. But then there's collision data. Sometimes collision mapping is generated automatically using a behavior command, where the scale of a spherical of box shaped collision is defined. Sometimes the collision data is polygonal and is referred to by either the geo layout script or behavior script, and I wouldn't be surprised if some objects didn't generate a collision map in their asm behavior code.
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | It's that time of the year where I post some update about v0.6's progress!
The last time I worked on TT64 was November 21st 2010. It's not that long ago but that doesn't represent how much I worked on it since 2008, which is... not much.
There was a time when I worked on TT64 a lot, but those days are gone. I don't wan't people to think that it's not out yet because it takes a lot of time (or worse, that I'm lazy). I simply lost motivation to work continuously on it, as I changed my priorities, and it doesn't help since each time I get back to it I have to remind myself of how it works in the details.
Maybe I should say that TT64 0.6 is cancelled and surprise you with a release someday? (didn't I already say that before? )
The problem is that when I post here, it's because I feel like working on it again, so it's hard for me to make a post saying that it's cancelled. It would also be silly to post here each time I "stop" working on TT64.
So what can I say... TT64 0.6 is progressing veeeerrrry slooooowly, so for now do the best you can with the tools you do have (TT64 0.5xx, messiaen's level importer and other tools).
And there's also a lot of stuff that is still undiscovered in the SM64 ROM. For example how the camera presets work, or how the character animation data is stored, the latter is not that hard to crack, with good old ROM hacking (if you read my docs and understand them you can get to this data pretty easily). It would be nice to see some progress in those areas...
Anyway have fun and don't depend on the unreleased
Edit: (Obviously billybobmario64's got me to post now, but I was about to post something anyway, since I usually work on TT64 around Christmas time each year So anyhow don't you guys think you can post annoying threads to get me to post! )
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Nice to see someone doing some low level hacking and publishing tools
This program will surely be very useful!
If I understand correctly this can work because the main game engine code is always loaded at the same address in RAM and that most Gameshark codes patch this area?
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Originally posted by messiaen
Yes, all game code is static, there isn't any kind of overlay such as in the Zelda-type filesystem.
But the cool thing would be to write a Gameshark interpreter so that all code types could be patched, including the ones that check for input or compare values .
Yeah I was thinking about that too. Emulating the GS shouldn't be too hard, and I'm sure you would know how to insert the code into SM64's main event loop. A program similar to ShenoxVII's patcher would take one or multiple GS codes as an input, and would patch the ROM with the GS emulator and codes. What could be very nice too is to be able to set one or more custom button combinations that would act as triggers to specific GS codes entered by the user.
But let's remind everyone that ShenoxVII's patcher is already very useful by itself
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | Happy New Year everyone
No it's not an actual release, but rather a screenshot, showing that TT64 0.6b is still progressing, and will be indeed a major upgrade that will include a revamp of the main interface and that aside from the level importer, it will contain some other new major features.
I have to go to bed now, but I'll tell you more about my plans tomorrow evening.
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VL-Tone
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | I hope I didn't hype this too much, I really was tired yesterday even though I felt like posting the new interface screenshot.
So here's the thing. TT64 v0.6b was supposed to be released a while ago, and its main two features were to be an .obj level importer and the ability to change the sky background image. There is now a tool that does both and more, and I've seen wonderful levels imported by a few of the board members here.
So obviously, the next release of TT64 must have something that will make people upgrade and create even nicer levels and hacks, using both tools if they want. It should also be more enticing to people that are interested but never hacked SM64 before.
The interface of the current version has some clever interface widgets at parts, but also has a messy and confusing layout in other parts. As you might have guessed I like to color code stuff in the interface, but let's face it there was simply too much bright colors in the interface (and because SM64 is a colorful game I didn't restrain myself enough ).
So I cleaned up the layout and the checkbox options will be moved elsewhere (menus or a pop-up panel/screen) or be reintegrated in the interface as small buttons.
The new layout is also much better when resizing the window on larger screens.
I added a search field for the yellow menu, which filters "as you type" the content of the field. In the example I typed "Warp" and got a list of warp objects. I will also add a search field for the object list menu above it.
You can also see that aside from the new undo/copy/paste buttons, there are "add" and "delete" buttons. Yes you'll be able to add and delete objects easily, but you'll be limited by the number of objects in the original game, you'll have to delete objects before you can add them. "Empty/No Acts" objects will simply be invisible until you activate them (enable their act stars) by clicking "add".
Ok that's enough for tonight... I'll let you react to this post and continue tomorrow as I have a lot of other stuff to talk about... (including replying to you messiaen)
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| Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes | I've been a little more busy than expected (what else is new?), I'll come back soon to give you more details about the new features I'm thinking of adding.
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