VGMaps
General Boards => Maps In Progress => Topic started by: ChronoSquare on March 31, 2010, 05:19:22 pm
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Hey all! Remember how the 4th generation Pokemon games have been out for about four years now and NOBODY has yet found out how to map out the towns and routes and rivers and lakes and caves of Diamond/Pearl/Platinum? Well, the waiting can now begin in earnest, because while primitive, the technology is out there!
I need to make a constant map of Sinnoh for a project I'm involved in, and all current sinnoh maps just won't cut it. They're several varieties, ranging from being edited together by tiles (looks like), to other screenshot-stitched maps, to maps using completely custom tiles for more 3rd-gen style maps. Those maps don't line up; we need up to a whole overworld map of Sinnoh itself, and I aim to help with that!
The biggest downside is going to be limited in the hours I can work on the map, because of the time of day and the game's lighting... so it's likely I can only get 1-4 maps (or levels of a cave/dungeon) stitched together at once. Although Twinleaf and Route 201 are kind of rough (since I was figuring out how to do this with those), here's what I got done today... (I'll separate the routes and towns better at the end, when I'm ready to submit them to vgmaps!)
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progress report: Sandgem, Route 202, and Routes 219-221 have now been mapped.
This also brings me to a question. How much info do you guys like on your map? Like if I should make an effort to expunge all enemy trainer icons from the map, and if I should make a legend for the items that can be found lying around the routes.
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Very nice job on these so far. I'd say leave the trainers/items in the map since they're pretty important, but the item key is up to you. If you go for labeling items, I suggest also labeling all the hidden items as well. That, I imagine, is no small feat, but serebii.net should be able to help with that.
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Thanks for the input. I think then what I'll end up doing is making two versions of the maps: A full version, with all trainers and items to submit to here, and a clean version, without the trainers and pokeballs, that we will use (and that I'll see if they wouldn't want to use on Bulbapedia.)
I think I'll keep the overworld cohesive map as a clean only, however. That'll give some meaning to having the individual routes :D
Man, I didn't realize just how much Jubilife had changed from DP - just compare the Platinum version of Jubilife to the DP version of the town they have on Bulbapedia :O
(I wasn't sure about how to cut off the top of the map for Iron Island, so I just left in there where it cuts off - interestingly enough, after a certain height, you just see white for a background!)(I don't like having uneven edges to the map, so that's why I didn't trim the top of Iron Island just yet...)
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You should submit both sets here. I'm sure Jon would be happy to host them both.
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Route 205, I hate you! You have a super-sucky shape! D:<
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Sorry for no updates yesterday - Easter dinner with relatives and some visiting afterwards, you know. Just did three small insides - Fuego Ironworks, Valley Windworks, and Ravaged Path.
To make up for it, however, I have a treat for today - almost perfect animated Eterna Forest and FULL route 205! Who knew the mt coronet inside fit PERFECTLY between the two halves? :D (It doesn't look like much of anything now, but I assure you, it will be noticeable once it's time to make a full overworld map...)
Animated Eterna Forest actually is too large for an attachment, so here it is from being hosted on imageshack... :3
(https://img269.imageshack.us/img269/7340/eternaforestanimated.gif)
oops, looks like I missed a sliver of the canopy overlay! Hahaha!
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These look great. Are you using a level editor or something? I know this game has 3D landscapes.
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These look great. Are you using a level editor or something? I know this game has 3D landscapes.
Nope, no kind of level editor. Level editor would be much more awesome, but it would produce a look distinctly different from my maps. What I use is an AR code to change the camera angle, and so I change the camera to "Inside buildings", which produces pretty much straightforward 2D landscapes. Although it may look 2D, however, it still is all 3D - walking up and down elevations changes the field of view ever so slightly. (In addition, some 3D objects still retain their properties and change pixels as you walk away; ledges and height ledges are an example of this.) It's my job to take screenshot by screenshot and make them line up, smoothing out any such distortion or covering it up so it's not as noticeable. :)
I just use DeSmuME to take the screenshots (quick screenshot function) and use the 0.9.5's new frame-advance feature to line up animated areas, such as water or the coal elevators in Oreburg. (That took a longer time to get through than you'd think... D: ). The screenshots I then place together in Photoshop, erasing or masking parts to make the whole consistent.
Hey guys, I just realized a little something I could do - I could include the route #, town name, or cave name on the maps in the upper left-hand corner like they appear in the game. I've taken the liberty to do this in these next four maps; should I do it with all maps?
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OH MY GOD
SIX HOURS TO EDIT OUT THE CYCLING ROAD
@_@
EDIT: Please excuse the filename... I was getting rather frustrated with the tangled mess of layers and pixels and what needed to be on top of what that I started taking my frustration out in the layer names/finally filenames when I finished...
Route 206/207 being done now means that I've mapped the whole of West Sinnoh in a week's time! FUCK YEAH SEAKING! (Well, the overworld anyways. Iron island, wayward cave, and that other cave next to it still remain, but still.) I'd upload/show the connected west sinnoh, but I don't know where to host a nearly 6000x6000 4.3 MB png :U
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With PNGOUT it'd get a lot smaller (e.g. your Route 206 map drops to 277KB). Still, it's be in the >2MB range; Jon ought to raise the size limit for attachments here.
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That PNGOUT sounds interesting. Is there any way to know what parameters to set to get an optimized compression? Even after looking at a tutorial (essentially just an operation manual describing the inputs) I can't see myself doing anything other than trial-and-error guesswork at trying to get the best compression possible, hahahaha.
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Don't bother, just use the default options. You can tell it to randomize the parameters, but it doesn't help much. I ran it on one of my recent Mega Man maps for over an hour with random options and saved something like 60 bytes over the default settings.
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Great job so far! Oops... looks like there's an extra piece of a person down there at the bottom of Hearthome.
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Oops! Hahaha, thanks for catching that! I saw it at first and thought to simply come back when I finished to clean it up, but I just plum gone and forgot about it completely ;p
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Don't bother, just use the default options.
With one exception: if it's over 256 colours, use the /f0 parameter (https://www.vgmaps.com/forums/index.php?topic=493.msg5580#msg5580).
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Bah, kids today and their colors.
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In my day, we had 16 colours and were glad of it.
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Oh no! I've broken my perfect record! D: There's not much I can do when I can't even boot into safe mode without blue screening, let alone booting normally :/
Now, to complicate matters, I need to figure out how to erase this rain without having to take 5 screenshots on the same spot for every step... D: (I'd forgotten about the rain! Anyone got an AR code to manipulate the weather?)
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There's a slight misalignment in your Route 210 map on the far left plank.
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If you're talking about the plank you need to ride your bike over... it's like that in-game, apparently. :V
I caught that as well, and went back layer through layer trying to find out where it got mis-aligned, until I finally realized that it's bent like that in the game itself! :O (The long plank over the water, its shadow does pretty much the same thing...)
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Is it maybe an artifact of your perspective changing code?
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It could very well be an artifact of the game's engine when displaying a 3D model with a "forced" perspective. I've seen that happen several times in various games where such a model was displayed without any perspective deformation and with textures where one pixel on it was exactly the size of one pixel of the screen, and despite the model being perfectly rectangular you still got straight lines that were slanted by one pixel.
In this particular case, it's up to the mapper to decide if he wants to be accurate to how the game actually displays things or to how they should theoretically look (I've been increasingly leaning toward the latter myself lately).
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It probably is, I don't know. There's too few of those planks to tell for sure - out of 3 around the Frontier area (I forget those route names), the one on the sandstorm route has the bending at its top; the two by Mt Stark, neither has that slight pixel mis-alignment, but the left one does seem to increase in elevation. Some weird hidden things get revealed in the environment with this camera change code, like funky 1/2 elevation hills along Cycling Road, so it might be something like that.
There's a lot of small deformations that are rampant throughout these maps due to being constrained to the elevation of the game, so for these maps it's next to impossible to get them to appear pixel-perfect as intended. Where I can blend two edges together to make them seem conformed, I will. It will likely be fixed, if it will be fixed, when it comes time to clean up route 215 and remove the trainers/put all trainers in/mark the items and hidden items.
BTW, I found that weather modifier code I wanted, so here're some more maps. I think I'm done for the day now, however...
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Maybe I should've chimed in earlier...what happened to the headers as seen back in Reply #8? I liked those. Especially if the area isn't naturally rectangular or a square and can therefore be put on the image without having to cover anything or increase the image size.
Though I guess to be consistent you'd have to do one or the other to get the header on them all...
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I hadn't continued that because I didn't hear any feedback on it. After seeing some other submitted maps, however, I know exactly what to do with those headers... don't worry. While they won't be showing up in these roughs to save time, I have a plan for them... ;)
In other news, things still aren't satisfactory with my laptop and its conditions... so output is diminished. D: I wanted to get done Lake Valor and Sendoff Spring as well, but doing the conglomerated route took long enough... (The snow routes should hopefully be easier to mural, since they have nowhere near the stupid amount of cliff interference that the resort area has :S)
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Sorry for the lack of updates... More computer troubles plus personal issues led to very little time to work on mapping sinnoh. I should be able to work on these a little more frequently now; I promise it won't go another 2 weeks without an update!
Here's 4 more to complete the land circuit of West Sinnoh... (...Dry Valor will be mapped when I get that far in a second save file used to double-check item positions and aid in trainer erasal...)
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Yyyup, that waterfall's annoying to screenshot. There's no gradient in the elevation there, so it just goes from the bottom end of the waterfall to the top end of the waterfall - you can't tell how high/how many spaces in-between to align the screens. :V
Anyways, this should complete West Sinnoh (I'll do Seabreak Path/ Flower Paradise tomorrow), leaving only the snowpoint areas. (I hope it's not too much of a pain in that blizzard... D:)
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Okay, as you may have noticed, Chronosquare has ceased to update this project. Before he left, however, he PMd the rest of us in his project (he mentioned it in the first post) asking if one of us wanted to take over. I foolishly agreed, so now I'm stuck mapping the rest of Sinnoh. And yes, he did tell me to upload here. There isn't that much, but still. Here's what I've done so far, consisting pretty much just of Northern Sinnoh. The water in Snowpoint's a little off, as I didn't realise I could Frame Skip at the time. I'll redo if it's that much of an issue. I also did Lake Acuity, but again, the water is all over the place, so it's not really suitable. I'll redo that one when I can be bothered.
Hopefully I'll get some Battle Area up soon!...
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How long's it been? Eight? Nine months? Yeah I got a little lazy. A lot lazy. We had the maps WE needed, so I slacked off. But now we need more maps, so I've started on the Battle Area. Here it is. The water on Route 226 is lined up as best I could. There's no glaring changes, it's all at roughly the same level. Some time this week I hope to work on the Desert, Stark Mountain, the Resort, Routes 229 and 230. Then that'll be it!...
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This time I've got Route 227, Stark Mountain, Route 228 and 229. I also have the Resort Area, but I can only upload four :( . I'll put it up once I've finished 230, which I should hopefully do tomorrow *cue six month waiting period*...
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Are these meant to be submissions?
I'll gladly put them up if they are, however, don't expect me to be up-to-date following every topic, which is why I strongly prefer submissions to be done via email.
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We were planning on submitting them when they were all done. Which just so happens to be now :D . Well, all overworld anyway. I may do the caves and stuff, but as of now they're not hugely relevant (or required by our project).
Anyway, here's the promised Resort Area, along with Route 230. I also forgot that I needed to do Lake Acuity, so here it is. The water is slightly off at the bottom. I tried a lot, but I couldn't align it =/. Anyway, as far as I'm aware, that's the Sinnoh overworld complete...
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Whoops, I totally forgot about Half and Newmoon island. They're technically overworld, so they've now been done. They're at night for atmosphere (moons, night, y'know?), but also because it's 12am here and I forgot to change the clock to midday to do it in daylight :P ...