Sage of Mirrors

When I get my computer back, I'm going to change something into the bosses to see what happens. It'd be cool to have say, Gohma as an obstacle rather than a boss.

Alright, thanks! Edit: Actually, your tutorial seems to be down.

What I meant was custom door models. I assume we'd have to import them into the ROM manually?

Excuse me for posting again, but... I've been hearing about people making doors. How do you make doors? Do they require any additional importing into the ROM?

Kargaroc, could you post a video with a replaced actor? Maybe try changing something to Gohdan?

I call making an import of Windfall! Heh, I can make it like a castle area, with ground under the water areas and maybe some sort of opening for connection to another map...!

Hold on. This program is designed to make importing new maps easy. It can also add actors, transitions, collision and environment stuff. And you can create multi-room structures. This seems too good to be true. (Does it work with Blender-created models?)

It seems that a lot of graphical stuff, such as sprites and background images, are stored in .tpl files. Now, I've got a program that can extract the image files, but I can't pack multiple images into one .tpl. As far as I can tell, no such program exists. With this limitation, the only type of image swapping I can do is between the background images maps use, as they are all .tpl files holding one image.

Thanks! Once I get some more discs (should be this weekend at the earliest), I'll mess around with different tags... I'm looking forward to seeing if the Shadow Queen's unique textbox will work anywhere else. I have an idea as to what the test text will be... Or I could just wait until I get my laptop back, and mess with it then without having to use discs...

I just beat Paper Mario a few days ago, and I decided to rip it and see what was there. I noticed the text was kept in ASCII, so I wanted to see if I could edit it at all. The reason the line of text below 'Enrichment Center' is cut off is that I forgot to add a <p> tag after the latter. <p> seems to tell the game when to scroll the text up out of the text box to make room for more; it's used with <k>, which is what makes the game stop for player input (specifically, wait for the player to press 'A'). I tried having a version with longer text, but it broke the text in that room; both the computer and the partner (the Goomba) say 'No message.[English]' if they try to speak. I would've made another version with proper use of the tags, but I needed to burn the image to a backup disc in order to play the game on real hardware (Dolphin sucks on my computer). Since I don't have any more discs at the moment, another version is impossible unless I figure out how to load the ISO directly from a USB drive... which, I admit, would be far more practical with this sort of stuff.

O.o whoa! Is that really in there? I wonder why they scrapped magic power so late in development. So... they originally intended to have Gamecube data transferable to the Wii? Wonder what went wrong... That would've been cool to have. Interesting findings!

Wow! This is a really cool idea! I especially like the Serenade of Water. I always liked Rutela's version more than the original. Two of these I'd like to see are Windfall Island and Medli's Prayer from Wind Waker. Syrup's Theme from the Oracles would be pretty cool, too.

This just in: The Beamos encountered in Room15 is NOT beta. It's a normal one. I think I might have a theory as to why Room19 doesn't load... it might be trying to load a .arc that doesn't exist (a boss model?) and thus causes the game to hang... Dolphin reports that after Room19 loads, it spawns 'Dalways.arc' (a chest found under the ocean) and nothing else. I wonder if I can find a list of what .arcs Room19 wants to load...

So, here's the story- I was looking around a forum when I ran into this somewhat bizarre video: ...Now, this looks unconvincing to me. It hasn't been mentioned anywhere, and I doubt that it would suddenly pop up out of nowhere. The only thing keeping me from disbelieving it is the fact that, from what I've heard, making cutscenes is somewhat difficult. My question is- is this something that has never been seen before, or is this some kind of hoax? I'm leaning towards a hoax.

Thanks for the suggestion, XDaniel. I created a thread pooling my findings here: http://jul.rustedlogic.net/thread.php?id=13745&page=0#365279

It could be. The model itself, while it doesn't seem to contain the island itself, has a few (three) joints where the island should be... could it have been that the island would rise from the ocean? That's the only thing I can think of if the ocean has bones. Hold on... I extracted the other islands for comparison. ENDumi seems to be a version of Northern Triangle Island with the surrounding sea rendered; the normal version is just a model. It seems the Wind Waker disc has a lot of trash in it. First there's the duplicate Wind Temple rooms in Cave08, then I find an entire Tower of the Gods model in the Object section of res. Whoa, whoa whoa. Hold on. I distinctly remember watching a Youtube video once about a fourth Trangle Island that loads when you're in the top of the Tower just after beating Gohdan. It has all three statues (albeit in Dormant form) mashed together on it. The model for the Tower that I found is huge... the same size as the actual model in 'sea.' Could it be that the game loads ENDumi as the map for the bell tower, and spawns the X_Tower object? What reason would they have for doing that? Hmm... I'm going to go see if the bell tower itself has a model. EDIT: No, it does not. Here's my theory. When they scrapped the original Tower's theme, they were hard pressed to complete a new dungeon with a different theme. For some reason, to save time, they just copied the Tower's Sea model, made it an object and made it spawn in a normally unused map. This would explain why there's a beta map with ONLY the bell tower stuff; it was originally supposed to be a stand-alone map. It would also explain the discrepancy between Gohdan's chamber and the 'Bell Tower' itself; when they copied the Tower's model, they didn't bother to put a gap in it like they had done for the original Bell Tower. This could be somewhat supported by the fact that the Bell spawns with the model of the Tower at sea, and it can in fact be rung if you use something like AR to get up there. The area around the bell is the same size as the one where you'd go after Gohdan's battle, and it has collision. Ringing the bell produces a screen shaking effect (the one that would happen normally), but nothing happens. However, the cutscene with the portal to Hyrule immediately begins if you ring the bell in the Tower's Sea model and then go into the light after beating Gohdan. Worth mentioning that I found a couple other maps with the same textures as Rooms 19 and 20. They're hallways- one regular, and one with a gap in the center. ...No. Might've been a good theory, though. I loaded up ENDumi in-game, and I was presented with an ocean with the pirate ship. It seems ENDumi is the map loaded for the time when you've just decided to get on the ship. That would explain the lack of models other than the ocean in BMDview; the ship is most likely an object, and thus wouldn't appear on the level's geometry. It probably uses a Triangle Island's .dzb because the game would throw a fit if there wasn't one. If the pirate ship is the only place you're supposed to be able to walk, the surrounding ocean doesn't really need collision. Oh well. New subject. I loaded up one of the halls that I mentioned earlier. This was the result: Apparently there's a beta Beamos that's just a base with an eye that appears when you get close enough. Now, these Beamos had a fatal flaw; they had space behind them so you could get around them. Maybe that was intentional? Also, the button with the statue... I think this is evidence that the Tower's basic structure wasn't changed when they redid the way it looks. I'm going to load up the second hall that I found now. That Beamos? It's a file called 'Hmos.' it's an entire unused Beamos model set- three bases (One wall-mounted!) and two eyes to correspond to the final ones.

I was looking at the two folders that you talked about, Xdaniel- Cave08 and TR_7. While TF_7 looks like a normal Triforce Chart area, Cave08 doesn't make any sense. Why have copies of Wind Temple rooms taking up space on the disc? Odd. I tried replacing Windfall Island's map with Room19... I'm not sure if it was because I changed the Stage.arc or what, but I was able to pull up the map. It said that I was in the Tower of the Gods... I'm posting this while the game's running, so I'll try to find Room19 in the overworld. I still haven't been able to get the room to load. So far, whenever it tries to load, it loads the objects 'Os,' 'Hkyo' and 'Key.' 'Os' is one of the statues in the Tower, 'Hkyo' is the glowing symbol used on doors in the Tower and the last one is a collection of the different locks used througout the game. I'm pretty sure they're loaded because of Stage.arc, though, as when I grafted Room19 over anything I always placed the TotG's Stage.arc with it, too. I believe I'm overthinking this. Is there really anything that I can do to get it to work? Probably not.

So, I found another room... this time of the miniboss room: I think the door is missing because Stage.arc, which holds the doors, hasn't been changed. I wonder how the game decides where to put what when it comes to things like objects and enemies. Interestingly, I couldn't use the sword when I was in there, meaning I couldn't kill the Darknut. Also, whenever I went far enough away, the Darknut went back to his neutral position in the center of the room. The cutscene didn't occur; maybe because the cutscene with the door locking didn't occur, either? Or maybe this map lacks the triggers for the cutscene... I wish I knew more about this stuff. Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten the beta boss room yet... Well, maybe I shouldn't say 'Unfortunately,' since all I'm doing is using a program to replace files... I should research Gamecube file formats a bit...

No, it says that it can't replace files with another file that's bigger.

Alright, so I've got a problem. Room19 is fairly large in .RARC form. I've noticed that the regular .ARCs in the ISO (uncompressed) have RARC in the first four... er, bytes? While the Room19 and 20 .ARCs are yaz0 compressed. Which means, I need to decompress them for them to work. My problem? The program I'm using to graft them doesn't like grafting files that are bigger than the original I'm trying to overwrite. Is there anyway to get Room19 in through, say, a hex editor? Is it possible to do that in a ROM? Maybe it could work for an ISO, as well.

... ...The bell renders itself; it's above where it should be held. All buttons were phased out (I'll get the Grappling Hook and see if I can use it there later) and the gap doesn't lead anywhere; it's just a long pit. Now to get Room19...

So, I tried using the program 'Gamecube Rebuilder' to graft the files of the unused TotG rooms over the Outset model in Sea_T (From what I can tell, it's the model used in the Title). From this, I found that Room20, the top of the bell tower, won't cause the game to crash; it loads, but because the Outset model is no longer there, the Link in the title sequence drops into the water. Once in the water, the only control I have is over the camera; all other input isn't registered. Because of this, I can't look around properly to see if the model did in fact load. The other one, Room19, results in a black screen; for all purposes, I assume this means it crashes. I've also grafted Room20 over the Outset model that is used normally (In the folder 'Sea'). This results in a crash, as well. I haven't checked (I will soon), but I believe this might be because the Title model of Outset is compressed. Room20 is also compressed. However, another theory I have is that it was to do with the location of the models; Room20 might be 'outside' in the same sense that Outset is; I'll have to figure out if I can get Room19 to load in place of an 'indoor' map.

Ooh, that might work. I'll try that, see what it does... thanks for the suggestion.

Here's the boss room. I think it's also worth mentioning that Gohdan's alcoves don't appear in the final boss room's model; they must be part of his entity, or a different entity(ies) altogether: One last thing: When comparing the sizes of the two rooms, it is obvious that the beta one is much smaller than the final; could it be that the boss might've opened the way to another room which held the transporter to the bell tower, and what's left is that room?

Yeah, that's possible, too... I was reading a beta wiki called 'The Cutting Room Floor,' and in the section on Wind Waker they mentioned old versions of some Tower of the Gods rooms... I was interested in seeing them, so I opened them up in BMDview2... I find it interesting that the Tower was originally going to have a more castle-like appearance. Notice the gap below the bell platform? I think that's why they made the gap in the ceiling present in Gohdan's room; It could've been something like the teleporter between the second and third floors- in fact, the energy beam that allows Link to go to the the bell tower in the final boss room is the same one as the teleporter. Along with this beta bell tower, there's a boss room with the same blue brick texture, and stained glass textures present in the final Tower. I'll post pics of those shortly. Oh, how I'd love to load these up in the game... Maybe I should research AR codes. If they can load test rooms, they can load these rooms, too, right?