Jul -- Posts by VL-Tone

VL-Tone
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Posted on 03-05-11 06:50:02 PM, in Toad's Tool 0.6.0 (On hiatus for an indefinite amount of time) (last edited by VL-Tone at 03-05-11 03:50 PM)

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

I'm sorry guys, I guess I should've posted the news here instead of using "Twitter for iPad".

My site is hosted by Apple's Mobileme (or rather a legacy part of it, homepage.mac.ccom) and I've heard that Apple recently stopped selling MobileMe retail boxes. That led to speculation about MobileMe becoming free March 2nd (the day the new iPad was announced), with new features like hosting your iTunes library (they just built a giant data center which would support this idea). My yearly renewal was expiring Feb 28, and I knew that I could still restore my site if I renewed before March 15, so I decided to wait a few days. Since it doesn't seem like it will become free soon I will restore my site next week (probably thursday - pay day).

So I guess you can blame all this on me being a sucker for Apple stuff. Add that to your list of reasons why Apple is evil

And please, I don't want you guys replying with your opinion about Apple (whether it's positive or negative), I don't want this thread to degenerate into a flamewar

And now for some TT64 news.

I haven't work much on it since the last time I posted here, I guess it's the usual pattern of me working on TT64, posting here, then stop posting for a few weeks.

What I wanted to add about my plans is that I'm contemplating extending the command editing system to other script types. TT64 currently mainly edits the "Level script" data, which contains 0x24 commands and such.

Since the early betas of TT64 0.0001b I planned the menu and parameter bar system to be able to edit not only level scripts, but also geo layout and polygon scripts.

The geo and poly scripts are already read and stored using the same variable structure than the level scripts, each command having each of its parameter position/length/type defined using property lists. So parsing them into the menu system and making the fields/buttons automatically appear in the parameter bar for each command type is relatively trivial.

There is a lot of interesting stuff to edit in geo layout commands, such as the recently discovered camera settings, sometimes global scaling, shadows and collision size. It also contains the parts list and hierarchy and some animation commands. While TT64 wouldn't allow you to edit the nested structure of the script itself, but you'd be able to easily swap body parts with other objects, and manually change their rotation joints positions amongst other thing. (For example, change Mario's head into a goomba!)

The 3d view would show the object that is currently edited, with live feedback. Same for the polygon command editor.

Polygon commands contains a lot of interesting commands to edit too, such as texture commands, color commands (easily change Yoshi's color for example), fog settings and other stuff. And while you'd be able to edit polygon vertex positions, even moving multiple vertices at the same time, don't expect it to be a suitable 3d editor, though. What I plan to add is some global polygon distortion commands, that could scale or warp polygons globally for an object part (including its collision data if it has some).

Behavior command editing would be eventually added, but it's not even currently read by TT64 except in the script dumper.

At this point I find these features to be a better thing for the SM64 hacking community than focusing on the object importer, which is a great advancement in itself, but can already be done with messiaen's importer. There is still a lot of these geo layout and polygon commands that are relatively unknown and currently require an hex editor to be experimented with, having an easy access to edit all of these could lead to a lot of new discoveries.

So what will happen is that I'll focus on revamping, improving and debugging the main interface, while also adding a lot of new commands to edit. The level importer will be present in v0.6, but it will probably give you a big red warning about it being somewhat incomplete/buggy for now, even recommending the user to use messiaen's importer instead.

messiaen:

To answer your question, the .tt64 is a plain text file that contain level settings such as the polygon scale and offset, the death floor height, collision settings for each texture, the texture data itself (encoded as hex), and a copy of the .obj and .mtl data. It also contains 0x24 data (and some other level script commands) if you save it after adding new objects to a custom level. Essentially, its goal is to contain everything needed to recreate the same custom level from scratch. You could send a .tt64 file to someone and he'd be able to integrate your level into his hack.

I guess that TT64 could output this file then call your importer, which would take care of the .obj and .mtl parsing and write all the level/geo layout and GBI commands to the ROM. The .obj and .mtl parsing part is one of my main problem with my level importer, as I feel a little overwhelmed having to deal with all the variations in the .obj and .mtl file format, which you already dealt with.

Anyway, I'll be back eventually, and remember : Don't panic!

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 03-06-11 05:25:05 AM, in Toad's Tool 0.6.0 (On hiatus for an indefinite amount of time)

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

Originally posted by messiaen
I probably won't work much in my importer in the the next few months, but there's one particular feature which would be very important: support for areas in any level. As far as I have tested, areas are hardcoded in the TT64 interface, but it would be great if you could decode them on the fly, so that custom levels can support them.

I'll try to fix that the next time I work on it. It's possible that I release a new version with the revamped interface and bug fixes (such as the polygon and texture amount limit) before I complete the geo and polygon commands editor. What I'll do is that I'll work on these along with the interface, and if I get to the point that the interface revamp is done but the geo and poly commands editors are not complete, I will release the thing as 0.6b and enable the other commands editor in a subsequent release (0.6.5 or 0.7).

Originally posted by vinnyboiler
@VL-Tone - Where you mention swapping body parts, have you considered integrating the OBJ importer to import over them.

The problem with importing .obj models into existing parts is dealing with the fixed size of the original part. The size of the polygon data for the imported object would have to always be equal or smaller than the original. And moving things around inside a bank to make more space could prove to be a daunting task, as polygon scripts include a lot of "go to" commands and all of these have to be repointed if data is moved. Some polygon banks also include data used by some ASM commands and tracking all pointers to make sure nothing breaks would involve a lot of planning. (I know I often make things sound more complicated than they are, but it's all relative to the amount of time I'm ready to dedicate to TT64).

I'm sure messiaen has been thinking about these issues, and I'm sure there would be ways to get around this using custom ASM code and extended memory, but in total it would be a lot of work, and need a lot of testing. And like I said for now I intend to forget about my own importer for a while, instead focusing on releasing something that simply works but still has enough new stuff to make it a worthwhile upgrade.

What I would like to add, and it's easy enough that it will probably be part of the polygon commands editor from the start, is the ability to import/export vertex positions for object parts. TT64 would output an untextured .obj file for a given object, which you could then edit/distort in a 3d program, then reimport it in TT64.

There would be some big limitations though, you couldn't touch the actual triangle structure, only the vertex positions. TT64 would only reimport the new vertices (not the face list), and they would have to be in the same order, and there would have to be the same exact number of them as the original object. I just hope that 3d programs can modify vertices and re-output an .obj with the vertices in the same order, I haven't tested this yet.

While it would be severely limited compared to a real importer/exporter, there would be a lot of fun things to do still. With that and the geo layout commands editor, one could make an even better Luigi, Waluigi or Wario by distorting Mario's face and body parts using a 3d program. And who knows, maybe someone will be good enough to transform Mario's head into Link's head, just by moving vertices, changing the eye textures and hat color.

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 03-06-11 06:39:56 AM, in Minecraft: _ is the new 1039129042779591728 (last edited by VL-Tone at 03-06-11 03:41 AM)

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Is there a program that enables you to import uncompressed 3d arrays of blocks into a world using a simple documented format?

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 03-08-11 01:42:24 AM, in Minecraft: _ is the new 1039129042779591728

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Originally posted by Sukasa
Nope, but I think the mcregion format is just a container format for old-style chunks

The format looks simple, but I just want to do a quick and dirty "show off" world doing something like integrating the whole Metroid game map (which I have already all decoded somewhere), or recreate some of my Metroid Cubed voxelized blocks using Minecraft blocks as voxels.

Originally posted by dirbaio
Originally posted by VL-Tone
Is there a program that enables you to import uncompressed 3d arrays of blocks into a world using a simple documented format?

I don't think so, but if you want, I can send you the sort-of-library I've made in java for my generator...

Thanks for the offer, I might get back to you if I don't find something simpler.

I'm not very familiar with the low level stuff in MC, but wouldn't there be a way to make some "batch file" that would put multiple blocks in a world one by one?

Something that would look like:

...
put block A0 at 10,200,143
put block A0 at 11,200,143
put block B2 at 12,250,144
...

I don't care if it's slow, but is this kind of thing possible?

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 03-08-11 08:26:42 PM, in Toad's Tool 0.6.0 (On hiatus for an indefinite amount of time)

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Originally posted by billybobmario64
Can you please release something new once you get to somewhere stable? It won't be perfect, but we've been waiting for years.

Yes that's my goal, and that's why I'm putting aside the level importer to work on interface improvements and bug fixes for the main interface.

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 03-12-11 06:58:15 PM, in Toad's Tool 0.6.0 (On hiatus for an indefinite amount of time) (last edited by VL-Tone at 03-12-11 03:59 PM)

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

Originally posted by messiaen
There's a really huge difference in doing an individual hack and implementing it as an automatic process, especially because there's tons of decision making involved in doing this type of stuff.

Sorry, but is sort of irritating when people point out obvious "it´s possible" stuff.

I was about to reply the same thing...

I spend too much time explaining why this or that feature is not trivial to implement, but I guess those who think it's easy "for a programmer" to do them are often those who are not programmers and can't understand half of what I'm trying to explain.

This Kirby hack is nice though, I didn't know about it. Dudaw12 certainly dedicated himself to become a great SM64 hacker over the last few years

BTW: my site is back up!

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 06-14-11 08:56:37 PM, in Toad's Tool 0.6.0 (On hiatus for an indefinite amount of time)

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

Official statement: Toad's Tool 64 development is on hiatus for an indefinite amount of time.

I updated the first post and title to reflect this.

Like Metal_Man88 said, I will reopen this thread when I really have something new and concrete to announce.

I'm too busy, I've lost interest for now. I will probably get back to it someday, but I don't know when.

That's all I have to say about it.

Thank you everyone for your support over these last few years. It's been fun.

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 06-14-11 09:35:26 PM, in Bright Blue LEDs

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

I guess it will show my age, but when I was a kid blue LEDs didn't even exist. There were only red, green and orange (red+green) LEDs available.

Blue LEDS only started to be mass produced in the mid-90s, which is after the Virtual Boy was released (there was no way to have a full-color display using LEDs at the time).

While many of you kids have seen blue ones since like forever, it was a novelty thing for older folks, and that's in part why companies started to use them everywhere (because it felt new and futuristic).

Blue LEDs are indeed an order of magnitude brighter than the red and green ones and I agree that they can be annoying!

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 02-04-12 05:58:59 PM, in Super Mario Star Road RELEASE! (Download avaliable)

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

Bravo Celux!

I'm still amazed to see people using TT64 and messiaen's importer to make any kind of hack, but I'm even more amazed to see well-thought and polished hacks like this.

This is a new milestone for SM64 hacking!

(Note that this doesn't make any other hacks less worthwhile to pursue!)

When I first worked on reverse-engineering SM64, I would've never had guessed that this would become this big.

This kind of high-caliber hack wouldn't be possible without messiaen's level importer, but if I may add, it wouldn't be possible without Toad's Tool 64 v0.5.9 either, even with its current limitations. (I hope I don't sound too much like "hey don't forget me!")

Anyway keep up the good work Celux!

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 02-04-12 06:14:25 PM, in Avatard changed without my consent?

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

Forget this post. (To be deleted, sorry)

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 02-04-12 06:27:44 PM, in Mario 64 Level Importer

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

Originally posted by Joe
As Metal_Man says, the damage is rather subtle.

In fact, if you look closely, Tile Molester doesn't actually display textures correctly. Had Super Mario 64 used 32bpp textures instead of 16bpp textures, it would be much more visible, but an odd coincidence related to how 16bpp data is stored makes the bug dangerously hard to spot.

Tile Molester works perfectly with N64 graphics on old PowerPC Macs, that's because the bit order is reversed on those systems and this happens to fit into one of TM's CODEC perfectly, while Windows and intel Macs can display something that is seemingly close using another CODEC, what is hard to see is that the data bits are actually shifted by one. Editing the texture will result in corruption of a byte before or after the texture.

There is an option in TM to change the byte order, but it only affect the palette data.

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 05-05-12 06:52:29 PM, in Toad's Tool 64 now found at qubedstudios.rustedlogic.net

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

Hello everyone,

The current Toad's Tool 64 website at the address http://homepage.mac.com/qubedstudios will disappear from the face of the internet after June 30 2012, as Apple will discontinue some "legacy" MobileMe services like homepage publishing.

Even if I'm not working on TT64 anymore, I don't want the site to completely disappear so I will have to move it somewhere else (I'm not sure where, if anyone has any suggestions...).

I already own the domain name qubedstudios.com which redirect to the current site, and it will be trivial to change it so it points to the new site. The problem is that most of the images I posted in threads will become 404 as they are pointing to homepage.mac.com. There are also many other links to TT64 all over the internet that will become 404 past June 30.

So as a warning, you may want to archive the images in these threads if you need them.

Don't panic, and have a nice day

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