VGMaps
General Boards => Map Requests => Topic started by: majax79 on April 27, 2009, 06:00:05 pm
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Hello,
I know I made a request below. This is a game I really need a map on sadly. I assume the items remain in a fixed position.
If I knew how to make maps I would do it myself and post. To make robowarrior maps, do you have to blow everything up to show the items and secrets?
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You either make maps by making everything visible in-game, and merging all the screenshots to make the whole map, or you have to hack the game to read its data directly. The former is easier (requires you to play the game and take screenshots) while the latter is incredibly hard - but does offer the possibility to discover 100% of the details.
GameFAQs has a complete-looking walkthrough, if that's what you "need" the maps for.
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I think we really need a tutorial for making maps, it would help a lot of people. Also, Jon should put an actual page with contribution guidelines like he had years ago. I remember finding it helpful when I submitted my first map.
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One could always try to record his/her desktop while making a map but that would either produce a huge video file or you'd have to reduce the resolution, which I think would make it harder to follow.
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I'd love to hack robowarrior but it sounds pretty hard. For a complete noob a tutorial would help tremendously. I've only used FCEUX to play my games.
I have made a contribution of a different kind though. I spent a few days figuring out how many new games were released in the US and licensed for the nes. 677. I got every single one of those roms, rared em up and made a torrent for people to enjoy.
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See, that's why I think we need a tutorial. Most newcomers assume there is romhacking involved. Just take screenshots and paste them together.
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I've thought about making a screenshot mapping tutorial once, but my tendency to do things fully and perfectly or not at all quickly shot that down.
A good tutorial would cover the basics first (taking screenshots and pasting them together), then continue with intermediate (disabling layers, transparencies) and advanced techniques (memory hacking, video buffer capture, emulator specific and custom tools, etc).
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Current projects: Bucky O'Hare (NES), Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES)
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I mean, I could bomb an entire screen in robowarrior but I would be confused as to where to start the screen and where to end it if that makes any sense.
I always wondered how people got thos icons on map too...like how they make a legend. Anyways, if a tutorial came out I could def try it.
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Here a couple codes for Robowarrior:
Address: 004D Value: 09 Big Bomb Item
Address: 0066 Value: 09 Life Item
Address: 01C6 Value: FF Life Energy
The first one gives you infinity Big Bombs to make clearing levels easier. The second gives you infinity Healing Life Items so if you get low on energy you can just heal as many times as you need to. The last is a code to stop your health from dropping. However the big chunks of heal next to the heal bar can still go down so it is still possible to die. I have not found a code yet to stop the big chunks of health from going down.
These codes were found on the FCEUX emulator. That should help mapping this game.
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Could anyone either explain or point me to the direction of where I can find out about mapping with FCEUX?
I get that I need to clear the screen and all...but I'm just not sure exactlly what to do.
The secrets in the game have been found out. I assume anyways.
The underground part of robowarrior though..omg, that would be impossible to map.
Seems like hacking would be better option, no?
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Basically you would need to first take screen shots and paste them together. First do the stage with no sprites (enemies, items and stuff like that). There is an option to turn them off in FCEUX.
Then after that make a map with all the area cleared showing all the sprites you want to be on the map, like the items. Then place the map with the sprites on a layer on top of the first one you did.
Finally cut out everything from the top layer except the sprites(items) you want to see in the final map. There are more ways to do this, but this is one method I use.
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Yeah, I think a in depth tutorial would be very helpful for noobs like me.
Idk how to do a screenshot even.
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What emulator are you using?
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I suggest we start another thread about tutorials since we've clearly gotten off topic.
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Current projects: Bucky O'Hare (NES), Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES)
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I don't know if it makes a big difference, but when I tried the Japanese version of this game, "BomberKing", on an emulator, it was able to display the leftmost column correctly; whereas with RoboWarrior, the left side seems to reflect what's coming up on the right side. It probably wouldn't hurt to check out both versions if you can.
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here, this is an editor i made a while back: http://jwurmz.cinnamonpirate.com/pub/RoboWarriorEditor.zip
to use it, rename your RoboWarrior ROM to RoboWarrior.nes and place it into the same directory as the binary. the level editor doesn't read the tile values directly from the ROM; rather, they are all screen caputured bitmaps (stored in the \media directory) with custom bitmap tiles that indicate the item hidden below. the editor only has the 'visual scheme' from the 1st level so it's not much help for your purposes now that i think of it; it works for hacking the levels though :P
in case you wanted to hack the data yourself, here are notes on everything: http://jwurmz.cinnamonpirate.com/pub/RoboWarrior.txt
someone could make a mapviewer utility with this info that reads directly from the ROM...
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Just wanted to update that it's pretty impossible to make maps of this game because the items generate in different places each time you play it. Oh well.
Quick question, how could I view the invisible fruit or secrets on Adventure Island I? I'm using the latest interim version of FCEUX currently.
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I still posted the King's Bounty maps for Genesis even though the chests and items are randomized for each game. The maps are still useful.
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Heck, I prefer maps that look good to maps to that are useful but ugly. Unless you have good hacking skills, your best bet is to use a (hopefully complete) FAQ or walkthrough to try and get everything but sometimes that's not enough. I had to find some secrets in Treasure Master by myself since there was very little information available for the game anywhere online. At any rate, do the maps anyway, we never get enough :).
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I would be more than happy to do maps for some games but I need the knowledge to do so.
I think the easiest map for me to start would be Day Dreamin' Davey. I don't know how everyone has learned to create maps. I would submit that if a detailed guide existed, with the use of FCEUX, that much more maps would be created. My topic has 1,100 views so imagine if just 5 of those people began helping.
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It's really not that complicated, just labour intensive. Play the game, take a screenshot, move the screen along a bit, take another screenshot. Now use an image editor to join the two screenshots together and edit out repeated sprites. Not too hard.
Then repeat until the whole level is done. There's the labour intensive part.
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It's not that complicated for you people because you've been doing it for a while. For others that happen to come across this site and want to contribute, it might not be.
Like I said it seems like common logic that if an in-depth tutorial was done more people would create maps and that would be more productive. Since there's 677 licensed NES games that were released in the U.S. I would think you'd welcome all the help you could get to expand the selection.
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There is (virtually) no more depth than that. I guess a tutorial showing it all end-to-end might help, but people have different ways of doing things to get the same effect, so there's no one correct way.
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The thing is, you can't really make a universal tutorial that would cover everything, even if you constrain yourself to only using FCEUX. Not all games work the same way, and some have peculiarities that require special actions to properly map them; things like animated tiles, shifting color palettes, unreachable area, background tiles that are not fully on screen, finding the exact starting point of moving sprites, etc.
(This should really be in the Mapping Tips/Guides forum)
We can try and give you some tips and tools, but as in all things, experience is the best teacher. Your first few maps will probably be terrible and most likely riddled with errors. That's okay though, we all started there.
Okay, let's start with, in my opinion, the very basics. In FCEUX, you can enable/disable both the sprite layer and the background layer (though I don't remember the default keyboard shortcut for it). By default, removing the background leaves only black, and since black is used on most sprites, that makes it impossible to accurately "cut them out". To remedy to that, edit the fceux.cfg file in your FCEUX directory, search for the string "gNoBGFillColor" and change the 3 digits number after it to "100". This will change the overscan color (that is, the color displayed when there's no color specified such as when you disable the background) to a lovely pink.
(And if you're unlucky enough the sprites you want to capture feature the same pink color, then play around with the number in the config file)
Hopefully, you understood the procedure I just gave you. If not, there is likely no tutorial complete enough to help you and you'll just have to try it alone for a while to get some experience.
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I agree that the thread has gotten off topic. This is my last post on this thread and from now on I'll post in the proper forum. I'm coming into some money in three weeks so perhaps I'll commission a broad guide to mapping.