Erockbrox's Zelda3C thread

I’ve decided to make my own thread and so here it is.

I recently started reading some very detailed documents concerning the Zelda 3 rom written by mathonnapkins. Let me tell you he is a very talented hacker. I’m reading these documents to get a better understanding of the programming aspect of this game. Here are some of the things that I found that are interesting in his writings and maybe even useful to GameMakr24 if he doesn’t already know about it.

I remember that GM had a request for Kiki he said “I already have the data required to move the points where Kiki talks; only the actual event needs to be moved.” I hope this info regarding the RAM will help.

$02F9 - Relates to Kiki... (STZ when he finds you)

Here is some info regarding the skull woods entrance as well as the turtle rock entrance that GM requested as well.

$04C6 – Trigger for special animations
0 – nothing
1 – Dark Palace entrance
2 – Skull Woods entrance (when it burns)
3 – Misery Mire entrance
4 – Turtle Rock entrance


Wow. Is there really luck in this game? I guess so.

$0CF9 - Luck

$0CFA - Luck Kill Counter. When this reaches 10 luck will revert to normal.
That goes for Bad luck and good luck

I kind of like this one because I kind of understand it. After all I did take a class in programming logic and a class in visual basic. It looks like some kind of if then statement and it looks like their declaring the variables B and Y at the beginning.

int B = tilemap_address;
int Y = 0; // Y will be the resulting VRAM offset

if(B & 0x1000) // Is this tile in the lower two quadrants?
{
// YES!

Y += 0x1000;
B ^= 0x1000; // Tells us to ignore this bit in the proceeding calculations.
}
if(B & 0x40) // Is this tile in a right hand quadrant?
{
// YES!

Y += 0x800;
B ^= 0x040; // The ^ symbol is XOR, in case you didn't know.
}

Y += (B - ((B & 0xFF80) >> 1));

Ok I thought this was weird. I know that some sprites can follow you but what I did not know is that apparently at the beginning of the game Zelda is following you but she is invisible? You have to read this.

Tagalong Indicator (who is following you, if anyone?) (value based)
$3CC: $0: no one
$1: Princess Zelda
$2: ???
$3: ???
$4: Old Man?
$5: Zelda (invisible) bitching at you about coming to rescue her

In his SRM document he also states something really interesting.

Side Note 2: Items other than the standard equipment can be equipped. For instance, it's possible to equip the compass as a sword.

And by the way I finally checked out GM’s dam and it looks pretty amazing. The only thing that I could possibly nitpick on is that under those two stone balconies that are underneath the doorways it seems like there needs to be a shadow of some sort under there but overall I’m impressed.

 

Hi everyone. I said a while back that I had studied the Zelda hack Parallel Worlds so that when I’m designing for Zelda3C I can avoid flaws and poor game design from the Parallel Worlds hack. I studied the game by watching an entire play through of it from videos on youtube mainly because it was faster and easier than playing the actual game but watching someone else playing a game and you playing it for yourself are two completely different things. Most people who are familiar with the Parallel Worlds hack are aware that it is notoriously known for its insane level of difficulty. I actually started out playing it but then had to resort to the youtube videos because it was beyond my patience. But over the summer I’ve picked it back up trying to finish this thing once and for all. Now, why did I say all that? Well to point out the flaws and to show everyone how NOT to make a hack.


Ok, here is the Parallel Tower. Impressive right? Well while I will agree that some parts of the tower are indeed challenging. Here is one flaw that stands out and really annoys me.

Here are eight screenshots of back-to-back rooms, meaning each room comes right after the other in order. Now the biggest problem here is the lack of originality and repetitiveness. Each room has flying floor tiles which get really irritating after a while and that’s it and I ask myself these questions.

Is this creative? No

Is this fun? No

Does this show that the person who designed this spent long hours thinking and brainstorming implementing their imagination into the game so that the rooms will have new and original concepts? No.

In my opinion this looks like someone had about 30 seconds to design eight rooms and even worse there are tons of other rooms in the exact same dungeon that have the exact same layout. I just wanted to point these out because they were back-to-back. Well let me just tell you the rooms that I’ve designed are nothing like the ones in the picture above. I’ve tried very hard in the past and still will try very hard in the future to make Zelda3C a great hack.

I will probably post more posts like this in the future describing what I think are mistakes in game design regarding Parallel Worlds.

 

good god. just thinking of those rooms still give me the chills. when i got to that point in the game, i was just like, F*** THIS!! Having a new Zelda game isnt worth the nightmares that were the PW dungeons. good to know that you wont be making the same design choices as Euclid for the dungeons (no offence, Euclid, but the dungeons sucked... btw, if ur reading this, is a v2 still in the works with the better dungeons? if it is im looking forward to it!) BTW, Erockbrox, good job with understanding the code for the game. i know i, along with many others, wouldnt be able to understand it.

 

Those rooms were made at the very end, Euclid couldn't give them more details since he used objects to their limit already... he found a way to make it so that the dungeons would be edited on three roms and reinsert them later (for Parallel Worlds v2.0) but I lost interest in the project and instead went on a two years hiatus.. until in january 2009 were I started playing with Hyrule Magic (again...) and started working on a whole sequel instead, were I'd concentrate on making it as enjoyable as possible, so yeah...

http://parallelsequel.wordpress.com/

 

Oh man. You never know who is reading the forums. Hi. SePH! Sorry to bad-mouth Parallel Worlds. I don’t mean to say anything too mean about it after all I know you and Euclid along with many others spent lots and lots of time and effort making it. Parallel Worlds isn’t all bad there are actually many things in the game which are pretty amazing for instance the over-world (light world) and believe it or not there were times when it was actually fun to play. Just having a completed hack with a new over-world and new dungeons is an accomplishment! You and Euclid probably know way more ASM than I do but I really think the game could have used some beta testers or a selected group of people who could test the game out to see how the general public would accept it. Like for example after the game was finished but before it was released on the internet have a group of about ten people test play the game and listen to their feedback. If all ten people can’t make it past the Guard House in their first or second try then the game may have to be adjusted so that the average player could at least beat that dungeon. When I first downloaded Parallel Worlds I was so excited to play a new Zelda 3 game I couldn’t hardly wait and I told myself that I’m not going to use save states at all because I wanted to enjoy the game like it was a REAL game on the Super Nintendo. After I started the game I played for about three to four hours non-stop and I couldn’t even get past Guard House! I couldn’t even get the sword at the beginning of the game! I kept dying and dying over and over and I’m a hardcore Zelda 3 player. Finally I resorted to save stating but in a REAL game the player should never have to do that.

By the way I checked out those screen-shots. Nice title screen. I never would have imagined Link in a modern city with cars and office buildings. The images I like the most are the bedroom and bathroom interiors because they look radically different than the inside of a typical dungeon.

One last thing, I have a question. One thing that seems to be a limitation when hacking Zelda 3 is that you only have so many tiles for graphics and once you have used up all of your tiles you can not add any more unique graphics. What I want to know is how do I hack the rom to allow for extra graphics so that I'm not limited to a specific number of graphic tiles? I want to expand the rom so I can put in more graphics than the original rom could hold.

 

I still read these forums once in a while. I wish GameMakr would just finish it one day so i can play it

SePH you're still at it eh? Haven't heard from you for a while. Nice graphics, as always

Yeah I ran out of tiles in 7F due to over-decorating 6F (note the pretty rooms! especially the ones you don't need to go through!), the goal of 7F was to put a total of 9 key holes within 2 sets of switches to stop the player advancing + the bomb jump puzzle. What to do with the rest of the rooms without objects to play with? use sprites (floortiles/boss/shooters).

Believe it or not, that set of rooms were the very last rooms I made for the game. Just think about the nerves (like omg i'm just about to finish this and i'm not going to let missing object tiles delay it!)

I don't remember much on the graphics, but i do believe there's limited space for the amount of graphic tiles. The compression can make the end size bigger, but that's not a problem as the program will throw them to the back of the rom

I suppose the guardhouse is really aligned to my sort of play style. Guardhouse was revamped while I was building the parallel world dungeons therefore the difficulty was "up there", I never had problems with it though . There should be a smv video file floating around for my game playthrough where I used save states like 10 times in total through the game (a few on Draegor and a few on that annoying Impa's Boss room)

As with 2.0, I doubt it's happening, with the rom in that state, I wouldn't touch it with a stick. It's probably easier to make the dungeon rooms form scratch. On that note though, I'd like to know what sort of difficulty is "right" on the difficulty mark, just tell me which dungeon was built the best and I'll follow that if i ever make another hack

 

I must agree that the last rooms in Parallel Tower weren't the most enjoyable once but I've always enjoyed playing Parallel Worlds and I'm probably the biggest fan of the game. I've tried to bug both Euclid and SePH to continue their progress on 2.0, but I kind of doubt that they will, sadly.

I don't know much, anything, about hacking the game though, or else I would have helped out with the making of QoC, which I have been looking forward to for many years now. I just wanted to say that I love the effort you put into making this and I'm browsing your site everyday to see if any news have been brought up. Keep up the awesome work, I can't wait to see it finished!

 

I was very inspired by this Zelda flash video. It is very artistic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yjh2BnTTBs

 

good god. just thinking of those rooms still give me the chills. when i got to that point in the game, i was just like, F*** THIS!! Having a new Zelda game isnt worth the nightmares that were the PW dungeons. good to know that you wont be making the same design choices as Euclid for the dungeons (no offence, Euclid, but the dungeons sucked... btw, if ur reading this, is a v2 still in the works with the better dungeons? if it is im looking forward to it!) BTW, Erockbrox, good job with understanding the code for the game. i know i, along with many others, wouldnt be able to understand it.

 

woah! deja vu!

 

This is a response to the October 04, 2009 Diary

Wow! That is an amazing dam. All that hard work and effort really did pay off.

I have one idea that would make it perfect. Thinking about this dam I realize that it is indeed very large and that there is a lot of water gushing out from the top splashing down when it hits the bottom of the waterfall. If you were to go to this dam you should hear the sound of running water. Well such a sound exist in the original Zelda 3 ALTTP. If you go to the area where Link obtains the flippers from King Zora there is background music of running water. If Zelda3C could be hacked to allow for the running water sound effect to be played when Link is in the same screen as Truce Dam that would be the icing on the cake!

Click here and watch the youtube video to hear the running water sound.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xX4O-zHSx0



Also I feel like I need to write something about GameMakr24’s comment about his brother.

“My brother gave me a hard time (again) about working on this game. He says I'm wasting my time creating a hack”

Different people have different opinions about what is considered a waste of time and what is not. Just because someone tells you that you are wasting your time does not mean that you are. Ultimately it does not matter what other people say because you are the one who makes this decision, you are the one who decides what is a waste of time and what is not.

“that I never plan to profit from,”

Not everything has to be about money. In fact doing something and giving it away at no cost is a sign of altruism.

“that no one will really appreciate the years put into it,”

Even though this game is currently underdevelopment and people can’t even play it there are people out there who ALREADY have an appreciation for it. I have read comments of people who have posted on the message boards stating that they have been following this adventure for years and that they can’t wait to play it when it comes out.

Making a hack on the scale GameMakr24 is doing is a huge job! It requires lots of time, energy and creativity. Not everyone has the programming knowledge nor the patience and determination to actually start and finish something like this. The hack when finished will be a work of art.

 

In response to the most recent diary post;

Nothing wrong with having a hobby, as long as it's not an obsession, i.e. doing actual harm to your well-being or your relationships with others. I wouldn't say that this or watching anime are particularly productive hobbies, or that one is better than the other, but that's not really the point of a hobby.

I've been following the progress of this hack since roughly 2001/2002, and I think you've made a habit of putting your life and family before your hack when you want/need to, so I don't think you need to worry about it.

I would also suggest to your brother that if he wants to spend more time with you, he should just tell you, and you'd be happy to schedule a time to do something with him. If that means watching anime for half-an-hour and then going for dinner or something so be it. But he should know that he doesn't get to monopolize your time either.

 

I still and have from the beginning believed this would be better than any of the Zelda games ever made. And if anything I am grateful that there are gamers out there that make fan games or hacks. I'd just like to say thank you. Keep on hacking games!!!

 

For sure, there is people who will enjoy this when it is done. And that is truly the best reward. This looks like it will be amazing. Zelda has always been my favorite for many years. 21 years to be exact!

FORZA ZELDA!