Author Topic: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)  (Read 109750 times)

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Offline TerraEsperZ

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #15 on: July 04, 2009, 12:29:43 am »
I think I've earned a good night's sleep, since I've been working on these all evening. Let's hope PNGGauntlet can get through both during the night but I doubt it...



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Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)



Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)

Offline Zeric

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #16 on: July 04, 2009, 04:40:50 am »
That's some amazing work you have done there Terra, looks a thousends times better then I would have done it.



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Current Projects: None, I have stopped mapping since a year ago.

Current Projects: Akumajo Dracula (X6800 - Final Stage) Mega Man X2 (SNES Sigma 2)

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GBA - 83%)


Offline Maxim

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #17 on: July 04, 2009, 01:10:31 pm »
PNGGauntlet is kind of silly. It tries a bunch of commandline parameters when 99% of the time you get the best results with /c5 /f0 or /c3 /f0. Even with that, you need a very fast computer to complete a map that large in a reasonable time.



If it's totally insane on your PC then I can give it a go - I have a US$2000 CPU in my work computer.

Offline TerraEsperZ

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #18 on: July 04, 2009, 03:52:52 pm »
It finished during the last hour actually (thanks for the offer though), and managed to reduce it to 92.1% of its original size. It still won't fit ImageShack or Hotmail's file size limits, but it's better than nothing.



And Zeric, considering the amazing work you usually put out (and the quantity too when you're on a roll), you really shouldn't short-change yourself like that. Too bad you've stopped mapping, but I'm sure there's a good reason for that.



Honestly, I'm 99% happy with the final result and I think I can safely say this is the project I'm the most proud of.



That missing last 1% is because I had to "fudge" certain transparent parts so they don't look exactly like they do in-game. In short, it's impossible to reproduce how the GBA handles transparencies. That meant problems with two parts of the game:



1) Transparent fog swaying in a wavy pattern over a cellar room in the Dance Hall. To reproduce the real colors, I basically took screenshots of the fog over the room in each of its 16 positions, and used single lines from each one that were in the same offset position. In short, I transformed the wavy fog into straight fog.



2) Transparent waterfalls and water surfaces over the parallax background. Transparencies over the foreground aren't a problem since you can map them as is, but the rest, I had to be creative. Thankfully, the water layer uses a single shade of blue for everything that's under the water surface, so I simply had to take a screenshot underwater, and use those colors to make a separate background for the parts underwater.



After that, all that remained were the water falls and water surfaces which, unfortunately, use 14 colors. It was simply impossible to capture how each color in the background would look with the transparency effect for each of those 14 shades of blue. Thankfully, those parts aren't really big and so I was able to approximate something acceptable using Paint Shop Pro. And anyway, the most important part was the underwater effect which I got perfectly.



I'll try to finish the Boss Rush tonight (all that remains are, again, the labels and final layout) and I'll look into a way to upload this ~14 Mb behemoth.



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Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)



Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)

Offline JonLeung

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #19 on: July 04, 2009, 04:49:45 pm »
You know my alternate email address, so you can send it there.  I wasn't in the habit of checking it, but Will Mallia is making sure I do...

Offline TerraEsperZ

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #20 on: July 05, 2009, 12:24:15 am »
The Boss Rush map is finished; the composition of this one sucks, but I just couldn't think of a better way to handle the conditions regarding your reward at the end.



Boss Rush:



User posted image



---

Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)



Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)

Offline RT 55J

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #21 on: July 05, 2009, 12:56:30 am »
Marvelous. Definitely MotM material.



And just out of curiosity, am I the only one that reads "MMIX" as "Mega Man 9"?

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"its a good day to do what has to be done by me and help my brother to defeat the enemys" - John Freeman


Offline TerraEsperZ

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #22 on: July 05, 2009, 01:15:35 am »
I might have if Capcom hadn't dropped the Roman Numerals starting with Mega Man 8. It's far from ideal to use MMIX, but it's better than the alternative (using a different, smaller *and* uglier font for the numbers). For some reason, I found that numbering system to have worked better before the year 2000. MMIX looks like a mispelled word, which wouldn't have happened with something like MCMXCIX (1999).



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Current project: None At The Moment



Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)

Offline JonLeung

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #23 on: July 05, 2009, 08:02:14 am »
Uploading the maps as we speak...  EDIT: Okay, they're up.



Absolutely awesome, Terra.  Thanks!  :D  And you should also congratulate yourself for finishing these maps.



I like that you included the shrine and stairs from back in Japan, as well.  The border on the maps looks good, but man, that must have been a pain to place...and of course, everything within the borders is nice, as expected for any Castlevania game.  But what I really like is that you took the time to label every item and boss.



Well, that does it for the three GBA Castlevanias.  Maybe someone could tackle the three DS ones?  I'm anticipating Symphony Of The Night (PSX) from Revned eventually.  Well, the first castle, anyway.



Looking forward to your Castlevania Legends (GB).  



Someone could've made a topic based around the Castlevania series like marioman's Mega Man topic.  I've always thought of Mega Man and Castlevania as parallel series, since they started at about the same time, both had heroes featured on Captain N, and both series are continuing on (though both have had relatively weaker 3D iterations, and their best games are in 2D).  Also, there probably aren't many games left to map, since both series are fairly popular around here, but if you couldn't tell, I'm anxious for those games that still remain.

Offline RT 55J

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #24 on: July 05, 2009, 07:41:17 pm »
Are you going to split the map into sub-areas like Zeric did with his HoD map?



Anyways, per Jon's request, I'll make a "Castlevania Maps" topic pretty soon.

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"its a good day to do what has to be done by me and help my brother to defeat the enemys" - John Freeman


Offline TerraEsperZ

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #25 on: July 05, 2009, 08:07:35 pm »
Honestly, I really don't feel like doing that. The collapsing, outlining, and annotation was only done to the final, assembled map. Doing what you're asking to my satisfaction would necessitate several hours at the very least to do it for each individual castle area, plus I'd have to make new captions to indicate where each door leads to, and you all know by now this is the part of making a map I hate the most.



Quite frankly, I consider this done and hope not to have to come back to it for a long time if ever.



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Current project: Castlevania Legends (GB)



Upcoming project: Not sure yet
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)

Offline JonLeung

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #26 on: July 06, 2009, 07:26:14 am »
I guess I started the "split maps" from Day One since my The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past maps were split up, but I always thought it was neat how each distinct area fit neatly into a square, even though often most players don't notice that.  They each make nice wallpapers, at least when centered in either 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024 resolutions.



The full maps for Metroid II: Return Of Samus and Castlevania: Harmony Of Dissonance are kind of big, and Zeric wanted them split up, but I don't think it's necessary.  A nice gesture for any mapper to do so, but I'm happy enough with the full map.



I do notice, though, that sprays's Castlevania: Circle Of The Moon map may sometimes be a bit too big in image area for Internet Explorer to handle...  Might be why the world maps for Mother / EarthBound Zero and The 7th Saga are split into quadrants.

Offline Maxim

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #27 on: July 09, 2009, 10:16:46 am »
If you run the 13.5MB map through PNGOUT with option /f0 it shrinks to 11.9MB. (And it took 2 hours.) Always try /f0 on video game maps...

Offline TerraEsperZ

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #28 on: July 09, 2009, 11:01:58 am »
I haven't used PNGOut directly ever since discovering PNGGauntlet, and I always assumed that using 'Brute Compression' gave the best result. It's just a pain to use the command line interface when I my files have names 40 or 50 characters long and Copy/Paste isn't available. Do you have any magic tricks I can use?



---

Current project: Castlevania Legends (GB)



Upcoming project: Not sure yet
Current project that are on hold because job burnout :
-Drill Dozer (GBA)
-Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
-Naya's Quest (PC)

Offline Revned

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RE: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)
« Reply #29 on: July 09, 2009, 04:43:12 pm »
bash. 'nuff said.