Jul -- Posts by VL-Tone

VL-Tone
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Posted on 05-06-12 02:44:25 AM, 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

I haven't thought about asking you guys. I'll get back to you about it (well before june 30 for sure

).

messiaen: nice to see you too

About StarFox, indeed I saw some renewed interest in it, as I was contacted by 2 or 3 people about it in the recent months. The thing is, it's been literally over 7 years since I've worked on that StarFox editor, and I think I lost part of my hacking notes in a HDD crash a while ago. If it was not for BGNG (Guy Perfect) cracking the MIO0 compression scheme around that time which led me to hacking SM64 ,I would've pursued working on SFXedit. (And incidentally, the fact that I was working on StarFox back in the days enabled me to quickly crack the SM64 level and polygon formats as they are similar in many ways)

Anyway let's not derail this topic as I just said not to.

See ya guys!

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Posted on 05-06-12 02:58:07 AM, in I don't think any of these are authorized by their creators...

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This reminds me, years ago some scammer tried to sell a "3D Metroid NES cartridge" using screenshots from my own Metroid Cubed voxel conversion which would not even be technically possible since my conversion was not a NES game nor a hack of one, it was made to be played using the Shockwave Web plug-in!

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Posted on 07-02-12 09:18:09 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,

Thanks to Xkeeper and friends, Toad's Tool 64 is now found at http://qubedstudios.rustedlogic.net.

Tell your friends!

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Posted on 03-04-13 09:21:31 PM, in Star Fox SNES Rom decoding, need help, VL-Tone opinions very welcome! (last edited by VL-Tone at 03-04-13 09:25:30 PM)

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Originally posted by dyson132
Hi!
I've been trying to decode the SNES Star Fox rom from the old info made by VL-Tone but I've had little luck with the bits in between.
Here is the thread I made about it, I can make it here too. Any help would be awesome, help from VL-Tone would be even better.
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php/topic,14298.msg234446.html#msg234446

@VL-Tone
I don't need to get it all working but a bit of help or a push in the righ direction would be incredible.

Thanks!

I'm very happy to see that other people are being interested in Star Fox reverse-engineering!

Not sure you need my help, looks like you guys are doing fine without me

Now seriously if you have any specific questions you can ask them here, and I'll try my best to answer them in a relatively short amount of time. Just keep in mind that it's been like 7-8 years and I forgot most of it.

Here's a collection of old random Star Fox hacking notes from back in the days that were not necessarily publicly available.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/93350052/StarFoxHackingDocs.zip

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Posted on 03-12-13 01:41:54 AM, in Star Fox SNES Rom decoding, need help, VL-Tone opinions very welcome! (last edited by VL-Tone at 03-12-13 01:50:33 AM)

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

Hi dyson132,

Actually when I said I would answer very specific questions, in my mind I was thinking more like one at a time... But hey don't feel bad about it, I guess you wanted to get the most of it while I'm here thinking that I may never come back (which is always a possibility with me

). I'll try to answer your questions, but it will include a lot of "I don't know" or "I'm not sure".

1.1-I guess not, I think Stef found some mistake in my docs about that.
1.2-I think so.
1.3-I'm not sure.
1.4-There shouldn't be.

2.1-There are special texture palettes where a color=a texture.
2.2-Nope (I don't remember).

3-I think that shadows are calculated on the fly.

4-Some models are cut in parts, probably to fix some z-ordering issues (Didn't you guys figured this out in the thread? Or was it after your post?)

5.1-No, not possible. And I did not lose all the source code files, I still have some incomplete older versions. I won't release this code for the same reasons I won't release TT64's source code. I may give you relevant parts of it if there's no easy way for you to find this info otherwise, but not the whole thing. Please respect my decision.

5.2-.DCR files are compiled Shockwave code, they can't be opened by Director.

6-I did not use any of the ROM data to set any of these, they came from some arbitrary settings in the Shockwave 3d viewer.

7.1-Maybe because I did not deconstruct the whole level in the doc? I'm not sure I can't find this doc.
7.2-Couldn't you use an hex editor and find out?
7.3-I guess.
7.4-I really don't think it would be of any use to do that. You'd be better trying to find how to program it by yourself.

8-The ztimer is just a timer that loads the next set of objects. If you use a game genie to freeze that value objects stops appearing and the Arwing endlessly goes forward in emptiness. There's nothing fancy about it and it doesn't have anything to do with animation.

9-I have no idea.

As for the object headers, I have nothing to add to the info that you already have.

One thing you guys should do more is hacking the actual game instead on working only on the decoding end. By modifying values and reloading the ROM in an emulator you can figure out what each bits and bytes do.

SFXEdit also pretty much lays out the basic level format for you. There's a lot that you could figure out just by using SFXEdit. Also if you put it in Hex mode you can see the raw hex code which should be useful to understand more of the format.

One last thing. I don't want to discourage you but reproducing Star Fox levels+gameplay will require a lot of work to get it right. Decoding the levels is the easy part, until you stumble on an ASM based branch command or any moving enemy that depends on ASM code. Some may be easier since they follow predefined paths (like your fellow Arwings) but I never managed to find/decode this animation path data. Not that it's hard, but I didn't look for it before abandoning development.

And while the Star Fox port for Genesis is a very nice and impressive demo, will it run at an acceptable framerate once all the game logic and special effects like particle explosions are implemented?

Ok so that's pretty much it for now. I think you already had enough info to move forward by yourselves without needing my help for the next few weeks hopefully...

Have fun!

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Posted on 03-16-14 06:07:36 PM, in New Category Discussion: Prerelease Materials

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

I don't know if you guys knew about this, but Frank Cifaldi (Nintendo/video-games historian and archivist, writes in Gamasutra) recently was given a goldmine of stuff coming from the EGM magazine archive, including boxes full of pre-release material, press-kits, pictures and movies on diskettes and ZIP-disks, along with prerelease CDs and ROMs for a lot of games.

You can check his recent tweets for some photos. I don't think he had time yet to scan and convert everything.

A box crammed full of press kits and asset discs, from EGM's archive pic.twitter.com/0PbNuHckEh
— Frank Cifaldi (@frankcifaldi) March 2, 2014

Oh baby, I'll bet there's good stuff on this "Zelda 64" disc. pic.twitter.com/4xaDmYH3ro
— Frank Cifaldi (@frankcifaldi) March 2, 2014

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Posted on 03-27-14 02:49:13 AM, in Toad's Tool 64 v0.6S Release (Bug reports go here)

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

Actually the Windows version of Director can compile Mac apps. What it can't do is compile iOS apps (which only applies to Director 12 anyway, v0.6S was compiled with Dir 11.5), those can only be published on a Mac.

That being said, for TT64 it wouldn't be straightforward because the Mac versions of the XTRAs plug-ins that would need to be installed and some config files edited. Also from what I've read publishing a Mac app from the Windows version of Director is a buggy and it's recommended to use a Mac anyway.

And the reality is, the importer doesn't have a Mac version, and the ROM extender doesn't work on most recent Macs because of the lack of intel versions of some XTRAs needed by the extender.

I perfectly understand that Celux has better things to do than to publish a Mac version in this context. If you can forgive me for not taking the time to update TT64 in over 6 years, surely you can forgive him.

I'm still a Mac user and TT64 was indeed created on a Mac, and as a Mac user I can understand that you're disappointed for the lack of an update for your platform of choice, but if someone has to be blamed for abandoning the Mac version, it should be me...

But please let's forget about this and move on. There's a new version of TT64, it's time to celebrate or something!

And congrats again Celux for this release! (Already congratulated him on YT).

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Posted on 03-28-14 10:49:09 PM, in Toad's Tool 64 v0.6S Release (Bug reports go here)

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Originally posted by stag019
Just curious, how big is the codebase? If in the future the source were to be released to the public, how difficult do you think it would be to port this to another language?

Also, hi VL-Tone. It's been a while.

Hey stag019! Remember back in 2005 when we were discovering all that stuff?

Those were the days…(the days when I had an easy job, lots of free time and motivation).

The codebase is messy because I built it as a reverse engineering tool as we were finding stuff, hoping to rewrite it to a cleaner code base. But it got too big and I never did that rewrite. There’s a lot of unused code that I didn’t remove so it looks bigger than it really is. Also because of the way Director works, the structure of it all may not seem obvious and all over the place.

Like I just told Celux in a PM, I’m not totally closed to the idea of open-sourcing it one day, but I would prefer if someone would clean it / organize it a little and maybe add some minimal comments (which are far and few currently).

I thought that the documentation I posted was enough for someone to build a new cleaner open-source editor, but that didn’t happen. I guess that TT64 being “good enough” didn’t help. And also there’s a world of stuff between level definition documentation and actually making an interface to deal with all the quirkiness of the SM64 level format, TT64 already solves most of the problems (not to say there couldn’t be a better interface) so it makes sense that some would like to use it as a starting point instead of rewriting everything.

Originally posted by Celux
Adobe's Lingo code is pretty funky, I'm not sure that you'd have much success in porting it.

I guess I’m biased but I don’t think Lingo in itself is that bad, I think the fishyness comes from my code as a then unexperienced programmer. Also, earlier Director versions didn’t have binary data manipulation functions so I worked around it by doing ugly hacks like manipulating data as hex strings and number arrays.

But the end result is the same, a direct port wouldn’t be easy. The source code could still help someone that is serious about making a SM64 editor though…

Originally posted by Kenshi
Didn't mean to come off as blaming him or you here, certainly excited at a new release for the SM64 community as a whole.

To address a few things:

1. I'm aware of the importer limitation of windows only, until just recently that I could run windows on my intel mac I pretty much dropped SM64 hacking due to lack of being able to use it. At the latter, I ended up having to use the windows version of the extender and couldn't figure out what was wrong with it, guess that explains it! Thought it was something I was doing wrong.

2. Not disappointed at all, just hoping that being that I have a Mac (and so do you) and Celux (maybe) being dedicated to future revisions of TT64, was hoping it could still be done for both platforms. Where there's a will there's a way.

That said, I don't mean to take away from what you've done Celux, very grateful that we finally got the official .6 release of TT64. For now I'll have to stick to windows only for SM64 hacking but if there's anything I can do to assist in publishing it on the Mac end just PM me and I'll do my best.

Once again thanks a lot and congratulations on the release!

I felt bad about my reply to you. After all you were one of the privileged alpha tester for that elusive unfinished v0.6a, and you were also "lucky" to have glanced at an older source code that I sent you by mistake. And lastly you were very kind in wanting to help me with the alpha version. My post felt like I was brushing you aside.

But here's something that will make up for that: I've given permission to Celux to give you the code so you can compile the Mac version. If you need help you can PM me.

Oh well, back to my old habits of making long posts!

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Posted on 03-30-14 01:30:25 AM, in Toad's Tool 64 v0.6S Release (Bug reports go here) (last edited by VL-Tone at 03-30-14 01:30:51 AM)

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

Originally posted by stag019

Those were the days indeed. In fact, I even went back to the archive to look for some random dates:
Your registration date: 06-06-04 12:56 AM
My registration date: 06-10-05 01:44 PM
HyperHacker opened the Mario 64 thread: 06-12-05 04:49 PM
Your post of the Mario 64 geometry: 06-19-05 02:00 PM
First release of any sort of editing tool: 07-02-05 06:31 PM

Nice historical recounting. Damn it's almost 10 years!

I remember someone sent me a list of all public versions of TT64 and their release dates a while ago. Maybe that could be put on a Wiki or something.

Originally posted by stag019

It always seems to me to be the absolute number one reason people don't release source code nowadays. And not necessarily without good reason, because there are a lot of elitist people online nowadays that will make fun of you for sloppy source code. But on that same token, I doubt too many people here are that much of a jerk to really care, and would be more happy just to have a working implementation to work off of. So unless your intend to get (or have, what is your new job?) a job in computer programming, where you wouldn't want an employer to see sloppy code, perhaps you should try releasing it sooner than later?

My current job involves programming in many shapes and forms, but not related to gaming at all. We're a small company and I'm the only "real" programmer there. So it wouldn't cause any problem. I wanted for a while to get a job in the gaming industry, but my current job is paying well enough for my modest needs and game programming was relegated to a hobby, a sideline. I'm planning on publishing an iOS game as an indie dev, but I'm my own boss for this so who cares if I wrote sloppy code 6-9 years ago?

So yeah I don't have any good reason anymore except maybe being still self-conscious about it. And while I felt like the source code wouldn't be of any use since nobody could figure it out and none wanted to use Director, Celux's release proved otherwise.

It's just a short matter of time now until I give my "Ok" but I don't feel like committing tonight.

I would just prefer wait one or two releases from Celux so that all the most important bugs are fixed, though I don't want to transfer the burden on him.

Originally posted by stag019
Originally posted by VL-Tone
I guess I’m biased but I don’t think Lingo in itself is that bad, I think the fishyness comes from my code as a then unexperienced programmer. Also, earlier Director versions didn’t have binary data manipulation functions so I worked around it by doing ugly hacks like manipulating data as hex strings and number arrays.
This all sounds like stuff you've mentioned before a long time ago, but is a nice rehash beaue of how long it's been.

Yeah I feel like I'm repeating myself when I talk about this, but I'm never sure how much people already know. I guess once I do release the code, I won't have to justify myself anymore.

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Posted on 04-03-14 02:39:02 AM, in Toad's Tool 64 v0.6S Release (Bug reports go here)

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

Originally posted by messiaen
Can't believe I actually remind my password for this site!

This is great news, thanks VL-Tone and Skelux for keeping this alive, hopefully SM64 Hacking will get renewed interest.

I haven't touched a hex editor or done much programming-wise in the last few years besides a simple Ludum Dare game (VL-Tone, have you ever tried the game compo? It's a good excuse to waste a weekend writing a game ), but from time to time I still check Skelux's channel just to see what he is doing, amazing how much progress has been done.

Hi messiaen!

I also hope that this renews interest in SM64 hacking, there's still a lot of stuff that hasn't been completely reverse-engineered or for which there's no tool available to edit the data, like animation sequences used by characters and Mario.

I don't remember hearing/reading about Ludum Dare before, I only recently started to follow the indie dev scene a little, mainly by following other indie devs on Twitter. I knew there was some "game in a week-end" competition but didn't know it was on this scale and several times a year. The nice thing is how you can use whatever tool/language you want.

This Ludum Dare thing looks to be the spark I needed to get me to make an actual playable game from start to end. Thanks for telling me about it!

Originally posted by stag019
So some things I've been working on the past coupla days:
1. Cellar Dweller's old newextender. I managed to get it to cross-compile a Windows version from Ubuntu which successfully works in Wine (if it can see the right dll's). Unfortunately, when I booted my old Windows XP to test it out, there was some random dll error. Honestly though, I feel like for such a simple GUI, GTK+ on Windows is a bit overkill. What I'll probably end up doing is maintaining separate GUI C source files for GTK+ for Linux, and WinAPI for Windows. And if someone wants to write a Cocoa file too, be my guest.

I remember how unorthodox the "ROM extender" thing felt to me when I worked on it. I don't think there was other level editors that required such a procedure. Do you think it was the right decision at the time?

BTW as for the TT64 source code, I'm still thinking about the details on how I'd like it to be released (I need to put some minimal license, for stuff like "don't sell it!") but it will happen sooner than later.

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Posted on 08-29-17 01:08:34 AM, in Peppy's Tool - The Star Fox Random Level Generator

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

Hello there!

It's been a while...

Some of you might remember that I was working on a Star Fox level editor around 2004, before I started hacking Super Mario 64 which lead to me making Toad's Tool 64.

Here's a thread about it on the old Acmlm's board:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050517170102/http://board.acmlm.org/thread.php?id=6876

The editor never went farther than a level script editor, where level script commands are listed and parameters can be edited, along with a single model polygon viewer. When I went all in on SM64 hacking I stopped working on it, but it helped me a lot to quickly figure out how the polygon and level data was stored in SM64, since they have similar formats.

I love when game corruption leads to seemingly random levels. This is the kind of thing I would enjoy doing as a kid by experimenting with Game Genie codes on games like SMB1, and also by "circuit-bending" (hardware hacking) my NES with a switch that could (sometimes) warp SMB1 to levels filled with random platforms, enemies and blocks.

Even though I enjoyed playing levels like this via game corruption, for some reason it had never occurred to make a tool to patch a game with randomly generated levels.

When I learned about Super Mario 64: Chaos Edition and the Super Mario World Randomizer, a light bulb lit up on top of my head (I blame home automation...). I thought about doing some game randomizer with the games I've hacked over the years.

Star Fox was a good match for the kind of randomizing I was striving for, since it's not a platform game, which randomness can make easily unplayable by creating walls and unreachable platforms.

It's also very linear in its gameplay (though level scripts do have some conditional branching and loops) so you can easily generate playable random levels simply by chaining random level script commands.

So... I made a tool:

Introducing Peppy's Tool - The Star Fox Random Level Generator. (Is there a pun to be made about this name?)

Download links for Windows and Mac
http://qubedstudios.rustedlogic.net/PeppysTool.htm

The tool will patch a Star Fox ROM with a new randomly generated level accessible though the default "Training" option in the control setup screen. It supports version 1.0 and 1.2 of the ROM, with or without a header. It doesn't work with higan or bsnes yet, probably because it extends the ROM by 32k and these emulators don't like that.

When I first got it working and played those random levels, I found it more enjoyable than I imagined. The levels are full of surprises and are seemingly infinite, since the tool fills a whole 32k bank with level commands (the whole game uses two 32k banks for level scripts). Sometimes weird stuff happens, like corrupted music and weird camera angles and other glitchy stuff. There's also always new things to shoot at on the screen which makes it hard to stop playing.

At the technical level, it works by scanning every level script commands in the game (excluding branch, loop, conditional branch and some other commands) and storing them in order in a list. Then it creates a new level by chaining random commands from that list into the extended 32k, and patches the Training level to jump to the start of a an existing level chosen at random (to initialize music, background, camera etc.) then jumps back to the new level.

By default the generator will copy random groups of 1-10 commands at a time from that list from their original order, so you may recognize some groups of objects from the original game. Some objects/structures in the game are made of more than one command so by doing that it can preserve them more entirely. You can adjust the range of randomness for command group sizes by moving the "Randomness" sliders.

You can make "completely random" levels by setting both randomness sliders all the way to the right, which will make the level generator copy one random command at a time from a random position in the list, creating more chaotic levels. It may increase the possibility of crashing, even though it doesn't tend to happen very often as the game engine is relatively resilient.

You can also adjust the level density, which will remove a percentage of level z-spacer (or what I called ztimers) commands at random. At its maximum setting, density will be so high that the game slows down to a crawl with too much stuff on the screen.

There are other features, which you can see in the screenshot and are described in the read me file.

Ok that was a long post, I guess I can't help it, like in the good old days!

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