Super Metroid/SMILE Help Thread

Edit history:

Conker303: 2011-06-19 09:17:15 pm

2011-06-19 07:52:31 pm

Does anyone know how to add water into rooms? Particularly Craterias Landing Site.

EDIT:

Nevermind I found out how to do it. If anyone else wants to know here are the videos I found on how to do it.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Quietus

2011-06-20 07:00:50 am

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

Yeah, Shadow's tutorials are all worth a watch. He wasn't around for long before disappearing. I recall he was in the forces, so I hope nothing awful happened.

Conker303

2011-06-20 01:22:20 pm

Forces? You mean like military? Ha, no, he's actually my older brother. Other things just came up, he got a job, a girlfriend, all that time consuming stuff. Me and him used to edit Super Metroid all the time. I just got back into it and I saw him messing around on SMILE the other day. He might start working on Desolation again, but like I said he's got a job and gf so he might just do it here and there, but not like he used to.

ANYWAYS, I have another question.

Room 7975C (The old Mother Brain room from Metroid 1) is giving me a small problem. I changed the tileset and made it into a new room, but it still has this "pinkishness" to it. It makes the tileset look all weird and so is there anyway to make it look normal?

Quietus

2011-06-20 01:43:29 pm

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

It's probably related to the room's states. That room has two, one of which is for when you first enter the area, where everything is dead and quiet, and the other is for once you enter the room having acquired Morph Ball and Missiles. To test, just change two items in an adjoining room to Morph and Missiles, and then reenter that room. It should change its appearance to its second state, and the colours should be normal.

Unless it's something else entirely... Wink

Oh, and I'm glad Shadow is fine. aiwebs_004

(Tell him to get back to hacking, the naughty so-and-so!)

Prime Hunter

2011-06-20 01:43:32 pm

Might be the FX1 again if you didn't change it. Are you talking about the room's first state (With the fog and everything powered down) or the one with all of the Space Pirates in it after you normally get the Morph Ball and Missiles?

Quietus

2011-06-20 01:43:53 pm

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

Woah, that was close. Razz

Prime Hunter

Edit history:

Prime Hunter: 2011-06-20 01:44:57 pm

Prime Hunter: 2011-06-20 01:44:51 pm

2011-06-20 01:44:36 pm

Heh, at least now with both of us saying it at the same time he's probably going to check it out, right? laugh new

Quietus

2011-06-20 01:45:02 pm

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

Let's hope so! aiwebs_004

Conker303

Edit history:

Conker303: 2011-06-20 01:46:14 pm

2011-06-20 01:45:10 pm

I'm Here!

I figured it out. It's the FX1 like Prime Hunter said. When you put it at "seemingly normal -- Used for fog" it makes it look like I was talking about.

Conker303

2011-06-22 11:23:34 am

Well...as no one else seems to be making use of this thread, I will! :D

I have a question about doors. Does anyone know if it's ok to put a door in a room that leads to another door in the same room? Almost like a teleporter. I did it and it works fine, but I just didn't know if this is a bad thing to do.

Quietus

2011-06-22 01:05:36 pm

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

As far as I know, doors can be linked to any door, even ones facing a completely different direction. You may need to mess with some settings if that's the case, but doors within the same room should be fine.

Conker303

2011-06-22 05:51:48 pm

Alright, well does anyone know if it's possible to take a door in a room that's let's say facing right, but you wanna change it to be facing up. Can you do this? If so, how?

Quietus

2011-06-22 06:17:12 pm

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

As I understand it, you would just build the door as required. The ROM holds data for x number of doors, but is not set on what exactly they are. Say you have a door facing left, and you want to change it to a floor door. Just build your door as normal, using door blocks and the correct BTS numbers in front of them. You then just edit the door's properties: Direction is fairly obvious (check a similar door elsewhere), all of the X's and Y's are automatically sorted for you by SMILE, but you need to pay attention to the 'Distance from Door', as this is where it spits you out, and is different for ceiling doors, to give the door time to close below you when you go through. You can hover the mouse over the numbers at the top of the door properties box to see hints as to what they are. Check this page if you want a better breakdown. teach

Tyjet66

2011-07-01 03:20:06 pm

What'd you say?

So I was watching Hoandjzj's TAS of Zero Mission and I noticed that the room from 12:34-12:36 has visible lava at the bottom of the room but upon entry of it, it dissipates. Does anyone know how that was done?

JAM

2011-07-01 09:27:04 pm

Tyjet66
Don't sure how exactly it was done, but I'd did it using FX2
contains the not too hard code in certain rooms.

The code should loads Samus Y position, add Samus height to it to
calculate lower boundary and compare this value to the current FX3
height.
Branch ahead if minus flag is set (Samus isn't touching the
surfance of lava).
Set new FX3 height and store it to RAM.
RTS

;Here we go with branch
Set old FX3 height and store it to RAM (to make lava reappear).
RTS

All needed RAM addresses are already in RAM Map doc.

BigMack

2011-07-02 02:21:42 pm

Quote from rolando:

Adding an entirely new room, you gonna need a few tools:

Lunar Address
Your hex editor of course and also..
SMILE which I assume you're using.

Mmkay, gonna take you through how I make an extra room.

Open your ROM with SMILE and select any room you want to use, I'm gonna use the room to the right of the landing site of Samus' ship, the small tunnel. The room is 795D4. Run Lunar Address and select the auto detect and choose your metroid ROM.

Now open your ROM with the hex editor(if your hex editor can't open it since SMILE has it in use, grab WindHex32, it'll work) and find some empty space in which some starts at offset
002F51C0. I'm gonna use offset 002F51E0 in this example.

To Lunar Address, enter on the PC File Address side $2F:51E0, the SNES address will pop up on the right((DED1E0) write it down on paper or whatever and save for later) you want to use then take it and go back to SMILE>Edit>Pointers, up topleft is the level data this is where that SNES address is gonna go. Remember the address that is currently there as you're going to replace it back.

So the data is stored at C3BCD2, replace that with the new address DED1E0, save pointers and then save the ROM. Go back into Edit>Pointers and set it back to C3BCD2, again, save pointers then save ROM. Back to the hex editor, reopen the ROM, if you're using WindHex32 its CTRL+U and you'll see that the data got stored there at that offset, now close SMILE, DO NOT SAVE. Lunar Address can also be closed as it is no longer needed.

Goto the room name that was in the drop down list which is the offset(795D4) and write down on paper the 44 bytes there and no further which is..

0D 00 20 04 01 01 70 A0 00 FB 95 E6 -16 bytes
E5 D2 BC C3 00 00 00 68 81 3B 8B 33 82 00 00 00 -32 bytes
00 00 00 00 00 46 82 00 00 D3 91 C6 8A D2 8A 0E -44 bytes

Now we're gonna use that new data to link to an entirely new room. Goto the bank that stores the room's, which is 78, so to offset 00078000(when making lots of rooms, stay within the bounds of 78000 to 7FFFF or errors will occur) and scroll down til you find empty data which starts at 7E99B, I will use 7E9A0 so to offset 0007E9A0. Place what you just wrote down into the new offset as so..

0D 00 20 04 01 01 70 A0 00 FB 95 E6 E5 D2 BC C3 -16 bytes
00 00 00 68 81 3B 8B 33 82 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 -32 bytes
00 46 82 00 00 D3 91 C6 8A D2 8A 0E -44 bytes

If you didn't know, bytes are 2 numbers smacked together so each 2 are a byte (01, 0A, 1C, etc.)

At bytes 14(D2), 15(BC) and 16(C3.) Place the number you wrote down from Lunar Address awhile back which was DED1E0 except put it in backwards, so the way to flip it would be E0D1DE(front to back<>back to front), now put that as bytes 14(E0), 15(D1) and 16(DE) then save.

Goto your SMILE folder now and open up the mdb file. smile>files>mdb. Scroll down to the very bottom and make a new line and put in the offset that the new room was made at so that it looks like so..

7E06B
7E0B5
7E82C
7E9A0

Save then close the file. Now reopen SMILE and on the drop down list of the room's, your newly added room will be on the very bottom. All done, enjoy! :)

Excellent! Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for :)

[quote="rolando"]

Adding an entirely new room, you gonna need a few tools:

Lunar Address
Your hex editor of course and also..
SMILE which I assume you're using.

Mmkay, gonna take you through how I make an extra room.

Open your ROM with SMILE and select any room you want to use, I'm gonna use the room to the right of the landing site of Samus' ship, the small tunnel. The room is 795D4. Run Lunar Address and select the auto detect and choose your metroid ROM.

Now open your ROM with the hex editor(if your hex editor can't open it since SMILE has it in use, grab WindHex32, it'll work) and find some empty space in which some starts at offset
002F51C0. I'm gonna use offset 002F51E0 in this example.

To Lunar Address, enter on the PC File Address side $2F:51E0, the SNES address will pop up on the right((DED1E0) write it down on paper or whatever and save for later) you want to use then take it and go back to SMILE>Edit>Pointers, up topleft is the level data this is where that SNES address is gonna go. Remember the address that is currently there as you're going to replace it back.

So the data is stored at C3BCD2, replace that with the new address DED1E0, save pointers and then save the ROM. Go back into Edit>Pointers and set it back to C3BCD2, again, save pointers then save ROM. Back to the hex editor, reopen the ROM, if you're using WindHex32 its CTRL+U and you'll see that the data got stored there at that offset, now close SMILE, DO NOT SAVE. Lunar Address can also be closed as it is no longer needed.

Goto the room name that was in the drop down list which is the offset(795D4) and write down on paper the 44 bytes there and no further which is..

0D 00 20 04 01 01 70 A0 00 FB 95 E6 -16 bytes
E5 D2 BC C3 00 00 00 68 81 3B 8B 33 82 00 00 00 -32 bytes
00 00 00 00 00 46 82 00 00 D3 91 C6 8A D2 8A 0E -44 bytes

Now we're gonna use that new data to link to an entirely new room. Goto the bank that stores the room's, which is 78, so to offset 00078000(when making lots of rooms, stay within the bounds of 78000 to 7FFFF or errors will occur) and scroll down til you find empty data which starts at 7E99B, I will use 7E9A0 so to offset 0007E9A0. Place what you just wrote down into the new offset as so..

0D 00 20 04 01 01 70 A0 00 FB 95 E6 E5 D2 BC C3 -16 bytes
00 00 00 68 81 3B 8B 33 82 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 -32 bytes
00 46 82 00 00 D3 91 C6 8A D2 8A 0E -44 bytes

If you didn't know, bytes are 2 numbers smacked together so each 2 are a byte (01, 0A, 1C, etc.)

At bytes 14(D2), 15(BC) and 16(C3.) Place the number you wrote down from Lunar Address awhile back which was DED1E0 except put it in backwards, so the way to flip it would be E0D1DE(front to back<>back to front), now put that as bytes 14(E0), 15(D1) and 16(DE) then save.

Goto your SMILE folder now and open up the mdb file. smile>files>mdb. Scroll down to the very bottom and make a new line and put in the offset that the new room was made at so that it looks like so..

7E06B
7E0B5
7E82C
7E9A0

Save then close the file. Now reopen SMILE and on the drop down list of the room's, your newly added room will be on the very bottom. All done, enjoy! :)
[/quote]

Excellent! Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for :)

Quietus

2011-07-02 05:38:33 pm

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

Quote from Tyjet66:

I noticed that the room from 12:34-12:36 has visible lava at the bottom of the room but upon entry of it, it dissipates. Does anyone know how that was done?

I know that JAM has supplied you with one possibility, but I don't think it's anything so technical. I suspect that he's just copied the animated lava tiles to the standard graphic set, and used BTS to disable Layer 2, with the rest of the room built solely in Layer 1. You'll note at 5:53, it's used again (among other spots in the hack).

DSO created a patch that'll do it for you if that's what you're after.

JAM

2011-07-07 10:21:35 pm

Quietus
Layer 2 removing trick was used in places where you've mentioned.
One of them is tall shaft in blue Brinstar.

As for lava, nope. It using layer 3 and if just copy tiles to
layer 2, they will not animate at all. And the code I'm talking
about is pretty simple and could take up to 30 bytes.

Try and test it.

LDA $0B00
ASL A
CLC
ADC $0AFA
CMP #$xxxx ;normal lava height
BPL $07
LDA #$xxxx ;normal lava height
STA $195E
RTS
LDA #$xxxx ;NEW lava height
STA $195E
RTS

Quietus

2011-07-08 05:53:56 am

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

I'm not doubting you, but surely you could create animated tiles to get the same effect? I recall somebody (Crashtour?) making new, animated tiles. Either way, it's good to have choice. Very Happy

Crashtour99

2011-07-11 05:28:11 am

Quote from Quietus:

I'm not doubting you, but surely you could create animated tiles to get the same effect? I recall somebody (Crashtour?) making new, animated tiles. Either way, it's good to have choice. Very Happy

You could do it with animated tiles, but I'm pretty sure it was done more like how JAM was talking about. One giveaway is that you still hear the lava sfx (bubbling) where as with animated tiles you'd have to insert code to get that. JAM's method is far quicker, easier, and more optimized/conservative with coding (making animated tiles takes up a bit of space).

JXQ

2011-07-19 08:36:22 am

Hello,

I apologize if this has been covered in this massive thread somewhere. Currently I am interested in creating a map for the somewhat recent hack Metroid Super Zero Mission. (IPS patch available here: http://metroid-database.com/fanapps.php )

I'm doing this partially by exporting individual rooms from SMILE, but I noticed that some rooms are inaccessible. A couple examples of inaccessible rooms are:

- Crateria, the room on the way to the Brinstar shaft at the very beginning, address appears to be 78102h from looking at the door editor in adjacent room 792FDh. When I try to enter this room, I get a pop-up which says "Door points to an unrecognized room ID".

- Brinstar, the first room with the morph ball. Room address appears to be 78190h, from adjacent room 7A2F7h. Similarly the room to Kraid's elevator isn't accessible from here either (address 788D7h).

I also tried entering these rooms from the map editor. In Crateria's case, I am put into the connecting room (792FDh) and in Brinstar's case, I get an error which says "No rooms found for this point!".

One thing these inaccessible rooms have in common is that the room address is before the earliest address in the list, so I'm wondering if that is the reason for being unable to access them. Does anyone know how to (or if it's possible to) access rooms before 791F8h in SMILE?

Thanks!

Hello,

I apologize if this has been covered in this massive thread somewhere.  Currently I am interested in creating a map for the somewhat recent hack Metroid Super Zero Mission. (IPS patch available here: http://metroid-database.com/fanapps.php )

I'm doing this partially by exporting individual rooms from SMILE, but I noticed that some rooms are inaccessible.  A couple examples of inaccessible rooms are:

- Crateria, the room on the way to the Brinstar shaft at the very beginning, address appears to be 78102h from looking at the door editor in adjacent room 792FDh.  When I try to enter this room, I get a pop-up which says "Door points to an unrecognized room ID".

- Brinstar, the first room with the morph ball.  Room address appears to be 78190h, from adjacent room 7A2F7h.  Similarly the room to Kraid's elevator isn't accessible from here either (address 788D7h).

I also tried entering these rooms from the map editor.  In Crateria's case, I am put into the connecting room (792FDh) and in Brinstar's case, I get an error which says "No rooms found for this point!".

One thing these inaccessible rooms have in common is that the room address is before the earliest address in the list, so I'm wondering if that is the reason for being unable to access them.  Does anyone know how to (or if it's possible to) access rooms before 791F8h in SMILE?

Thanks!

Quietus

Edit history:

Quietus: 2011-07-19 09:15:22 am

2011-07-19 09:14:36 am

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

The only thing I can think of would be that it's related to the level_entries.txt file. When creating a hack bigger than the original game, adding / expanding rooms, it becomes necessary to edit and update this file to correctly display the room tile data. Perhaps because you don't have the creator's level_entries.txt, SMILE is looking for rooms that it thinks don't exist (because it would be using the default level_entries.txt)? If it's not that, you'll have to wait for one of the gurus. Very Happy

JXQ

2011-07-19 01:25:04 pm

That sounds plausible - thanks for the idea/direction. I found this document on how level_entries.txt works, and how to do some basic manipulation of it: http://www.metroidconstruction.com/docs/squishy_ichigoRepointingLevelData.rtf

However, it seems like I don't have access to the ROM offset or the "SNESized" offset of the rooms I can't access in SMILE - I only have access to the room ID, whatever that represents. (And I only have that because of doors pointing to those inaccessible rooms FROM rooms that I can access.) So I'm not sure what values to add to the file.

So right now I'm stuck on how to convert, say, 791F8h (the room ID of the first room in Crateria with Samus's ship) into C2C2BBh (the room's level pointer in SNESized format) or 2142BBh (the actual location of the data in the ROM). If I can do that, I should be able to do so with other room IDs and slowly get access to all the rooms that aren't accessible currently.

I've looked through the ROM in a hex editor to look for any of these pointers in the first's room's data, but so far have not found anything familiar. I'll have more time later to do a bit more digging though - hopefully something shows itself.

That sounds plausible - thanks for the idea/direction.  I found this document on how level_entries.txt works, and how to do some basic manipulation of it: http://www.metroidconstruction.com/docs/squishy_ichigoRepointingLevelData.rtf

However, it seems like I don't have access to the ROM offset or the "SNESized" offset of the rooms I can't access in SMILE - I only have access to the room ID, whatever that represents.  (And I only have that because of doors pointing to those inaccessible rooms FROM rooms that I can access.)  So I'm not sure what values to add to the file.

So right now I'm stuck on how to convert, say, 791F8h (the room ID of the first room in Crateria with Samus's ship) into C2C2BBh (the room's level pointer in SNESized format) or 2142BBh (the actual location of the data in the ROM).  If I can do that, I should be able to do so with other room IDs and slowly get access to all the rooms that aren't accessible currently.

I've looked through the ROM in a hex editor to look for any of these pointers in the first's room's data, but so far have not found anything familiar.  I'll have more time later to do a bit more digging though - hopefully something shows itself.

JXQ

2011-07-19 10:00:54 pm

I seem to have figured it out. There was a lot of helpful information in this post:

http://m2k2.taigaforum.com/post/moonedit_smile_faq23.html#moonedit_smile_faq23

For example, that these room IDs seem to be pointers for certain parts of level data.

Anyway, the solution is to add the new room IDs (called "mbd"s?) to the files/mdb.txt file. As an example, I added 78102 as the first line and was able to access the room on the way to the Crateria-->Brinstar shaft (without an elevator).

Thanks very much for the help and the resources!

Quietus

2011-07-20 06:58:51 am

Super Secret Area - Dead Ahead!

Cool. Good luck with the map! aiwebs_004