Metroid Prime hacking research

2015-11-01 03:21:59 pm

It's not used. It's a leftover from one of the old demos.

2015-11-02 03:42:10 am

Quote from Odylg:

Also, out of curiosity, would it be possible to change what options are set to by default? For example hint system off by default?

I think something in PlayerTweaks handles that, I'll take a look.

Aruki

2015-11-02 12:01:58 pm

Hey, so this isn't really Metroid related, but if anyone's wondering, the job I got just solidified into a permanent position, so I think I can tell you all what I'm working on now: it's A Hat in Time by Gears for Breakfast!

I -have- actually been able to get some work done over the last month on PWE, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to continue development on it, though obviously it'll have to slow down a bit. Things are still getting done though!

Willphonse

2015-11-02 01:53:59 pm

Hello?

Quote from Parax:

Hey, so this isn't really Metroid related, but if anyone's wondering, the job I got just solidified into a permanent position, so I think I can tell you all what I'm working on now: it's A Hat in Time by Gears for Breakfast!

I -have- actually been able to get some work done over the last month on PWE, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to continue development on it, though obviously it'll have to slow down a bit. Things are still getting done though!

Oh wow!! I remember playing that game during Alpha. This is great news, and I wish you the best of luck!

Odylg

2015-11-06 08:36:03 pm

I run this here hotel of an evening

Yet another question: Why can't I import banners? Even the standard ones throw a "Wrong BMP" error in my face

Antidote

2015-11-07 12:36:21 pm

They have to be 24bit.

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2015-11-17 11:50:46 pm

2015-11-17 11:50:28 pm

I've checked out the tweaks and I can't seem to find anything.
That doesn't mean I haven't missed anything but it MIGHT be hard coded.

Caveberry

2015-11-26 02:00:26 am

getting there...

Congrats on the new job parax! AHIT looks to be really amazing. That genre of games seems to be completely looked over nowadays.

Point being, it really sucks that you can't keep on this full time. Do you have any plans to turn over the code to another person, and let them work in tandem with you? I still have my dream of playing portal like MP rooms. I would love it if we could reach the super metroid rom hack levels, but only on prime.

Aruki

Edit history:

Aruki: 2015-12-01 08:35:05 am

Aruki: 2015-12-01 08:33:13 am

2015-11-26 03:21:47 am

Nah, I'm gonna keep working on it myself when I have time. I've actually gotten quite a lot of work done on PWE over the last few days - made a bunch of backend changes and I have billboards completely functional now, plus some other extras. I think I'll be able to do both.

edit: So, some of the stuff I had in my to-do list is now done and others I think I'll be putting on the backburner until post-release for the sake of getting something out sooner rather than later (prefabs/better collision rendering/DKCR dynamic lights and rendering). Most of what's left probably won't be very hard to implement. The most annoying part is that we still have some 60 DKCR templates to do (75/138 are done) and there are a bunch of UI changes I want to make, which I'm not very good at, so I'll need to try to improve on that. Still don't know about 2015 but I don't really see why it would take longer than early 2016.

Aruki

2015-12-25 10:07:12 am

Made some progress on DKCR. We previously did a bunch of the DKCR templates by hand by examining a disassembly of the dol in IDA, figuring out what values the game was loading in defaults, and figuring out which addresses were being used by which properties to associate those default values with the properties. We did about half of them that way before I got pulled away due to the whole getting-a-job thing which put the DKCR templates on hold for a bit. Recently decided I wanted to come back to it to get it done, and also decided I did not want to do the rest of them by hand. So I wrote a tool that opens the dol and reads the bytecode directly. It executes the property initialization code directly to load the default parameters of all the properties into memory, then parses the loader code line-by-line to figure out the property IDs and which address their corresponding data is at and what type they are. I've spent probably about a week on this in total, so not too bad, and currently I've finally got a text file that contains the ID and default value of every property for every object in the game (minus the dynamically linked ones in the RSOs - haven't done those yet). It's saved me a ton of work, and it's more accurate too - I've already caught a few mistakes in our original handmade templates by comparing the output of this tool with our templates.

What needs to be done now is making sure the output is completely correct and exporting it to PWE's template format, plus getting it set up so I can load the RSO files and grab the properties out of those too. I'm feeling pretty good about the chances of PWE having good DKCR support on release!

Made some progress on DKCR. We previously did a bunch of the DKCR templates by hand by examining a disassembly of the dol in IDA, figuring out what values the game was loading in defaults, and figuring out which addresses were being used by which properties to associate those default values with the properties. We did about half of them that way before I got pulled away due to the whole getting-a-job thing which put the DKCR templates on hold for a bit. Recently decided I wanted to come back to it to get it done, and also decided I did not want to do the rest of them by hand. So I wrote a tool that opens the dol and reads the bytecode directly. It executes the property initialization code directly to load the default parameters of all the properties into memory, then parses the loader code line-by-line to figure out the property IDs and which address their corresponding data is at and what type they are. I've spent probably about a week on this in total, so not too bad, and currently I've finally got a text file that contains the ID and default value of every property for every object in the game (minus the dynamically linked ones in the RSOs - haven't done those yet). It's saved me a ton of work, and it's more accurate too - I've already caught a few mistakes in our original handmade templates by comparing the output of this tool with our templates.

What needs to be done now is making sure the output is completely correct and exporting it to PWE's template format, plus getting it set up so I can load the RSO files and grab the properties out of those too. I'm feeling pretty good about the chances of PWE having good DKCR support on release!

Crythix

2015-12-28 12:47:03 am

death yon

Out of simple curiosity, (and without having to scrap through every last post in this thread) what do you believe the Metroid Prime engine will be capable of in terms of modding?

Is it going to be on the same level of Half Life per say, with custom enemies, models and plots; or will it be much lighter than that?

I'm so grateful people are looking into modding Metroid! Ahhh, made my day for sure!

Aruki

2015-12-28 09:33:22 am

It's a very flexible engine, there's definitely a lot that could be done with it.

Aruki

2015-12-31 12:30:25 am

Okay, so this is kinda funny. I just noticed on the Prime 2 demo disc, most of the .rels end with the letter P, but some of them have two versions, one with the P and one without. The non-P versions have the same module IDs as the P versions and they seem to be debug builds that contain a bunch of extra debug strings that aren't in the P version (same kind of strings that can be found in the Corruption prototype build). The funny part is, the non-P ones are all present towards the end of the alphabet - Sporb, StoneToad, Tryclops, Tweaks, WallCrawler, WallCrawlerSwarm, WallWalker, and WispTentacle have them. So it seems like somebody at Retro was going down the list and deleting the debug builds from the demo disc, and then they got distracted halfway through and forgot to finish.

Good for us at least :P

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2016-01-03 12:33:24 am

2016-01-03 12:32:59 am

That 'P' probably stands for Production, as I doubt it means PAL. If so, the debug hypothesis makes sense.

Aruki

2016-01-03 01:34:36 am

Yeah, that was my guess too.

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2016-01-05 04:59:15 am

Antidote: 2016-01-05 04:57:56 am

Antidote: 2016-01-05 04:50:30 am

Antidote: 2016-01-05 04:44:08 am

Antidote: 2016-01-05 12:28:11 am

Antidote: 2016-01-05 12:27:24 am

2016-01-05 12:27:14 am

Hey guys, it's been a while since Jack and I have posted anything about our projects so I thought I'd post a couple teaser shots of our upcoming editor:
Splash Screen:

File/Directory Browser

If there are any errors in the translations please ignore them, they're definitely preliminary and mostly there to test our localization code.

Andrew Mills

2016-01-05 03:41:01 am

Strategy Guide Writer

Congrats on the new job Parax, hope you find game professional game development not too stressful!

I have a cheeky request: Can someone provide me with a raw dump of the images used in the unlockable galleries (.PNG if possible). Or would it be a headache to do? I'd like to use them in a new MP project I've started but I want to use the highest quality assets possible for it.

Thanks :)

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2016-01-05 04:06:58 am

2016-01-05 03:50:37 am

We technically can't, that's distributing copyrighted material.

Andrew Mills

Edit history:

Andrew Mills: 2016-01-05 04:42:22 am

2016-01-05 04:41:54 am

Strategy Guide Writer

Quote from Antidote:

We technically can't, that's distributing copyrighted material.

You seem to overlook the fact that every screenshot and video that's on this forum or that was even on SCU fell under that category. I'm 99.99% sure Nintendo wouldn't give a monkey's about it these days. Shhh

Oh, and thanks... ;)

Antidote

2016-01-05 04:45:43 am

"Technically" Whistle

Aruki

2016-01-15 06:44:57 pm

So this isn't the most super exciting update ever, but for a while a lot of us have been wondering how MP2/3 know which world models to associate scans with, since we couldn't find the data anywhere in the MREA format. Then the other day Miles noticed that the EGMC format had a bunch of PointOfInterest instance IDs in it, and from there we connected the dots and realized that was probably where it was done. EGMC's an extremely basic format and it just contains an array where each element is two values - one of them is the POI ID so it stands to reason the other one was a model ID or index. Antidote and I spent some time looking into the IDs last night and we figured out how to associate the model surfaces with the ID that EGMC uses (it's the table of shorts after the surface sections). Then I wrote up some code in PWE to load the file and visualize the data, and...

I'm still working on this, but I guess this means PWE supports EGMC now, so yay :P

So this isn't the most super exciting update ever, but for a while a lot of us have been wondering how MP2/3 know which world models to associate scans with, since we couldn't find the data anywhere in the MREA format. Then the other day Miles noticed that the EGMC format had a bunch of PointOfInterest instance IDs in it, and from there we connected the dots and realized that was probably where it was done. EGMC's an extremely basic format and it just contains an array where each element is two values - one of them is the POI ID so it stands to reason the other one was a model ID or index. Antidote and I spent some time looking into the IDs last night and we figured out how to associate the model surfaces with the ID that EGMC uses (it's the table of shorts after the surface sections). Then I wrote up some code in PWE to load the file and visualize the data, and...

[img]http://i.imgur.com/UUNO0xb.jpg[/img]

I'm still working on this, but I guess this means PWE supports EGMC now, so yay :P

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2016-01-15 08:22:54 pm

Antidote: 2016-01-15 07:56:48 pm

2016-01-15 07:56:26 pm

On a rather unimportant but "huh, thats rather interesting" note, in the room with the GF Ship there is a dish that you collide with when using the canon, it has a POI but it's totally unused, it doesn't even have EGMC data associated with it!

Aruki

Edit history:

Aruki: 2016-01-16 03:01:21 am

Aruki: 2016-01-16 02:59:21 am

Aruki: 2016-01-16 02:37:11 am

2016-01-16 01:27:28 am

I have a functional editor interface for EGMC now

EGMC is a trivial format so I think I'll try writing the file back out so I can see the changes ingame

edit: and done!

Antidote

2016-01-16 04:08:03 am

Needs moar scan!

Antidote

Edit history:

Antidote: 2016-01-22 08:11:46 am

2016-01-22 08:11:06 am

Recent breakthrough, we have FRME support in hecl!!!

It's still preliminary and needs more fine-tuning, and support for more widget types, but it's a start!