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I was always a little disappointed that both of the existing Castlevania II maps are arbitrarily broken into three pieces. I was in the mood for mapping a few weeks ago, so I spent a weekend making my own maps which add new value to the atlas:





It's up to Jon whether to post the daytime map in addition to the two already on the site. These are the widest maps I've ever made, and this is the first time in ages that I've had my tools choke (pngout crashes, for example).

I'm also working on some minor revisions to Castlevania 1 and 3 so that my whole collection is consistent. Mostly just small things like tweaking the headers/outlines, adding some moving platforms which I had previously chosen to omit, and fixing a few errors I've noticed.

Shameless plug: I now have a personal site collecting my maps at git.io/revned

I've been meaning to do this for years. I'm no designer and I've been staring at it too long to even tell whether it looks good, but at least it's fast and hopefully usable. It's not super scalable, but good enough for my modest portfolio. Criticism welcome.

I reconstructed my map history as a git repo, which was an interesting process and lets me do some cool things like automatically generate the update history on the main page and the timestamps on each map.

There are a handful of maps which aren't on VGMaps: the manually modified Saturn SotN maps, some older ones which have been replaced, and also a Link's Awakening DX world map which I created but never submitted as I was mapping the dungeons.

This is a little different for me. I actually did 2/3 of these waaay back when Wii Sports came out since several of the golf courses there are based on this game. It was interesting to see the similarities. I finally got around to finishing them up today and adding headers, so now I can submit them and cross them off my TODO list at long last.

Interestingly, the actual hole/flag locations change in each playthrough. These maps would look weird without them, so I just went with whatever I got.

I did some work on this awhile back but pretty much dropped it. I figured I'd post some of what I have, and maybe this topic will nag me sufficiently to get me to finish at some point.

No labeling yet - these are background only at the moment. I don't know for sure how much I want to include, but probably at least people in towns and place names on the world map.

I just found out about this today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61-OMrOxyso

Looks pretty solid! Maybe I'll even map it over the holidays.

As I mentioned in the big Mega Man topic, I was able to fix the bug in Dolphin that was preventing this game from being emulated. Now it works great, and I can finally map it. Enjoy this first map.

More good news is that since Mega Man 10 will almost certainly use the same engine, it should run in Dolphin as well. I'll be mapping it as soon as it comes out :-)

Must... sleep....

There's already a level editor for it. I smell maps in the near future.

There are a lot of ads on this site. Usually I have them blocked, but with the new poker ads on the front page, I took the opportunity to see what it is supposed to look like. It's really bad. Jon, are they worth it? How much money do they actually generate? I remember you mentioning that you didn't get much. I think at this point they might actually be causing you to lose viewers...

Felt like sharing this one with you all. The levels are vector graphics but the format is very simple. I just need to figure out some details regarding the "sprites", which shouldn't be too difficult. This example is just the first level without any decorations.



http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/4943/hellorolando.png">http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/4943/hellorolando.th.png" width="150" height="104" alt="User posted image" />

Lots of SQL errors.

The third DS Castlevania, Order of Ecclesia is coming out late 2008 / early 2009. As much as I loved the first two, I'm afraid it might feel a bit stale. It also looks like they're still borrowing from SotN.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcVXk4jiNQU">Trailer



Apparently, they're also making a Castlevania fighting game for the Wii, called Castlevania: Judgement. I'm not a fan of fighting games in general (save Smash Bros.), but it seems like it could work well.

http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/photos/june2008_106_1.JPG" width="648" height="486" alt="User posted image" />

Here it is, featuring a fancy new GUI. Well, sort of fancy. It should work fine if you have JRE installed; just double-click the JAR file. Tell me if you find any problems, I only briefly tried it in Windows.

I've wanted to map this game for quite awhile. The PC version is so much better looking than the maps already on the site. It's really easy to map, so I won't have to devote too much time to it. Here are a few to start off with:



http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/5739/01rf9.png" width="510" height="160" alt="User posted image" />

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/8210/02sf3.png" width="446" height="160" alt="User posted image" />

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/9492/03ci6.png" width="437" height="160" alt="User posted image" />

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/7061/04jf8.png" width="564" height="160" alt="User posted image" />

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/8837/05dc3.png" width="848" height="160" alt="User posted image" />

I'm still around, I've just been doing other things lately. I have some mapping ideas in mind, but I doubt they'll get anywhere anytime soon. I suppose I should work on SotN eventually, too.

https://img245.imageshack.us/img245/204/mailmx7.png" width="706" height="258" alt="User posted image" />



I'm not even sure how to respond to this. It just doesn't make sense to me why someone would mail someone they don't even know without even greeting or thanking them.

Is it just me, or is the font on the system pages considerably bigger than it was before the bandwidth ran out? Now with this large font and the super wide tables, it looks like my monitor is zoomed in on the real page.

This running out of bandwidth every single month without fail is getting really annoying. This month it was gone 5 of 31 days, so the site lost 16% of all potential newcomers. Not a good deal.

I found this easter egg on a site a long time ago, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere since. Does anyone else know how to get it?

http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/7685/haltw2.png" width="256" height="240" alt="User posted image" />

[Guidelines for mapping]

Guidelines for mapping

Anyone can help out with this project, but please follow the rules in this post to make sure everything will go relatively smoothly. Please read through all of this before you start mapping.



Requirements

First of all, you need the US version of the game. Then, to make sure we don't have any palette conflicts later on, you should use the same emulator and graphics plugin as everyone else. The emulator we've chosen is ePSXe, and we're using Pete's OpenGL graphics plugin. You need to use these settings.



Getting started mapping

Choose a room to map. Any room is fine, but you should try to stick to the first castle for now. I also advise that you don't choose a room with a scrolling background for your first try. See this map for the unmapped sections:



<div class="quote"><center><img src="http://revned.googlepages.com/NormalCastle.png" width="498" height="386" alt="User posted image" /></center><font color="C00000">Red = TerraEsperZ</font>

<font color="E08000">Orange = Zeric</font>

<font color="008000">Green = Edsword/Wileee</font>

<font color="0000C0">Blue = Revned</font>

<font color="8000C0">Purple = mephea</font></div>

Anything grey is fair game. The colored sections have already been mapped or are in progress by another mapper. Please use the fancy grid I made to refer to the rooms. It took forever to make ;-)



Alright, now that you've chosen a room you can get started. Take screenshots in ePSXe with F8. Then just put them together in your favorite image editor. Save all images as PNGs (I suppose BMP would be fine, too). Since we can't disable layers in ePSXe, you might have trouble getting rid of the status bar in the upper left. If you need it, you can use GLIntercept to get the tiles behind the sprites. Just put the DLL file and the settings file in the ePSXe folder. Then run the emulator, and lots of images will get dumped to the "images" folder. Since it makes hundreds of files very quickly, you should only use it briefly. Get to the place you need without GLIntercept, make a savestate, exit the emulator, put the DLL file in the folder, then run it and unfreeze for a second or two. Then just look through all the images for the tiles you need.



Animated elements

We're going to have all the animated elements synchronized in the end, so it's best if you do this while mapping the first time. There are lots of different kinds of candles and torches, so I'll post the frames we're using for reference. If you come to a room with candles unlike the other rooms mapped so far, just choose a frame you like and stick with that.

<img src="http://revned.googlepages.com/animatedtiles.png" width="136" height="64" alt="User posted image" />

You shouldn't copy and paste these into your image, except the red door.



Parallax backgrounds

These are tricky to deal with. You probably won't want to do many of these. I won't go into details right now, but you need to separate the background from the foreground and keep them in separate files. Please leave them in separate files in case we need to change them later.



Other difficulties

There are several areas that we're going to have to figure out strategies for later, like the chapel with the 3D background. If you come to one of these rooms, either skip it for now or post in this thread for assistance.



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Original message:

If this meets with general approval, I'll have Jon move it to the Maps in Progress board.



This game is inherently difficult to map since there is no layer disabling in ePSXe (or any other PSX emulator). I suggest that we all pitch in and map a room or two each, and slowly progress towards a full map of this game. It would take a long time, but we don't have any deadlines. We would all have to make sure to use the same emulator with the same settings to ensure uniform palettes, as that got to be a problem in the last project. Anybody have any ideas for or against?



I'll write more later, I'm late for class...

Now that I've found a solution to my emulator troubles, I tried to force myself to map Link's Awakening. I mapped a couple rooms before getting very bored, so I decided I needed a new project. I've been meaning to map this game for a long time, and it interests me more at the moment than Link's Awakening. I've already finished the first stage. I'll post a preview tomorrow.