does this mean we are a step closer to having a way to make MP1 easily hackable(fully custom games)?
every piece of progress that gets posted here puts us a step closer.
Archived M2K2 Forum
Materials are basically what determines what a surface looks like. It does determine which textures get used on the model, but there's almost always more than one texture, and there's sometimes no textures at all, so that certainly isn't the only thing it does. In Metroid Prime they determine how a bunch of different color sources are mixed together to give a surface its ingame appearance, as well as things like how the surface is lit, whether Samus's reflection shows up on it, how texture coordinates are generated, how texture coordinates are animated (which is used for scrolling textures, reflections and specularity that move with the camera, etc), among other things.
Everything's on the wiki if you're interested in more specifics.
Everything's on the wiki if you're interested in more specifics.
I'm just assuming the reason is because "k" is more distinguishable when abbreviated. Konst colors are abbreviated in GX function names like "GXSetTevKColor" for instance. Makes it obvious what it's referring to. In Retro's case, "C" is already used as the class prefix, so it makes sense to distinguish const values with k instead of c. (Although that didn't stop them with "s", which is used for both structs and for static variables.)
Quote from wowsers:
wow, I actually expected it to be proper english grammar... well, guess I can't be right all off the time when it comes to documentation...
The trouble with english grammar in programming is that it sometimes clashes between mechanisms and introduces ambiguities..
I'm sure "const" is not used for identifying KColors since it is a reserved keyword in the C/C++ programming languages (which Nintendo's SDKs are written in):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Const_(computer_programming%29
This means that Nintendo's developers wouldn't be able to use the term "const" in their code without the compiler yelling at them..
Took a look at MP2's ANCS files, and it turns out that they changed a few things, however even though ANCS doesn't technically have a version (just to shorts at the beginning) we're able to tell which version we need to load. Which makes things a little less painful.
What we can check is actually part of the CharacterNode, the value after the node ID is a value which determines which particle lists are available, but we can also re-purpose that to detect MP2, in MP1 it's either 5 or 6, in MP2 it's always 10, and since it's reliable (so reliable I set an assert, something which you normally only do when you KNOW something shouldn't happen) we're able to use that as our "Version" field.
What we can check is actually part of the CharacterNode, the value after the node ID is a value which determines which particle lists are available, but we can also re-purpose that to detect MP2, in MP1 it's either 5 or 6, in MP2 it's always 10, and since it's reliable (so reliable I set an assert, something which you normally only do when you KNOW something shouldn't happen) we're able to use that as our "Version" field.
So far, pretty much all of AROT is known; it will eventually control rendering of areas in RetroView.
http://www.metroid2002.com/retromodding/wiki/AROT_(MREA_Section%29
Here's a visualization of the root-octant's relationships with the area meshes:
http://www.metroid2002.com/retromodding/wiki/AROT_(MREA_Section%29
Here's a visualization of the root-octant's relationships with the area meshes: