Topics

46

Maps In Progress / TerraEsperZ's thread for Corrected and No Longer Missing maps

« on: March 10, 2011, 09:42:35 pm »

Taking a hint from Peardian, I've decided to start a generic thread for maps that wouldn't justify their own threads, most of which should consist of maps I've corrected or added to projects that were considered completed until I realized they weren't. I won't bother to include links, so consider every map mentioned here to have been submitted to JonLeung and thus should appear with the next site update.

Tonight, after reading people talking about the bonus stages in Nemesis (Game Boy), I decided to find out where they were located and both mapped them out in addition to indicating their locations on the regular maps. I submitted all the maps of the game again since PNGGauntlet managed to squeeze out a few kB out the other maps. Otherwise this is what's new:

Nemesis (GB):
-Stage 2 (Updated)
-Bonus Stage 1 (New)
-Stage 4 (Updated)
-Bonus Stage 2 (New)

47

VGMaps Social Board / ReBoot: The Definitive Mainframe Edition (Upcoming DVD)

« on: January 16, 2011, 10:07:12 pm »

It's finally coming out! After almost a decade and a half of waiting, ReBoot's first two seasons are coming out (both by themselves and as part of the complete series collection) on DVD this March! This is also good news for those who already have seasons 3 and 4 and find double-dipping a horrible concept.

I don't know if anyone here cares about this aside from me and JonLeung, but this finally completes my list for TV shows I wanted to see coming on DVD, the other being the complete Daria collection released earlier this year (but with all the music missing, boo). I have a friend who used to love what little he saw of the first season but I could never get him interested in the latter, darker stuff. Maybe I'll finally be able to get him interested enough that once we get to that part, he'll be too hooked to stop watching .

48

VGMaps Social Board / MSPaint Adventures: Homestuck

« on: November 27, 2010, 10:17:45 pm »

Homestuck

We had a thread a year ago about MSPaint Adventures' previous main comic, Problem Sleuth, but I figured a new thread was warranted.

Has anyone been following it? I know I'm going to sound like a giggling fanboy, but I've been loving every single update of it!!! It is easily my favourite webcomic (of sorts) of all time. The fact that it's also based on old adventure games like Problem Sleuth was is a nice bonus, but the author has been slowly getting away from that and it's not entirely a bad thing. It has become more cinematic as a result, and the various animations with music have been, for the most part, getting better and more epic as time goes by.

Heck, I've bought every soundtrack album they've released for it (8 so far!) and the only thing I'm not happy with is the fact that aside from the flash animations, there's no real way to view it offline.


In any case, I started this thread because a new flash animation has been released today about Jade, the fourth kid's entry into the medium and things are getting even more epic that I expected. Let's just say that 'Jackspers Noirlecrow' just got his final prototyping and we finally get a good glimpse of what or who destroyed the Trolls' version of Derse and Prospit...

Now, let's all talk about how this comic rocks  

49

Maps In Progress / Castlevania: Dawn Of Sorrow (DS)

« on: November 09, 2010, 09:29:43 pm »

So yeah, I'm tackling this game; seemed fair to map the sequel of the game that lead to my best work so far.

Don't expect this to be finished anytime soon, since the mapping process is very slow and tedious on account of No$gba not being helpful in saving tilesets and VRAM contents and the game itself mostly not using the DS layers, relying instead on simply displaying tiles as needed (kinda like with Symphony Of The Night).

But I'm enjoying the challenge, and doubly so since I haven't played the game before. And to make sure I don't burn myself along the way, I'll take small pauses along the way to finish those maps that are close to completion that I've been neglecting lately (Bucky O'Hare and Solstice mainly).

Hopefully this will tide you in the mean time

The Lost Village:


* Added 29/12/10 *
Wizardry Lab:


* Added 14/07/12 *
Demon Guest House:


* Added 14/07/12 *
Garden of Madness:


* Added 22/07/12 *
The Dark Chapel:


* Added 27/07/12 *
Condemned Tower:


* Added 10/08/12 *
Cursed Clock Tower:


Total Progression for Castle:

50

Mapping Tips/Guides / 3D Modeling Question...

« on: October 27, 2010, 08:59:34 pm »

Okay, I'm not going to say much about why I need this but trust me, it's for a good cause (eventually).

Let's just say that I needed to rip a simple 3D model and after hours of trying with various capture software, all I managed to obtain is an OBJ file containing all the vertices of the model and nothing else. No polygons at all. As for the textures, I managed to get them in the form of three 128 x 128 pixels images and thanks to screenshots, I should mostly be able to figure out where they belong.

The problem is that I haven't found any program allowing me to manipulate the vertices to recreate the original polygons. All the viewers so far as well as Cinema 4D don't display anything at all. If I could at least *see* the damn vertices I could then link them to recreate the models. I'd have to learn how to do all these things, true, but it beats the alternative which I've been doing since yesterday, namely editing the OBJ file by hand, creating temporary polygons from vertices and viewing the result in Quick 3D Viewer to determine which one goes where and *then* using that to create the real polygons.

Total number of polygons reassembled so far: 30 (in 4 hours).

There *has* to be a better alternative... 

51

VGMaps Social Board / Leaving for France tonight ;D

« on: September 23, 2010, 11:46:37 pm »

I know I'm bragging and I'm sorry if anyone feels I'm rubbing it in their face, but I feel I've more than earned my vacation time this year! Summer has been hell at work where I repair and service office equipment like printers, PCs, scanners and the like. There was more work to do, the problems encountered were stranger and less known, we received more D.O.A. parts than ever before (a ratio of 2 out of 3 actually, which is *insane*) and more co-workers on vacation at the same time leaving me alone to handle the whole city for two whole weeks.

Well now it's over and good riddance! Let the others handle all the crap for once (they're all great people and I don't wish them anything bad, but I figured it's their turn) while I'm relaxing on the other side of the world. And hopefully, I'll manage to find the "History of Nintendo' books while over there.

Oh and JonLeung, know that I've been working on Bucky O'Hare again this week. I should be good to finish it in my third vacation week once I'm back home.

52

VGMaps Social Board / Is there a painless way to correctly tag a massive library of messy MP3s?

« on: September 09, 2010, 07:42:57 pm »

Let's just say that after a year of thinking about buying an MP3 player, I finally broke down and bought an iPod Classic 160 Go. I'm not an Apple fan by any mean, but I figured that it was relatively cheap for the storage space, and I could get double the warranty time by buying where I did with my mother's credit card.

My biggest fear was actually having to deal with iTunes, as being a long time Windows user, I'm used to micromanaging my files instead of letting programs handle everything themselves. How would an idiot-proof program mesh with a very hands-on user? Not very well at all it turns out. I simply have way too many music files that aren't tagged properly so when I tried adding everything I had in iTunes, the resulting mess was completely unusable.

I'm now faced with having to tag close to 10 000 files (in addition to converting all the files that my iPod will not read like OGG, WV and WMA, thank you very much Apple) and from reading around the net, the whole process feels anything but straightforward. I'd love it if I could just start a program that would scan all my files and automatically and accurately tag everything following some universal standards but the few programs I tried were pretty bad when left alone to tag even a simple album.

Now granted, I own a lot of illegal music though in my defense, I've bought in MP3 or CD form everything that could be at a reasonable price; but since a large part of my collection is made of video game soundtracks that are for the most part expensive imports, yeah I've downloaded a lot of stuff.

Anyway, this leads me to my main point, which is that I need help for a few things:

1) First, does anyone know of a program that makes tagging MP3 easy if not automatically? And by tag I obviously mean ID3 tag.

2) Is there some sort of standard for tagging and naming the files? Most programs, if told to manage the files themselves will name the files with the track number and name, and place them in a directory with the album name which is itself in a directory with the artist name. But what do I do with soundtracks where there are more than one artist, or where there is only one but being less important than the album I *don't* want it to be placed in a folder with the artist's name? And how do I best use the Genre tag if I want to keep track of sub-genres like a "Soundtrack" which is "Techno" style?

I'm literally completely lost as I usually am when faced with complex and intricate information processes (like whenever I have to fill a government form or insurance claim which usually makes me want to scream in frustration because everything is needlessly ambiguous). As it is, my iPod is useless because there's very little music I can put on it without having to do lots of editing.

VGMaps posters, I need you

53

Map Gab / Solstice (NES) *Abandoned*

« on: August 23, 2010, 09:04:08 pm »

This is another project of mine, but one that has a much better chance of being finished given how I've already mapped about half of the game. Since the whole game is basically one huge interconnected map, I've decided to separate the maps by overall location and gave them the official names from the manual. The name of the third map is still tentative since the manual wasn't really that clear about the whole "gardens" thing. Anyway, I went to great lengths to make sure that all the doors are perfectly aligned between rooms, which meant a lot of moving stuff around until everything lined up right.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome!

Caves of the Doomed Souls:


Fortress of Kastlerock:


Gardens of Pain & Blood Gardens:


I was planning on making one huge map for the finished product, but I'm still not sure how practical it will be given the fact that there are several instances of rooms one over another, as well as the Caves of the Doomed Souls being located under everything else. Bah, that's a problem better left for later, or else I might seize t as the perfect excuse *not* to work on this further

54

Maps In Progress / Max Payne (GBA)

« on: August 23, 2010, 08:44:49 pm »

It's been a while since I've posted anything, which is understandable given my habit of starting and dropping projects on a whim. So take this one as a big "maybe", a Proof of Concept if you will. Feel free to offer suggestions or comments on the layout of the rooms or the general presentation of the map. I haven't included any of the enemies despite wanting to since they're all 3D models, most of which start moving or rotating to face you well before they're even visible on screen. I've come up with a number of codes to move the player around to capture some unreachable areas but it remains to be seen if that will work for all the maps, and there are way too many variables to even try to come up with codes to freeze the enemies.

I've tried to keep the connections between the various rooms accurate in terms of direction, but for some that would have meant moving rooms *way* too far so I opted to use the accurate direction if possible, or a straight horizontal/vertical one if not.

Part 1: Roscoe Street Station


Part 1: Live From The Crime Scene

55

VGMaps Social Board / Happy Holidays or Whatever You Want To Celebrate Y'All!

« on: December 23, 2009, 08:07:41 am »

Hey everyone! I know I haven't been around much lately but, well, I just had to take a break from all this obsessive mapping and recharge my mental batteries. Let's just say my parents' divorce ended up going through more drama than my sister and I anticipated. Nothing too dramatic thankfully, but the last few months have been, shall we say, *unnerving*.

But as they say, "it's the season to be jolly" and since everything seems to have mostly worked itself out in time for the holidays, I wanted to wish you guys the best "whatever you're having" and that hopefully you have good reasons to celebrate and be with the people you care about. I'm not much of a writer, so that's as eloquent as I can be right now.

So cheers and have fun !

56

Map Gab / The Immortal (NES)

« on: September 15, 2009, 09:37:04 pm »

Another project started with so many remaining uncompleted, but since I actually took time searching/hacking memory values to help me, I don't intend on dropping this until I'm finished.

...

Yeah, I don't fault anyone for doubting me.

Anyway, I was looking through scans of my first real Nintendo Power issue and saw that old game called "The Immortal" which I never actually played. So I got curious and cautiously tried mapping a few rooms and tried to assemble them together to see if it would work or if the game coders had been smoking crack again while designing the levels. Surprisingly, the rooms fit perfectly despite the isometric perspective. So I decided to give it a try.

The game, for those who never played it, is basically a sort of dungeon crawler with involved one-on-one combat where you have to time both your sword swings and your dodging and try not to tire yourself too much. There are a number of simple puzzles and many, *many* deadly traps everywhere, most of them hidden.

Since the perspective is isometric, there is a section of the floor in every room that is hidden by the southern wall, which coincidently usually contains traps; finding every trap so far took some time.

Another thing that annoyed me is how some enemies will start running toward you as soon as you enter the room even if they are off-screen so it was seemingly impossible to find out their starting position. However, enemies would not reset to their starting position if you came back to their room, so it meant that their position would remain in memory for the duration of the level. That's when I decided to do some memory searching.

Using FCEUX's memory search functions, I manage to isolate a range of addresses for the horizontal and vertical coordinates of moving entities relative to their current room. Since there are several ranges of values always in the same order (all the horizontal positions, all the verticals, etc), they're probably memory arrays:

-0698h to 06A2h: Contain the horizontal positions, starting with the player's and then the various other entities (troll, goblin, will o' the wisp, bat, etc)
-06A3h to 06ADh: Contain the vertical positions
-06CFh to 06D9h: I don't know what the values represent, but freeze the value and the entity will no longer exhibit sprite animation
-06E5h to 06EFh: I don't know what it represents either, but freeze it and the entity will no longer react to your position (i.e. turn to face you)

By identifying which addresses represented which entity on each level and freezing the necessary values, I could ensure that after entering a room, every enemy would be completely frozen as if I wasn't even there. That felt extremely satisfying for my desire to be as accurate as possible.

I'm still undecided on how to handle rooms joined by ladders (link with arrows, ladder tiles, letters, numbers?), so don't be too hard when looking at the following previews... Also, these are the ones with all the secrets (traps, triggers, ladders, etc) revealed. I'm actually considering posting finished maps both with everything hidden and revealed.

Level 1:


Level 2:


Level 3:


God I love the new board! It's so much *easier* to use 

57

VGMaps Social Board / Whoa! Scary vision thing after blowing my nose...

« on: July 27, 2009, 09:00:44 pm »

The last fifteen minutes have been really strange and scary, for the reason mentioned in the thread title. I'm somewhat allergic to dust, pollen and cat hair, and sometimes I'll start sneezing or having a stuffy nose even though I was perfectly fine minutes before.



Anyway. I had to blow my nose several times with some force to clear things up and stop sneezing, but it was followed with an episode of weird vision troubles.



At first, I noticed a few vague blurry spots in the center of my vision, which didn't seem anymore serious than when you look at a bright light which leaves you seeing a sort of echo of it for a little while. But then I started seeing more spots, which then grew until I could determine that it was actually a ring-shaped region expanding outward which was squiggly/blinking. The weirdest thing is that the center where the first spots were became clear, which is why I stopped panicking and just waited for the circular "wave" to dissipate.



Has anyone ever experienced something like this? I've seen stars plenty of time after intensive sneezing due to allergies, but never something like that. Hopefully it wasn't something like my retina(s) detaching, but who knows? I have a co-worker who suffered that after a head impact, and he saw blinking filaments on his peripheral vision for a very long time.



---

Current project: Not sure yet



Upcoming project: Not sure yet either

58

Mapping Tips/Guides / *gasp* I just realized why I never finish most of my maps!

« on: July 02, 2009, 11:12:45 am »

I know it sounds weird said like that, but it suddenly became clear to me yesterday why I start so many mapping project but finish so few (heck, Aria Of Sorrow as been sitting on my hard drive for weeks with only the final layout and lettering left to do).



I love the process of mapping. That is, I love playing a game with the specific intent of playing through every areas, trying to find every secret, and assembling a map to help me better understand the spatial relationship between them all. I love finding out if, say, the interior of a vehicle or building matches with its exterior.



Of course, there's a big aesthetic aspect to it all which tends to guide which game I'm interested in, but the actual discovery and assembly is what I love doing most.



There's also a trill in the challenges involved with certain maps that have multiple scrolling layers, transparencies, moving parts, special programming effects, etc. That can be really stimulating as you struggle to find a way to tile a seemingly untilable parallax background, or find the best way to represent a stage with dynamic geography.



But for me, the fun all comes crashing down when the actual assembly is done and the "polishing" phase begins. There's nothing I find more tedious in this hobby than trying to come up with the best map layout, deciding which fonts to use and wasting time trying to extract it, spending hours placing enemies and moving objects, harmonizing colors that use palette cycling effects, wondering what to caption and how, making a map key, etc.



All the extra work is also why I don't want to make gameplay maps. Sometimes, a game can be so complex that finding everything to put it on a map just turns me off of the game completely. That reason is why two other projects of mine have stalled for a long time. The first, Clock Tower (SNES), is because of several cases of randomness in terms of puzzles and item locations which I would have loved to include. The second,S.O.S.(SNES) (a game about a sinking ship taking place during a real-time hour), includes about 70 people you can save in various ways (or can't), depending on your starting character (out of 4) with some appearing or changing status after 20 or 40 minutes with no visible clock available. I don't even want to know how many times I'd have to go through the game to figure out everything and put it all on a map. As it is, I'll probably post a simple geographical map of the ship and not include any of the passengers because of the headache.



You see what I mean by tedious? That's why some maps of mine have been sitting uncompleted for so long. Heck, I was practically done with Heart Of The Alien, the Sega CD sequel to Out Of This World, but I lost interest when deciding how to separate the maps since there are no clear stage delimitation in-game. That's why Aria Of Sorrow has been sitting untouched for weeks, and that one is farther on that most, since I spent hours making an elaborate border for the playable areas and putting together a map key with colors to differentiate between items, bosses, souls, etc. But when came time to settle on the font to use to label the map and a few areas that are maze-like, my mind about just crashed. This wasn't fun or interesting anymore; it was just tedious and incredibly boring (don't worry though, as the realization described in this post has motivated me to force myself into at least finishing this one ASAP).



I also realized that my dad is the same way. He's a big fan of trains and an accomplished railroad modeler, and he's built a number of large layouts when I was a kid. But the only one he ever completely finished was the first one I remember, which took up half our basement when I was four years old. It was covered in buildings, little people and everything was detailed and painted. But afterward, he'd often make plans and get the main part done, that is the wood framework, the mountains and tunnels were shaped with cardboard and often a coating of plaster was applied, all the rails and electrical connections were installed. Then he'd lose interest, run the trains on it for a while and eventually he'd tear it all down, only to start another one a few months later.



See, my dad has always been a great handyman. In fact, he's the exact opposite of the people you can see on Canada's Worst Handyman on TV. He loves building and fixing stuff, but he has no patience for the finishing touches. It's neither challenging nor fun for him, and I think I'm somewhat the same way with game mapping.



I don't know if finally putting my finger on my main problem will help me in the future, but I hope so.



Does anyone else feel similar?



---

Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)



Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)

59

VGMaps Social Board / Things are constantly changing, as they are wont to

« on: June 10, 2009, 01:22:36 am »

Things have been moving in my life recently or rather, they've been moving all around me. I'm not directly being affected, and yet I feel the effects everyday.



Several months ago, one of my uncle on my father's side died after fighting the effects of failing kidneys for several years, including dialysis, an almost-failed kidney transplant and several long-term infections that finally managed to get the best of him. Now, I love all six of my uncles, but he was still the funniest and most social one, so his passing in his mid-forties affected me and the rest of the family quite a bit.



Also, several months ago (already!?), my parents finally decided to get a divorce, something that my sister and I felt was probably a decade overdue. A lot of reasons are involved of course, chief among them the fact that my dad always resented being "dominated" by my mother who had a much stronger character than him (always being berated over trivial things, being made to be an idiot in front of people, etc). It probably sounds worse than it really was said like that (you can't summarize a marriage of 30 years in one or two sentences after all, and I do know that my mother has always had affection for him), but it was still bad enough that I grew up with a very skewed image of my father. It took me until college to really start re-evaluating both my place in the family (by standing up for myself to my mom for example) and the true character of both parents.



But the turning point was when, a few years ago, my mom had job burnout, and since she was very weak emotionally, my dad took care of her (because he felt affection for her too) but also took the dominant position during her recovery. So the role got reversed for a few years and, well, afterward they both stood up to one another and that created friction over the tiniest of issues during trips, family celebrations, etc.



The whole thing happened quite civilly actually; things were separated evenly, the house was sold, they both agreed that they could still hang with the same friends despite the separation (which was important for my mom since, having lost her father in her late teens, she practically adopted her step-father as her own) and last week they both moved out.



I have to say that having lived in the same house from birth up to the start of college, I find it sad that I'll never go back there again. In fact, the whole things makes me sad more out of nostalgia than anything else. You know, the idea of a united family, of a house that would pass from parents to children, of spending weekends in my childhood village, of family celebrations, etc.



I'm still not sure how things are going to go from here; trivial things really, but still, how are things like Christmas going to be handled? And on my part at least, there's also the fact that I'm really a lot closer to my mom than my dad, mostly for the reasons explained above. By the time I realized I was always siding blindly with my mom against him, it had become very difficult to really connect together, which wasn't helped by the fact that my dad is quite emotionally distant (I used to be like him too in fact). I get along with him very well, but we don't have nearly the same chemistry, interests and view of the world. With my mom, I can be totally honest on anything since we think alike and aren't afraid of saying what we really think and feel. With my dad, it's much harder to get his real feelings on things, especially if it puts him in a position of weakness. There's a lot of efforts still to be made to improve our relationship.



Anyway, I just needed to vent a bit, or rather, to organize my thoughts and feelings on the whole thing. Big changes tend to destabilize me quite a bit if I'm not prepared for them, but fortunately I usually manage to bring myself around pretty quickly these days.



---

Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)



Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)

60

Map Gab / Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)

« on: May 06, 2009, 09:26:11 pm »

People like JonLeung and Revned know I've trying to fully map a GBA Castlevania for a very long time. In fact, mapping all three of them was my goal back when I first started mapping but I didn't have the skill or attention span to do it. Since then, Circle Of The Moon and Harmony Of Dissonance have been mapped by other people, and soon I'll complete that holy triumvirate with maps for Aria Of Sorrow.



This is why I've been mostly absent from the board for the last two months:







As you can somewhat see despite the size and JPG-induced blur, it also includes all the bosses and items (and they're labeled too!).



The final, full size map hasn't been fully assembled yet (I'm still mapping the boss rush mode and making my way to include the Hard Mode items), but I'm working on it, so expect the real thing sometimes next week.



---

Current projects: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA), 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)