Showing posts with label street fighter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label street fighter. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Week Update
look at that! i really like where this is heading. So serene, so simple, so atari. Ive spent the past week digging through SFII's tileset and converting the whole game into this, and im getting close to being done. Then after that, new, simple interfaces to play it with!
-dylan
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Palette Swaping
So I finally got it together and figured out how to swap out palettes. There were a number of stupid things going on, but now its pretty simple to find where a tile references its tile and to change it (at least, for Street Fighter 2). I think the biggest problem I was having before is that I wasn't having trouble finding the palette for the title screen, but when I tried to find one for a character i never got anything. I thought the problem was in the transparency color and that value was messing things up, but that wasn't it. The whole time I was searching for palette data on the Player 1 character--the character that faces screen right. This meant all of my palettes corresponded with this. However, in the tileset, all of the characters are facing to screenleft. No wonder my palette searches weren't coming up with anything, i was looking for a mirrored version of what was there (silly japanese people and their backwards everything). After that, there were (and still are) a few small speedbumps in the process, but its nothing too painful now. Mostly just manually insterting the palette RGB values, because Tile Layer Pro still seems to have trouble importing palette files generated from Digisalt's apps. Still, im glad to have figured this out, as this now opens up a world of infinite (well, almost) color combinations. Tinkering can be seen below (abstracting further as you go down). The last one I liked so much theres even a video of it. Man, check out ryu's blood when he gets hit at 00:23. Radical
On a tangent to this issue and my problems with TileLayerPro, i stumbled on this wonderful java-based graphics editor today called Tile Molester (great name, right). Though really it's showing the same exact tile set in pretty much the same manner, for some reason after scrolling through SFII in it I discovered so many new things I never noticed before. Maybe it was looking at the tileset through a different program's eyes, im not sure. Either way, theres some fun stuff I found that ill have to look more into later. I cant say that Tile Molester is as useful as TileLayerPro as far as actual editing is concerned, but it is a great overall program for viewing and moving things around (it can also view graphics from other-gen systems i believe, like n64 and whatnot, which is pretty awesome. also, just the fact that it runs of java is sweet enough in itself).
The Tile Molester in all its glory
Also, here's a few videos from last week I forgot to put up here. The first is my attempt to decode the horrendous graphics problem of Mortal Kombat while the second was basically some glitch tests i happened to come across while i was jumbling around graphics in MK. Basically, changing the visual representation of hex data in TileLayerPro and seeing what happened. Also concerning Mortal Kombat, I really wanted to work more with MK than SFII because of its..."features" i suppose (lots of blood, fatalaties, etc), but after spending the past two weeks trying to crack its graphics and still being stuck Im not sure how hopeful its looking. I beleive the graphics are actually compressed, which if they are, means ive pretty much hit a brick wall because i definitely dont have the time to figure out how to decompress them at this point. Maybe some time in the future though. Ill give an update on the actual physical bending of the SNES sometime soon as well.
(a bunch of tests stitched together)
-dylan
On a tangent to this issue and my problems with TileLayerPro, i stumbled on this wonderful java-based graphics editor today called Tile Molester (great name, right). Though really it's showing the same exact tile set in pretty much the same manner, for some reason after scrolling through SFII in it I discovered so many new things I never noticed before. Maybe it was looking at the tileset through a different program's eyes, im not sure. Either way, theres some fun stuff I found that ill have to look more into later. I cant say that Tile Molester is as useful as TileLayerPro as far as actual editing is concerned, but it is a great overall program for viewing and moving things around (it can also view graphics from other-gen systems i believe, like n64 and whatnot, which is pretty awesome. also, just the fact that it runs of java is sweet enough in itself).
The Tile Molester in all its glory(a bunch of tests stitched together)
-dylan
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Week 07 Update
I'm not really sure where to start with this thing, since there's so much to go over since we've started. I suppose the best thing to do is start with where I'm at now and try to work my back backwards as I find more time to update. I was trying to focus on graphics this week (more specifically, sprites), and ended up look into how to swap out palettes for certain graphics. Essentially in a super nintendo tile there are 16 color slots which can be used to make up any single tile. The tile then refers to a palette, which tells the super nintendo what color values to put in those slots. It's a great concept for saving space, but can be a headache when you open up the tileset of a rom and get this because you don't have the right palette data:
So what that means is you have to find a way to decode the palette data for the tile you're looking to edit, as well as find where the palette data is referred to in the game (if, for example, you wanted to make Ryu's robe neon green). Conceptually its actually quite simple, and this wonderful person Digisalt has released this wonderful set of programs with an equally wonderful tutorial to accomplish this task (available here). Of course though, as things seem to go with this, my computer seems to have some disagreement with some form of software required or another. I don't think it's Digisalt's programs, which seem to be doing exactly what they're suppsosed to, but rather Tile Layer Pro, which is having a hard time loading palette data extracted from Digisalt's exe's (or rather, not loading any palette data at all). I'm working on figuring this out now, and I have a hunch it might be my computer (Windows XP and my graphics card seem to be very disagreeable with a lot of these programs floating around for rom hacking), so we'll see what happens with that. It's a nice trick to be able to have under your belt, and is actually quite simple as long as everything works properly.
Either way, that ended up not working, but as a result I did end up developing a (very crude) method of translating palette data from the game so that I could edit the "color slots" of the graphics (not the paletta data, but the acutal image itself). When first looking at that mess of tiles in Tile Layer Pro (see above) I thought, "Man, I'm never going to be able to do anything with this." But, after three weeks of staring at these tile sets and reorganizing them, they actually start to get pretty clear.
By focusing on a very distinct tile, such as the single tile that makes up Ryu's left foot when he's standing, it isn't too hard to sort through the tileset until you find what you're looking for. Then, taking a screenshot from ZSNES, i simply compared the actual in game palette colors to what was being read in Tile Layer Pro. After that it was a simple matter of copying over the 16 RGB values and all of a sudden the tile set is as easy to read as a Dr. Suess book. You can see a comparison below.
Once you get it to that point you can really do with it as you please. Of course, a videogame is an animation, not a still image, so even doing one little change would require you to modify every frame where that change is visible. As a test I added a little stupid red mask to Ryu. Kind of tedius, yes, and very pointless, yes, but it shows what can be done with this. I was even able to find in the tileset where Ryu's portraits were located so I could put the mask on the character select screen, as well as a badass scar on Ryu's right cheek (the portraits, by the way, required me to define a different palette to read them, which is always exciting). You can see a screengrab and a little video below of masked Ryu in action. You can see there are a few frames of his face I missed, and man, did i draw a lot of little red masks on little red faces.
(I just realized how bad the quality on this video is, sorry. But it gets the idea across)
On another note, I found out that the text in Street Fighter II is in fact editable. I was worried that the text would simply be some simple graphics located somewhere in the rom because really, how much text is there in Street Fighter? Well, more than I remember, apparently, because there's a whole lot you can change around, which is pretty exciting. In fact, pretty much every word in that game is changeable due to the fact that the amount of text in the game is so small. It makes it very easy to single out what you want to change and just go for it. Some screen shots below, I'm not really sure where to go with this, just that it's a very fun thing to have control over. I'll go over the process of translation/text editing sometime this next week, it's really quite easy and wonderful.
This is just a brief runover of what I've been up to this week, I'll keep in mind more thorough and clear explanations of this for the future. I also spent a lot of time messing around with F-Zero, which I unfortunately never really got a chance to play on the super nintendo as a child--a tragic story. It's so beautiful, i really would love to do something with it, but with its fancy "3D Engine" and bells and whistles, everything I did to it just made it crash and beep at me. Maybe I'll find something out with it in the future.
-dylan
So what that means is you have to find a way to decode the palette data for the tile you're looking to edit, as well as find where the palette data is referred to in the game (if, for example, you wanted to make Ryu's robe neon green). Conceptually its actually quite simple, and this wonderful person Digisalt has released this wonderful set of programs with an equally wonderful tutorial to accomplish this task (available here). Of course though, as things seem to go with this, my computer seems to have some disagreement with some form of software required or another. I don't think it's Digisalt's programs, which seem to be doing exactly what they're suppsosed to, but rather Tile Layer Pro, which is having a hard time loading palette data extracted from Digisalt's exe's (or rather, not loading any palette data at all). I'm working on figuring this out now, and I have a hunch it might be my computer (Windows XP and my graphics card seem to be very disagreeable with a lot of these programs floating around for rom hacking), so we'll see what happens with that. It's a nice trick to be able to have under your belt, and is actually quite simple as long as everything works properly.Either way, that ended up not working, but as a result I did end up developing a (very crude) method of translating palette data from the game so that I could edit the "color slots" of the graphics (not the paletta data, but the acutal image itself). When first looking at that mess of tiles in Tile Layer Pro (see above) I thought, "Man, I'm never going to be able to do anything with this." But, after three weeks of staring at these tile sets and reorganizing them, they actually start to get pretty clear.
By focusing on a very distinct tile, such as the single tile that makes up Ryu's left foot when he's standing, it isn't too hard to sort through the tileset until you find what you're looking for. Then, taking a screenshot from ZSNES, i simply compared the actual in game palette colors to what was being read in Tile Layer Pro. After that it was a simple matter of copying over the 16 RGB values and all of a sudden the tile set is as easy to read as a Dr. Suess book. You can see a comparison below.
Once you get it to that point you can really do with it as you please. Of course, a videogame is an animation, not a still image, so even doing one little change would require you to modify every frame where that change is visible. As a test I added a little stupid red mask to Ryu. Kind of tedius, yes, and very pointless, yes, but it shows what can be done with this. I was even able to find in the tileset where Ryu's portraits were located so I could put the mask on the character select screen, as well as a badass scar on Ryu's right cheek (the portraits, by the way, required me to define a different palette to read them, which is always exciting). You can see a screengrab and a little video below of masked Ryu in action. You can see there are a few frames of his face I missed, and man, did i draw a lot of little red masks on little red faces.
(I just realized how bad the quality on this video is, sorry. But it gets the idea across)
On another note, I found out that the text in Street Fighter II is in fact editable. I was worried that the text would simply be some simple graphics located somewhere in the rom because really, how much text is there in Street Fighter? Well, more than I remember, apparently, because there's a whole lot you can change around, which is pretty exciting. In fact, pretty much every word in that game is changeable due to the fact that the amount of text in the game is so small. It makes it very easy to single out what you want to change and just go for it. Some screen shots below, I'm not really sure where to go with this, just that it's a very fun thing to have control over. I'll go over the process of translation/text editing sometime this next week, it's really quite easy and wonderful.
This is just a brief runover of what I've been up to this week, I'll keep in mind more thorough and clear explanations of this for the future. I also spent a lot of time messing around with F-Zero, which I unfortunately never really got a chance to play on the super nintendo as a child--a tragic story. It's so beautiful, i really would love to do something with it, but with its fancy "3D Engine" and bells and whistles, everything I did to it just made it crash and beep at me. Maybe I'll find something out with it in the future.
-dylan
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