xdaniel's Random Junk

[Antidote]

I really need to get myself a Dreamcast, I'd like to develop for it since it seems like a pretty popular platform, that and I've never owned one.

[xdaniel]

The Dreamcast is already worth owning for its library of games alone, but developing for it is a fun plus

 

Speaking of which, OMG?! "Fake error during main processing"!?! How could "Fake" fail, I don't get it!!

 

 

 

...in all seriousness, the bog-standard assert was kinda boring, plus I wanted it to somehow print to the screen, too. So in comes a custom assert macro, together with a function to print the data to the screen with - as far as I know, anyway - the most minimal code capable of that: using the BIOS' font and writing characters directly to VRAM.

 

Well, yes, that's based on example code from (fancy BG included), and uses printing functions already in KOS, but still!

 

[Mallos31]

That, and being nudged to work on cracking BLOCKS.bin from the Star Fox Adventures E3 demo, which did pay off at least (old Dinosaur Planet level data!).

 

 

I know this was posted forever ago, but do you have this stuff logged anywhere? I'd love to see! 

[xdaniel]

Mallos: There's a thread on Jul/TCRF about the demo, my posts about the model stuff begin halfway through this page. Posted the final binaries and sources of the programs I worked on, on page 19 or thereabouts. I'm not really doing anything with the game anymore myself, but other people there (ex. Hugo_Peters) are making more headway into the files.

[Mallos31]

Wonderful. Thank you! 

[xdaniel]

Integrated my assert stuff with KOS' existing provisions for custom asserts, which I only just learned about even, well, existed... Makes things cleaner and, as far as I understand it, should also cause asserts caused by ex. KOS itself to be handled by my custom method (thus ex. get printed to the screen).

 

Also wrapped the fancy background in an #ifdef DEBUG_ASSERT_FANCYBG, so as to disable it for now. It looks nice and all, but it's kinda not so appropriate for a fatal system-hanging error message, right?

 

I should finally get to doing that "Dungeon" gamestate, tho... like rendering floor maps, walking around, etc...

[xdaniel]

Began work on floor maps, etc... still extremely incomplete, unoptimized, untested on hardware, and so on - only started this yesterday evening.

 

 

 

(Also, yes, asserts from KOS really are handled by my custom assert code now, too, and get printed to screen.)

[Vexiant]

I'm feeling it Mr. Krabs!

[xdaniel]

I really should leave Zelda 64 hacking behind, considering nothing good ever comes out of it, just drama. So, kinda in preperation for doing so eventually, I looked back at some things I could pick up again, one thing being that Pokemon GSC map editor, G2Map.

 

Ended up spending much of the night (5:20am now) going over the source, cleaning it up, restructuring it, fixing a few bugs, etc., all while keeping an eye on the drama unfolding elsewhere on the forums... but that's not really a topic for my "random junk" thread. That program's probably going to join SceneNavi on GitHub soon-ish, as well as get a new release, even if it's just a tiny bugfix one.

[Twili]

N3DSCmbViewer source?

[xdaniel]

I knew I kept forgetting something. I'll pack it up later (this evening local time, I guess) and drop into #zelda to give it out, answer questions about it, stuff like that.

[xdaniel]

G2Map now supports Pokemon Gold/Silver Japanese v1.0 and v1.1, English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as Crystal Japanese, English v1.0 and v1.1, German, French, Italian and Spanish (as an example of something previously unsupported). Which is almost every version in existence, except for the Korean GS... and I'm not sure if I'll be able to support those, because of the Korean text.

[Vexiant]

lets hack starfox instead

[xdaniel]

Star Fox 64? A bloody mess I tried to make sense of twice, and I don't feel like trying a third time right now. Only thing in it, that I feel might be interesting to mess with further, would be the object scripting.

 

Plus, while a fun series of games, I have no nostalgia for any of them, unlike Pokemon Gen 2 or - take a wild guess - Zelda OoT.

 

EDIT: Want Star Fox? Here's what I know, have fun.

 

SF64/Overview

SF64/Object Scripting

[xdaniel]

That should be every single freaking official language version of Pokemon GS and C supported, unless I'm missing another European translation or something. To quote the source...

• Pocket Monsters Gold/Silver (Japanese v1.0)
• Pocket Monsters Gold/Silver (Japanese v1.1)
• Pokémon Gold/Silver (English)
• Pokémon Gold/Silver (German)
• Pokémon Gold/Silver (French)
• Pokémon Gold/Silver (Italian)
• Pokémon Gold/Silver (Spanish)
• Pocket Monsters Gold/Silver (Korean)
• Pocket Monsters Crystal (Japanese)
• Pokémon Crystal (English v1.0)
• Pokémon Crystal (English v1.1)
• Pokémon Crystal (German)
• Pokémon Crystal (French)
• Pokémon Crystal (Italian)
• Pokémon Crystal (Spanish)

Everything in a single program, and maybe for the first time ever? Most editors for GS just focused on English and maybe German ROMs, and Crystal only had dodgy support through modified GS editors...

[xdaniel]

Back to the DS filesystem and model viewer thingy for a bit...

 

 

Preliminary texture animation support added, ex. for Etrian Odyssey's Geomagnetic Fields; choppiness comes from the fact that this is a GIF:

 

 

(No fancy YouTube video, because... really, why? Would you really want to watch a texture animate for 30 seconds or something?)

 

 

[xdaniel]

...annnnd back to G2Map:

 

 

 

...GUI localization for controls and generic strings; still a work-in-progress, mostly the translations themselves. And best of all, it's based on easily editable XML files:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Localization>
  <Language Culture="de-DE">
    <Form Name="MainForm">
      <Control Name="fileToolStripMenuItem">&Datei</Control>
      <Control Name="openROMToolStripMenuItem">ROM &öffnen...</Control>
      <Control Name="saveROMToolStripMenuItem">ROM &speichern</Control>
      <Control Name="exitToolStripMenuItem">&Beenden</Control>
      <Control Name="editToolStripMenuItem">&Bearbeiten</Control>
      <Control Name="tilesetPropertiesToolStripMenuItem">&Tileset-Eigenschaften</Control>
      <Control Name="mapPropertiesToolStripMenuItem">&Karteneigenschaften</Control>
      <Control Name="wildPokemonEditorToolStripMenuItem">&Wilde Pokémon</Control>
      <Control Name="optionsToolStripMenuItem">&Optionen</Control>
      <Control Name="showMapsByAreaToolStripMenuItem">Karten nach &Gebiet anzeigen</Control>
      <Control Name="sortMapsAlphabeticallyToolStripMenuItem">Sortiere Karten &alphabetisch</Control>
      <Control Name="mapDisplayPaletteToolStripMenuItem">Karten&palette</Control>
      [...]

    <Strings>
      <String Name="NoCount">Keine</String>
      <String Name="Offset">Adresse</String>
      <String Name="PokemonLevel">Level</String>
      <String Name="BankSingular">Bank</String>
      <String Name="BankPlural">Bänke</String>
      <String Name="MapSingular">Karte</String>
      <String Name="MapPlural">Karten</String>
      <String Name="WarpSingular">Warp</String>
      <String Name="WarpPlural">Warps</String>
      <String Name="EventSingular">Event</String>
      <String Name="EventPlural">Events</String>
      <String Name="TriggerSingular">Auslöser</String>
      <String Name="TriggerPlural">Auslöser</String>
      <String Name="SignpostSingular">Schild</String>
      <String Name="SignpostPlural">Schilder</String>
      <String Name="PersonSingular">Person</String>
      <String Name="PersonPlural">Personen</String>
      <String Name="ROMFilter">Game Boy-ROMs (*.gb;*.sgb;*.gbc)|*.gb;*.sgb;*.gbc|Alle Dateien (*.*)|*.*</String>
      <String Name="LoadingROM">ROM wird geladen...</String>
      [...]

 

[mzxrules]

I bought Etrian Odyssey 4 because of you. On my 3rd playthrough.

 

The multi-language Gen 2? editor looks very interesting

[xdaniel]

mzxrules: Hehe, nice to hear! Although I'm not even finished with my first playthrough yet... because Pokemon Y and Black 2 got in the way *cough*

 

That aside, not a lot to report on G2Map since my last post. I did add support for an extended tileset hack for G/S by Tauwasser, which makes G/S capable of using the second VRAM bank the GBC has for additional map tiles, like Crystal. It's not terribly well tested yet, but the one G/S hack that uses it, that I tried so far, appears to work fine with the program.

 

Edit, two more screenshots - one of said hack working fine, and another one of the now-resizeable block selection panel:

 

 

 

Edited May 1, 2014 by xdaniel

[xdaniel]

Considering it concerns my "random junk" (i.e. my projects and such), here's this 20 minutes long video of me rambling about said random junk... and OoT hacking:

 

(sorry, no tl;dr)

 

[43512]

I'm sad to hear that, although I definitely understand; having to hop between different forums due to drama or the forum fading away gets tiring.  For what it's worth, I always found your work staggeringly impressive.  I didn't have much in terms of constructive criticism or feedback because I never used your tools much myself -- I tend to do my work in hex editors -- and because I was away for such a long time and thus didn't know much of anything about them.

 

Is there any chance that you'll pick up OOT/MM hacking again later on, or are you finished for the foreseeable future?

[xdaniel]

Unless things change significantly in the next couple of years - which I do not believe will happen, considering the past ten or so years as mentioned in the video, but I'd love to be proven wrong -, I am finished with OoT/MM hacking. The only exception might be SceneNavi, said OoT level editor I've been working on since last May (thread here if you haven't seen it yet, downloads etc. on its update page), but I'm not sure if I still want to bother with that either.

[Jason777]

Unfortunate to hear, xdaniel. Your tools have made modding so much easier in the recent years. I also want to thank you for leaving your source code behind as there is much I can learn from it.

[xdaniel]

If anyone wants to have a laugh about my C++ or my knowledge of the Dreamcast, here's the source to my DC project's "engine" part, i.e. Frenda: https://github.com/xdanieldzd/libfrenda

 

It's not really documented at all, but hey, I guess this is mainly for personal reference etc. anyway, and the public being able to check it out is just a bonus

[xdaniel]

Related to this SceneNavi screenshot I tweeted a few days ago, here's something that might help me with my GLSL adventures...

 

 

...and yes, I am aware of similar programs - I've used RenderMonkey myself before - but I wanted something more specific, closer to the problem at hand: