ASM daydreaming (And introducing myself)

A very few of you may know who I am already, but since Josh has decided to make his first appearance, I'll go ahead and introduce myself as well. I'm Reshaper256, the anonymous "ASM friend" who recently became an official part of the project. GameMakr24 mentioned me a few diary entries back. I've decided that I don't want to remain anonymous, since I want to be able to chat with you people. I also want to make it clear that I'm expressly working on Zelda3C now, and will not be taking on any side projects for other hacks. Anyway... what I want to discuss in this thread involves my primary area of interest - ASM hacking. Of course, I'm not about to spoil any current ASM projects or ideas, so don't worry about hearing something you wished you hadn't.

The point of this thread is to promote some discussion about possible ASM hacks. Basically I'm hunting for some cool ideas; stuff that may not even be possible... but then again, who knows, it just might. I'm hoping this thread can become a source of ASM ideas that GM and I might have never otherwise considered, and inspire some ASM hacks that could eventually make it into the final game. Don't be afraid to bring up any ideas, even if you don't think it would actually be possible.

 

I might bring in some things which i thought about but didn't bother to hack it in/too hard to hack in.

One of the things is moving flute event (the digging, the chicken etc), moving the shovel location is an easy task, but making the chicken/rooster break out of that statue is out of this world.

Quite powerful Magic draining sword -- if swords can be equipped separately, then this'll be good. It'll make magic even more valuable.

Lens of truth (Remember zelda's quote in PW? that was the original plan till it got changed to that.)

Using ice rod to put out fire lit torches.

chicken/bird/rooster in dark world.

Remember how you fight agahnim the second time in lttp? make the "fake agahnims" the same colour as the real one in the fight.

you should hack the item select screen, it's quite fun

edit: you know that tunics idea from the other thread, it's not so bad if you don't give it "obviously hard to code" ideas (for example make one double your damage and the other one 1/2 your magic usage / replenish magic or something, that's not hard at all!)

 

Great to see you here, Euclid!

Great additions to the thread, those were the kind of suggestions I was hoping for. Of course, I can't give away spoilers about any past, present, or *future* ASM projects inspired by this thread (at least without GM's consent), so I won't share my thoughts about your ideas on here. I'll just say that your additions are appreciated, even just to get this thread moving.

Again, great to have you here!

By the way, I have some of your tutorials on my webspace, since NEONswift's went down a good while back. Here's the link: http://www.wku.edu/~james.martin2/resh/z3data.html

 

heh I didn't know i crapped on so much on msn back then.

I believe this place isn't as well known as a lot of other places. Sometimes i didn't even check gamemakr's blog (sorry, couldn't call it a diary since it's not updated daily ) in like a few months without me realising.

If you want me to do look into little things like how would you do X in zelda3 (be as vague as you can as i don't want spoilers), feel free to ask (if you grab the PW readme, you should find my email there, it's the first one of the 2.), because it's most likely that I did look at it.

 

The only thing I can think of is a big problem I had with Outlands, and that was crowding too many tough enemies in one room. There were many times when I was forced to abuse savestates (which I hate doing) just to make it through one room.

So my suggestion is to keep rooms like those to a minimum. People may think differently, though. I'm just throwing it out there.

 

i remember reading something about a hardcoded grass palette in parallel worlds, and about gm not being able to find the blue soldier's pallette. maybe you could hack all the hardcoded pallettes in the game.

 

Heheh, if you only knew how much I worked on that blue soldier palette problem already! Blue soldiers use a very generic 'blue' palette that's shared by a great portion of the sprites in the game. Its not just a simple as changing the sprite's colors, as they would change the colors of all the sprites that also use that palette. The problems with editing sprite palettes has been solved to a point - I made a patch to handle sprite palettes in dungeons a long while back, and promised GM to eventually make one for the outdoors.

I probably need to actually finish that, someday... <_<

 

Well, I hope you're successful, because a lot of the monster graphics will look a HECK of a lot better if they can be the proper colors. I'm going to be your biggest fan if it all works out.

 

Don't worry, you should have plenty of freedom with which palettes your sprite graphics can use. If I remember, I was pretty close to finishing the overworld version of the palette patch before I got sidetracked by another project.

As for enemies, I'll need to be able to talk with you privately concerning new GFX work. You can email me at jajomart@gmail.com if you want to discuss it.

 

isnt it possible to simply change which pallette the graphic refers to(like the <rock roses> in the castle)? or are monster graphics different?

 

It's possible to swap out which palette in CG-RAM is used for each sprite, and is actually part of using the sprite palette patch. There's a table of values in ROM that determines which palette in CG-RAM each sprite starts off with when it spawns onto the screen. The only problem is that some sprites have "special swaps" to their palettes. Remember when the Armos Knights boss changes to the red palette? That's a special palette swap not covered by the initial sprite spawning routine. In some cases there's actually a 'special palette swap' as soon as the sprite is spawned onto the screen! So in order to safely use alternate palettes, we have to find all the special palette swaps for the sprites we're changing.

 

hmm... if i knew anything about ASM hacking or how the rom works, id prolly try to help find all those swaps. but ive looked at some pages for it, and it makes no sense to me at all.

 

Ah, don't worry about it. I'll be able to find any of them that we need when it comes down to it, so it's no big deal.

I was just wanting to point out that it's not as simple as a one byte change in many cases.

 

k. it just seems like theres not many people working on this right now, so anyone with multiple skills would be a help.

i think ill try to get some of my friends in on this project too.

 

Monster graphics are different than the overworld. I can set any overworld tile's palette in Hyrule Magic, but I can't edit sprites beyond their positions and graphics.

 

maybe you could make the sword break pots.

would it be possible to change some enemies' behavior?

 

I've seen that in the GBA version, and have wondered myself if I could make the pots break with sword impact. I'll store the thought away.

As for editing some enemies' behavior, some changes aren't horribly difficult - altering HP, the amount of damage sprites do, even altering some sprite speeds and such. Much more beyond that becomes pretty involved.

 

maybe you could make the grass and bushes burn up with the lamp or fire rod, like in minish cap. hacking and slashing individual bushes is so tedious, especially without the boots. there needs to be something to speed up the process.

 

I'll just use less bushes... kidding. Although it was cool to watch the fires spread in Minish Cap, I don't think I'd want this algorithm. It might remove bushes covering secrets that I only want revealed if the player directly attacks them. For example, there may be a hole covered by a bush which is surrounded by tall grass.