The new innovations and such is making this hack look much better than any i've seen before. Needless to say, i'm more than excited to play it. I really hope you decide to finish it, and have your hack be known as one of the best out there. (I'm almost certain it will be.)
Sorry I haven't uploaded the video yet. I actually can't seem to boot the computer it's on. Good thing I use my flash drive for my hacking, eh? :)
I may just make a new video soon. It'll be the last before the hack is released, aiming for May. Again, thanks for all the encouragement, it goes a long way.
Good thing I use my flash drive for my hacking, eh? :)
Hey! So do I!
This looks great so far! Good luck on your future hacking on Aegis, hope everything goes well for you. I did notice you had one bug on the first post. Am I going to far if I ask what it was?
I'm kinda wondering. Are you going to do a few palette changes on the suit? I noticed the Varia Suit seemed darker in your presentation. Any palette changes relating to the story would be good.
Think I've found a way to skip the MB fight, thanks to help from the geniuses (geniusi?) on #jzd. Learning assembly's coming along well, so I'll probably use some custom-made PLMs for this mod. Nothing awesome, no new items or anything, but subtle things that will let me make the game feel more complete.
The one bug's related to a room I changed the enemies in. They aren't displaying properly and the background is a bit off. Easy fix would be to change the enemies, but I think I'll knock that out tonight regardless. There's, like, two graphical bugs I know of too, but they're so minor you wouldn't even notice them if you weren't looking for them, so I don't count them. May still fix it before I release the hack, though.
I've changed the feel of some old items. Samus starts with the Varia Suit. The upgrade that was the Varia Suit is now the Radia Suit and grants protection against irradiation (allowing travel in the deserts of Radia, obviously). The other upgrade is Gravity Suit + something else. You'll see.
Beams work differently. As someone pointed out, the Ice Beam offers rapidfire, at the cost of slightly reduced damage. Some enemies take double damage from ice, and others are immune to ice damage. To counteract that, the Wave Beam is now the Heat Beam, which fires at a reduced rate and can melt frozen obstacles, as well as cause increased damage to cold enemies. Obviously some enemies are immune to heat. Working on a minor ASM hack to keep both from being activated simultaneously (think Plasma and Spazer). Obviously those beams are different as well.
You know, like in DrewSeph's Redesign hack, I hope that it doesn't come down to this:
About the separate Beams part, I hope that you can crack up a way to swap beams without having to pause all the time. Too bad you can't alter the title sequence to match your hack, or show your demos in-game. I also like the way you can now program beam-elements now. So, no beam with electricity (thought Wave Beam from Prime, though Plasma had heat). Do we also start with the Charge Beam and Morph Ball?
The more you say about this hack, the more I want to play it. Haven't played a hack in awhile, infact I'd wager it's been a dry spell for quite a few of us. I'd love to learn assembly but its hard enough juggling basic hacking into my life. Good on you! :D
You know, like in DrewSeph's Redesign hack, I hope that it doesn't come down to this:
About the separate Beams part, I hope that you can crack up a way to swap beams without having to pause all the time. Too bad you can't alter the title sequence to match your hack, or show your demos in-game. I also like the way you can now program beam-elements now. So, no beam with electricity (thought Wave Beam from Prime, though Plasma had heat). Do we also start with the Charge Beam and Morph Ball?
Well,
a charged beam does damage regardless of element, though ice-type enemies won't be frozen by it, just killed. I may still look into adding a "toggle beams" button (using auto-run, like Kej's patch for controls did) but I have no idea right now if that's within my knowledge. In the meantime, The ice beam always overrides the heat beam.
It's geniuses. iirc "ii" is only used as a plural when a word both ends in "–ius" and has more than two syllables. And you can usually just use "–iuses" as an alternative anyway.
but their is one thing that bothers me....................
how the hell did you get the 8*8 fonts. the only reason im asking is because they. would go well with my hack which is based around a gf ship not like aegis tho since i was planning this before. the teaser was shown(i think) so if you could please tell me how :) much appreciated.
how the hell did you get the 8*8 fonts. the only reason im asking is because they. would go well with my hack which is based around a gf ship not like aegis tho since i was planning this before. the teaser was shown(i think) so if you could please tell me how :) much appreciated.
Same way I got most of the other tiles. I drew them. ;) TBH I have no hesitation about sharing my tilesets, but as-is you have to shuffle around some pointers and I know that's not everyone's thing.
Oh, you know, I could probably make a IPS patch for that... hrm. Let me sleep on it.
Quote from uNsane:
Edit: Did you manage to get the ice PLMs you were talking about a while ago to work?
I actually think this wouldn't be too difficult but I decided to focus on level design for the time being. Glacia is more snowy than icy, so it may or may not make the cut.
Quote from playerman1230:
How large is your flashdrive? I'm thinking about getting a 2 GB one.
1 Gig, which I've almost filled up, but I also have some music to listen to and ASM/hex tools/notes/etc. on there as well. Not to mention at least 40 backups of the hack.
Quote from DMantra:
The more you say about this hack, the more I want to play it. Haven't played a hack in awhile, infact I'd wager it's been a dry spell for quite a few of us. I'd love to learn assembly but its hard enough juggling basic hacking into my life. Good on you! :D
Seems like big hacks have been "in the works" for a while. Last real hack I played was GD, I think. Everything else has been minor changes, or one room hacks, etc.
SFI, Limit, Legacy, GD, Redesign... those are the ones I've played that fall under that category. I'm trying to think if there's anything newer that's been a big hacking project (read: totally new Zebes). Not sure, I'm tired. Looking forward to yours. I don't particularly like "crazy hard" hacks personally, but savestates are enough to get me through if it's fun to play.
As far as learning ASM goes, I'm realizing I have a long way to go and I'm inevitably going to have to scrap some ideas for Aegis. However, once I finish this hack, I can focus that time and energy into learning ASM properly. Re-coding anything is much, much more reasonable a practice BEFORE you start a hack. :P
How large is your flashdrive? I'm thinking about getting a 2 GB one.
1 Gig, which I've almost filled up, but I also have some music to listen to and ASM/hex tools/notes/etc. on there as well. Not to mention at least 40 backups of the hack.
40 backups? Wow, you do pay attention to detail.
Quote from Acheron86:
Quote from DMantra:
The more you say about this hack, the more I want to play it. Haven't played a hack in awhile, infact I'd wager it's been a dry spell for quite a few of us. I'd love to learn assembly but its hard enough juggling basic hacking into my life. Good on you! :D
SFI, Limit, Legacy, GD, Redesign... those are the ones I've played that fall under that category. I'm trying to think if there's anything newer that's been a big hacking project (read: totally new Zebes). Not sure, I'm tired. Looking forward to yours. I don't particularly like "crazy hard" hacks personally, but savestates are enough to get me through if it's fun to play.
"Crazy hard", such as Impossible, Crazy, and probably the new-to-come Cliffhanger?
Well, I thought Redesign was pretty tough, if that's any idea. I still beat it, because it was such a complete and new hack. From what I saw, hacks like Impossible/Crazy were still basically the same Zebes, only with tougher fights and spikes everywhere, I think. That doesn't really do it for me.
You literally cannot have enough backups. I have lost far, far too much work to a stupid minor error. Even with backups every day, I lost three hours of work earlier this week. Bleh...
Backups are definitely your friend. I had 230+ backups of GD by the end and probably close to 150 for Dependence Almost any time the hack exploded (around 3 times for Dependence, twice for GD) I had a backup around only an hour back at max.
I didn't have any back-ups for anything until about halfway through Soup when I made one finally. I've yet to need one either, but I guess I'm just careful.
Well, I've also used the graphics/background editors (obviously!) and they tend to be a bit buggier. I'm also doing hexwork regularly (I've had to expand the ROM four times thus far) and a bad pointer at any given point could pretty much break everything. Worst is when I point towards anything $XX0000-$XX7FFF. I forget to use $8000-$FFFF every so often, and... well, yeah. Buh-bye, previous bank.
so acheron youve managed to expand the rom and point level data to another bank right. to give you more data to work with but whenever i try it in the following way the rooms always screw up is this due to the hex value ff ??? so i go to tools then expand my rom all good open up a hex editor and point the data to the very bottom bank. and it all goes fine but when i do it with another room the previous one turns to garbage :-s wtf could you please point me in the right direction. much appreciated.
so acheron youve managed to expand the rom and point level data to another bank right. to give you more data to work with but whenever i try it in the following way the rooms always screw up is this due to the hex value ff ??? so i go to tools then expand my rom all good open up a hex editor and point the data to the very bottom bank. and it all goes fine but when i do it with another room the previous one turns to garbage :-s wtf could you please point me in the right direction. much appreciated.
If you're tired of running out of space for a room, there's a cure. You'll just need some free space in the SMC to work with. SMILE has an option for expanding ROM space, so that's the best way to get some more room. The banks created by the "expand ROM" option will start at E0 and go on from there. A single bank is good enough for at least a dozen large rooms, so let's just expand it once for now. What you'll want to do next is open up the room you want to edit and pull up the pointers window. Change the Level Data pointer to point to free space. For your first new room, this would be E08000 (300000 in hex). Note this is E0-8-000 and not E0-0-000! Pointers will never have anything below 8000 in the second two bytes! As long as you make sure you're above 8000 for the bytes after the bank, go ahead and save, and you'll see right away that your size limit has changed to some ridiculous value. You can now edit to your heart's content and not worry a smidgen about silly room size issues. There is one more thing you should do, though, and that's add this room to the "level_entries" text file for SMILE, stored under the Smile/files folder. Add its hex location (300000) at the end of the file. This will make sure that SMILE keeps you from overwriting other rooms. Any time you decide to do this to rooms hereafter, you'll need to take an extra step and open up your ROM in a hex editor. Check where the free space begins after your new room at the very end of the ROM, so that you're not overwriting your first new room with your second one. If your new room goes from hex address 300000 to 301200, you'll want to use an address somewhere else. If you want to leave yourself a few hundred bytes in case you decide to edit the old first room later on, You should pick an address like 301400. Plug that into your pointer window to see what the pointer for that location should be (in this case, it's E09400, again, NOT E01400, as that's not above 8000!). Put this value into your Level Data pointer, and save. Don't forget to add this room's hex address (301400) to the "level_entries" file!
Edit: Man that's a dorky guide. Meh. Let me know if you have any questions.
