Messages

Dang. 50,000 maps. That's... a lot of maps! Congrats, Jon! And I'm happy to have contributed to that total, small as it is. Wish I could think of more games to map out... but oh well. I'm sure I'll think of something else someday.

Anyway, here's hoping we'll one day hit 100k maps!

Awesome work, as usual. Nice to finally see FF9 and MediEvil finished (as an aside, your maps encouraged me to give that game a try back when they were first posted, as they looked neat... and I had fun with it!), and the Parasite Eve maps are pretty dang sweet, too. Site report, though: the link to the map of the last stage in MediEvil is broken. Just figured I'd point that out. Hopefully Jon sees this.

Your maps never cease to amaze me. Now a(n admittedly modern homebrew) game from a computer older than I am! And I'm honestly surprised at how *good* it looks for something on such an old machine. What kind of game is it, anyway? It actually looks pretty neat.

Anyway, great work, as always!

(Also, yeah, I know I rarely post... but I do check the site every day for new maps, at least!)

Finished and submitted.

Let me tell you... that final dungeon was a gigantic pain to map out... and you'll all see *why* when it appears on the site. Good gourds.

Anyway. This was a fun project overall. Gave me a chance to revisit a game I liked from my childhood, and hopefully give this forgotten gem some much needed exposure!

Another quick update. I've finished all the overworld mapping! The jungle was confusing and boring. So many trees. So little *else*.

All I have left are a few dungeon, so I should have this project wrapped up and submitted by the end of the week, barring anything weird happening.

Making some very good progress. I've mapped out most of the main world, all of the swamp, and am working on the jungle... and I made a discovery that makes my job a lot easier. Seems the overworld maps are made up of 192x192 chunks, and that quite a few of these, especially in the swamp and jungle, are just infinitely repeating beyond a certain point. Also helped me to determine the main overworld's proper alignment. I might have this done in another week. Maybe two. Depending on how fast I work.

I've also taken period breaks from the overworld maps to do dungeon maps. I have most of the small side caves (there's one I've yet to find; might be in the one region I can't yet reach, for all I know), but some of the later ones are gigantic, so those will be a good time, heh.

[zanazac( at )protonmail.com]

I wouldn't mind helping you stitch the chunks together into a single image. The PC I have now is far and away much better equipped than the previous one (having 16x more RAM certainly helps), so whenever you're ready, you can send them to zanazac( at )protonmail.com and I'll put them together for ya!

Heh, thanks for the offer, but as it turns out, the overall map size is quite a bit smaller than I thought. I've narrowed the dimensions down to 6144x6144, which, while not exactly *tiny*, is still a good bit smaller than, say, that Ultima 6 map. I'm pretty sure my PC can handle it. But if not, I'll keep you in mind.

I actually finished one of the other two overworld maps (the swamp), which was much smaller and more easily done, and I suspect the third one (the jungle) won't be a huge deal, either. I'd say I'm probably about 70% finished with the main overworld, and most of the work after that will be in the dungeons, of which I've still only explored a few so far.

And yeah, it's a neat game. It's not the *greatest*, but it's honestly aged surprisingly well. My childhood memories of it were that it was a lot jankier than it ended up actually *being*. I'm enjoying it, at any rate, and look forward to showing off my work when it's done, and hopefully increasing awareness of this unsung little gem.

Just popping back in to say that I am hard at work on this, and I should be able to get it done without any assistance. It's slow going, but I'm making steady progress. Mostly, it's the main overworld map that's taking forever to assemble, but it'll get there eventually.

Got started on it properly last night. The dungeon maps are going smoothly, and won't be a problem, but the overworld maps may be an issue... I don't know if it's my antique image editor (Paint Shop Pro 5... yay for turn of the millennium software!) or just my aging PC in general, but I don't think I can do a *full* overworld (if an image's dimensions are too large, I get an "out of memory" error when I try to save). I've seen huge maps here before (e.g. FlyingArmor's massive 16k*16k Ultima 6 overworld maps), so I was wondering... I can rip smaller chunks of the map, and if I did, could someone else here with the means combine them into one large one? Thanks!

Oh hey. I'm bumping a thread that I haven't posted in since... jeez, 2016? It's been *that* long?

Well... obviously I never got around to doing the various things I mentioned here, and for that, I apologize, but... I've decided to take on a new project. Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun, for Genesis. A game I played a long time ago, as a kid, but never actually *finished*. It's kind of like... I dunno, "Ultima 6 meets Eye of the Beholder", I guess? A few large, sprawling overworld maps with turn-based battles, and first-person dungeons with action-based fighting. The overworld maps would be ripped directly, of course, whereas I'd map out the dungeons manually.

It's been ages since I played this game, so I'm definitely looking forward to this project. It's gonna be a bit of a hassle, since the Genesis emulator I'm using isn't *quite* as feature-friendly as the NES and SNES ones I've ripped maps with in the past, but it's very much doable.

Oh yeah, now that you mention it, I guess there are some other smaller maps you didn't do as well. (Like Tears' Point, the Sorceress Memorial, and the Lunatic Pandora Lab, for instance.) I guess just figured you were sticking to larger areas, and the Centra Excavation Site was the only one of size I noticed was missing. As for the Triple Triad map... that'd be neat. It's always kind of a pain trying to remember who has what rare card, so a handy map would certainly help.

Also, I love the Wild Arms 2 world map. I never realized just how *weird* that game's world looked. That is some very... interesting... geography.

I gotta say, I am *really* impressed with your PS1 maps. It's especially awesome to see someone finally tackling FF8 and 9, and your maps are very thorough and well-made. I'm curious, though, as to why the Centra Excavation Site, from the first Laguna scenario, wasn't included... I always thought that area looked really neat, and there's a lot of little things to do there in preparation for later in the game that'd be nice to have marked on a map. (And if that was included in another map and I just missed it, I apologize in advance. )

Beyond that, great job. I appreciate how you even separately mapped out areas that change, such as Balamb Garden, Dollet, and Winhill; very nice touch. Looking forward to seeing the rest of FF9; that's one of my favorite games ever!

Do you mean the one directly north of it, two tiles up?

Do you think it has to do with it being lined up with all the enterable areas?  Because none of the other pyramids are... except for the one you actually do have to enter before going to the castle.  I'm surprised it doesn't lead to a duplicate of that pyramid stage, actually...

Yeah, that's the one. Like you said, it's the only one that adheres to the "grid", so I assume that's why it works, to a degree. The rest of the decorative pyramids *not* on the "grid" just glitch up the game. (See below.)

Are there any other off-path areas you can enter using that cheat?

You can "enter" quite a few map objects, some of which you normally couldn't in a normal game, such as the little water holes, the dancing flowers on the world 4 map, and the icebergs on the world 6 map... though most of them either freeze the game, lead to a glitched stage that usually kills you instantly or *also* freezes the game, or, and most bizarrely, lead to a weird "stage" that attempts to use the world map's graphics, but are horribly glitched. You can't do anything in them.

I tested every "enterable" area a long time ago, and *did* find a few that actually *led* somewhere (I recall one of the icebergs in world 6 led to a duplicate of... I think it was 6-8?, and another one led to a hammer bros. stage), though I can't recall the specifics.

Also, as an aside... if you use a Game Genie code that forces you to automatically enter levels, the START panel on world 1, oddly enough, leads to an unused stage.

This is quite early, and you probably can't normally get a Hammer before this if memory serves.  But if you hacked the game or used a Game Genie code or something to get a Hammer here, could you break it to skip both 1-5 and 1-6?

This is an old post, but... well, I don't come to the forums very often, so I just saw it. Despite that it very much looks breakable, no, it isn't. While this isn't possible to try in the NES version without cheats, you *can* go back to World 1 in the All-Stars and Advance versions with a hammer, and... still, no. There are actually multiple types of rocks in the data, two that break and reveal horizontal and vertical paths, respectively, and a couple others that are just decoration, which is what this one is. I assume the devs figured it'd be impossible to get here with a hammer, didn't make it breakable, then just forgot about the possibility to do so in later versions.

Bonus fun fact: If you were to use a "move anywhere on the map" cheat to access the pyramid on the first screen of the world 2 map, just above the first Toad house, you'd find it's... a duplicate of said Toad's house. Trying to enter the others on the map just glitches the game.

Question about the Elw Dimension map... I've wondered for *years* if those two side islands were actually present on the map, and I'm curious as to whether what's shown in your map is all that's actually there, or if that's just all you were able to get without any sort of tools. If it's the latter, I guess some sort of "overworld walk through walls" code would be in order...

Still, nice to finally see "actual game graphics" maps for Filgaia. I'm genuinely surprised none existed until now. Good job! Heck, all of your PS1 maps are pretty dang amazing! Looking forward to seeing more of them in the future!