Messages

121

Map Requests / Re: Ultima and Final Fantasy

« on: July 03, 2014, 01:43:39 pm »

Holy Crap! FF7!  Flying Armor, how are you doing this?

Well, I'll be using my usual screen shot method and any codes that help with capturing every corner of every area. That's what I did with my No. 1 Reactor map. For more complicated areas, I won't have a clue until I get to those.

122

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: July 03, 2014, 01:34:08 pm »

Heeey~ I'm back.

As Jon has mentioned in another thread, I've mapped out the first area in Final Fantasy VII (PSX).

It was mainly an experiment to see if I could pull off mapping the No. 1 Reactor fully, and luckily I was able to. Don't expect to see any more FF7 maps any time soon though. I want to play through the game at least once before doing that.

Looking back on it now, there are some things I'll need to revise, such as including icons in item and materia labels. I'm not sure if I should add another instance of the elevator and have a arrow connecting them to make it clearer that the elevator travels between two places. Any and all feedback is welcome!

Having played the game for a couple of hours last night, I noticed some areas will be tricky to capture accurately, such as areas with parallax backgrounds. It's a shame you can't simply disable/enable layers with a single keystroke with PlayStation games. I'll probably need to call upon those with more experience dealing with PSX games for help whenever I run into new roadblocks, so I hope you guys can help me out when that time comes.

BumFengShui pointed me to a program (7mimic) that will make things a thousand times easier. Thanks so much! Areas with parallax backgrounds will still be a problem though, especially since the backgrounds aren't repeatable patterns. I might either forget about adding the backgrounds altogether, or resize them so they take up more space across a scene.

123

Map Gab / Re: Attention Mappers

« on: June 24, 2014, 05:39:42 pm »

Sure, I don't mind my maps being over at that site as well.

124

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: March 12, 2014, 08:03:37 pm »

If no one else decides to work on it, I'll probably eventually find myself working on it some day. Ah, thanks so much! Your kind words are definitely appreciated.

Oh God, the Lete River was a pain in the ass to map. It was incidentally the last map I finished when I was wrapping up Final Fantasy VI, simply because it was so frustrating to work on. It basically took a ton of cheat codes to capture all the square footage that you see there. Tropicon helped me with freezing most of the water animations, and I managed to find some codes that allowed me to shift the scene the player would see when entering an area, so I could get the out-of-reach bits that you would never see when traveling down that river.

Nevertheless, the annoying thing was that I couldn't stop the raft from continuing on its course, so I was pretty much abusing the hell out of the Increase Frame function in ZSNES just so I could make sure the rapids animations matched up between screen shots. And even with all that, I still had inconsistencies in certain areas with colours changing for unknown reasons, but at that time I couldn't have cared less, I just wanted the blasted thing over and done with!

I did think about making a complimentary map that would split the river up into several parts (which would include the caverns) that would be reflective of the flow the river takes, but I never got around to doing that.

125

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: March 12, 2014, 03:12:35 pm »

Yesterday I managed to finish off the rest of the maps for Final Fantasy II (U), so now this double project is finally done! And with that, I think I'll take a break from mapping for a while. While mapping is fun and all, I've got a lot work to do with regards to paintings and comics, so I want to devote as much time as I can to those things.

When I do get back into mapping, I'd like to take on GD Leen/Gadyurin for the Super NES. I'm in the middle of playing it right now and it's been a blast thus far. It looks like it will be pretty straightforward to map out, though without a walk-through-walls code, some of the overworld areas will be tough to map completely, but I'll worry over that when that time comes.

126

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: March 08, 2014, 10:27:26 pm »

From what I've seen, there aren't any major changes like extra rooms or things like that, mainly cosmetic changes such as the things you mentioned and others. The most drastic change seems to be with the Town of Baron where the one corner is completely rearranged to accommodate the Beginner's Hall at the entrance to the town. There was also a "Beginner's Hall" or sorts in the Japanese version, but it was far smaller in scale and out of the way in the basement of the Serpent's Road (or rather, Devil's Road).

As far as the dungeons are concerned, none have been rearranged, but there are some that exhibit structural changes to make them easier to navigate around. I'm mainly referring to the tower areas that had overhead beams (for lack of a better term) that arched across pathways. These were removed from the North American version to make where you can go less ambiguous. I don't have all of them done right now, but you can check the Tower of Zot maps side by side to see what I'm talking about.

From what I can tell, all the secret passages in FF2(U) were in FF4. It's actually thanks to FF2's visible secret passageways that I was able to locate the few I missed in the Japanese maps. There are no visible cues for the one in the Antlion's Nest for example, so finding that one would've been a stroke of luck.

127

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: March 06, 2014, 10:53:36 pm »

A li'l update with mapping Final Fantasy II (U). I'm a little over halfway done so far; I'm up to Agart, just before descending into the underworld. It looks like I just may have the rest ready by this weekend.

A funny thing I found when re-mapping the Sylvan Cave was a hidden passageway that I missed in the corresponding Japanese version map. With most of the other caverns in the game, the hidden passageways aren't all that obvious, but in the Sylvan Cave, they just smack you in the face! Come on Squaresoft, you could've made it at least a little challenging, hmm? On the bright side, it did highlight an error with my map, so I guess it's a good thing?


Also, one thing in regards to translations for the items in the Japanese maps. I'm not sure how many of you noticed, but there was an item that recurred a lot in many areas named 銅の砂時計 which I at first translated to "Copper Hourglass". When I was working on these maps, I would often consult what the official translations of more recent iterations of the game had named things, and for this item it ended up being "Bronze Hourglass".

I at first thought: "Bronze?! But it clearly says copper! 銅 isn't bronze! If it was bronze, it'd be 青銅!"

But later on in the game, I came across other hourglasses, these times in the Silver and Gold varieties, so I ended up recognizing the pattern being presented. "Okay I guess Bronze would make sense here..." I thought. To verify this, I ended up going to a Japanese Wikipedia page that had a list of all the countries that won medals in the Olympics, broken down in various ways, and lo and behold! they use the character 銅 for the Bronze categories. So I conceded defeat and ended up changing my translations in this case.

But one thing that's no secret is that the Japanese love abbreviating and shortening down words. So this may just be one of those instances. It certainly looks more elegant to have one character represent each medal rather than have one stand out with two characters. Heck, even the word hentai (変態), a very well known word among Japanese aficionados, is an abbreviation of the term hentai seiyoku (変態性欲) meaning "abnormal sexuality; sexual perversion". 変態 otherwise normally means "transformation; metamorphosis", but you certainly wouldn't get that impression from listening to anime with girls screaming this word left and right.

128

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: March 02, 2014, 12:27:24 am »

Just finished working on the Lunar Subterranean Valley a little bit ago, so that means I'm done mapping Final Fantasy IV (J). Those last dungeons are always a pain to map...

So with the Japanese version out of the way, I'll be able to start on the North American one fairly soon.

129

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: February 08, 2014, 08:56:23 pm »

Alright, now that mapping Dragon Quest I & II is all done with, onto another project!

Although I had only intended to work with the Japanese version, I talked with Jon yesterday and he insisted I also work on the North American version as well. So it looks like I'll have my hands full with Final Fantasy IV (SNES) and its English counterpart for the next little while.

As far as progress goes, I'm already about three quarters of the way done with the raw mapping, so it won't be long before you start seeing them. I'll go ahead and attach a few examples of the approach I'll be taking (at least as far as the Japanese ones are concerned).

I decided to use a legend for the items in chests and pots, etc. like I did with Final Fantasy VI. It will include the Japanese name, then its translation into English, like so:

01 ポーション　Potion
02 きんのはり Golden Needle
03　フェニックスのお Phoenix Down
04 ... etc.

In terms of order of release, I'll be starting with the Japanese versions, then afterwards work upon the North American ones, tweaking them and/or redoing them to reflect the changes that were made when the game crossed the Pacific Ocean.

There are quite a number of changes between both versions such as: rearranging sections of towns, tweaking of colour palettes, restructuring certain features in dungeons, being able to see the hidden passageways, changing the appearances of treasure chests/save points, and so on. I thought it would be interesting for people to compare both versions and see these changes first hand.

Jon brought up the idea of toggling between both versions of each map back and forth and witnessing where the changes occur, and that would work for many of the maps where everything will be in the exact same place, but for those that have buildings added in or taken away, the toggling won't end up being quite as clean as one would like, but it'd still show more or less some of the more drastic changes that were made.

Anyway, that's all for now!

130

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: January 25, 2014, 03:02:33 pm »

These past few days I finally got around to finishing off my revisions for the Paladin's Quest maps. Now they're all uniform in style, and include many item labels that weren't present in the original maps. I think I covered all the areas that have items to discover, so it's probably safe to say this map set is now truly complete.

As for Dragon Quest II, I got about two or three areas left to map, so once those are done, that project will be complete as well.

131

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: January 05, 2014, 05:10:39 pm »

I finished mapping Dragon Quest I a few days ago, and since I just finished playing Dragon Quest II yesterday, my attention has shifted to that. I've found this game compilation to be surprisingly easy to map; a nice break from the frustrating juggernaut that was Lennus II! If things go well, I should be done with it fairly soon.

132

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: December 15, 2013, 03:01:08 pm »

So I finished mapping Dragon Quest V a little while ago. So while I'm in the Dragon Quest mood, I thought I'd tackle Dragon Quest I & II on the SNES. I just finished playing the first game yesterday, and I'm somewhere in the middle of the second.

I don't know about anyone else, but I feel that the gameplay progresses so much more quickly with the SNES iterations as opposed to the original NES ones. When I had played the first Dragon Quest on the NES for example, the game just felt like it dragged on forever and ever. But with the SNES version, I was done in about 15 hours over a three day period.

Besides that, I've got an "undercover" project I'm working on at the moment. I don't want to disclose it just yet, but once I've got a fair number of maps done for it, I'll make an announcement here.

133

Maps Of The Month / Re: 2013/12: Lennus II: Fuuin no Shito (J) (Super NES) - FlyingArmor

« on: December 03, 2013, 03:57:18 pm »

Thanks so much. It looks like all the completed map sets I've submitted to the site have received this honour now.

I'd agree with this game being a giant pain in the neck to map. All of the working PSD files for these maps amount to well over 1 GB. I also had to rely heavily upon BGMapper for a lot of the maps, seeing as how any area that utilized a transparency for water or whatnot shared the same layer as all the scenery you can walk behind (the top halves of trees, buildings, etc). This caused that scenery to have a slightly different palette than what it would normally be, so having to capture those parts separately was a bit of a pain. But in the end they look all the better for it.

I also wasn't exactly planning on mapping this game to completion this year. I think it started when I came across a walk-through-walls code someplace and things just happened to take off from there.

134

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: November 15, 2013, 08:29:02 pm »

Now that one major RPG mapping project is over and done with, I'm moving on to another! Dragon Quest V (SFC) will be my next project. I have nearly all of the mapping done for it, having done most of it late last year.

I had said that I was going to label them with the Japanese names rather than the English ones, but I changed my mind on that. Having tried labelling the maps in English, I have to say that they don't look all that bad. Even when it comes to the longer item name labels, they're not nearly as obtrusive as I had thought they would be. There will be some maps where I will need to resort to using a treasure legend (due to multiple chests being clustered together), but for the most part that shouldn't be a common occurrence.

If all goes well, I should be able to get most if not all of the maps done before the end of this month.

135

Maps In Progress / Re: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

« on: October 24, 2013, 04:13:43 pm »

I'm happy to announce that I am finally finished with mapping Lennus II. The remaining maps should be up on the site whenever it pleases Jon to do so.

Now, whether or not this is a complete map set, I am not completely sure since the in-game maps seem to indicate other areas existing on certain islands in Eltz and Lennus (the ring of mountains in the southwest corner of Eltz, for example, seem especially suspicious). Try as I may however, there seems to be nothing there. I surmise that other areas were planned to exist, but were cut out altogether due to impending deadlines, but if anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to know.