ROM Hacking Discussions

[colcolstyles]

Compare his ledges with these.

But if you removed the "slime pools" in the southwestern corner, wouldn't the two look the same?

 

[Ninja Caterpie]

But if you removed the "slime pools" in the southwestern corner, wouldn't the two look the same?

-cough- Look closer. The mountain does an about turn. In his, it only curves once.

Also, I believe they're meant to go with mini-ledges. But that's subjective.

 

[Luck]

Do you mean the fact that they used the normal mountain tiles to show inclination like in various spots in this map (warning: only a slight page-breaker), particularly in the northern half, instead of jump-over-able ledges?

Yes, and I don't like how people actually get their rating hurt because it doesn't look natural. Be aware that this is in the most natural region of all of them. I can honestly see the point of those big ledges, albeit the fact that they don't look that nice. They also do other stuff in many other places, such as Lilycove City and the path to Mt. Chimney. They make the big ledges into little ledges, yet I don't see people ever using them because it looks 'unnatural' especially in the most natural region. Does it matter on the game? Because The Legend of Zelda does that very thing many times and no one ever complains about it, even with the ugly old tiles that they had in Oracle of Ages and LADX.

Contrary to what I believed for quite some time, just because Nintendo does it doesn't make it correct. Route 11 has a whole slew of tree shadow errors along the southern border (and a whole lot more in various places throughout Kanto) and there are some errors with the water-edge tiles in the two maps on the right in the Meteor Falls sheet you linked to. The point is: Nintendo may have used that protruding mountain-thingy in one of their official maps but it still looks ugly :\

Speaking of those, I was playing Firered, and I noticed that viridian forest had a few tile errors in them(probably more that I didn't see.)
For example, near the end of the Viridian forest, the big trees to the right of the gatehouse use the wrong tiles even though they used the tiles perfectly fine everywhere else.

 

[Ninja Caterpie]

Yes, and I don't like how people actually get their rating hurt because it doesn't look natural. Be aware that this is in the most natural region of all of them. I can honestly see the point of those big ledges, albeit the fact that they don't look that nice. They also do other stuff in many other places, such as Lilycove City and the path to Mt. Chimney. They make the big ledges into little ledges, yet I don't see people ever using them because it looks 'unnatural' especially in the most natural region. Does it matter on the game? Because The Legend of Zelda does that very thing many times and no one ever complains about it, even with the ugly old tiles that they had in Oracle of Ages and LADX.

Obviously, then, their idea of "natural" is very skewed. Using tiles in that manner contributes to MORE naturalism, because since when does every single hill have stairs as the only climbable part?

 

[Luck]

Obviously, then, their idea of "natural" is very skewed. Using tiles in that manner contributes to MORE naturalism, because since when does every single hill have stairs as the only climbable part?

Well, places could always be a newly discovered area. Just look at my description in MOTM. It was only recently found, but it was a good and quick way to travel from one area to another, so a path to the other side was formed before cultivating and picking the rewards.

 

[Ninja Caterpie]

Well, places could always be a newly discovered area. Just look at my description in MOTM. It was only recently found, but it was a good and quick way to travel from one area to another, so a path to the other side was formed before cultivating and picking the rewards.

That's...not exactly what I meant...

Go outside, and to the nearest depression/other thing in the ground. Is it so steep you can't go down/up it without stairs?

 

[thethethethe]

Sorry to go off the topic of this discussion, but I was just wondering something. If there were plans to not include every Pokemon, thereby removing the possibility of catching each one, should the Pokedex still be included in the hack?

 

[Luck]

That's...not exactly what I meant...

Go outside, and to the nearest depression/other thing in the ground. Is it so steep you can't go down/up it without stairs?

No, but you would get seriously injured if you actually managed to trip while on the mountains. I think they meant to make it safe, despite the numerous ledges.

 

[Ninja Caterpie]

Sorry to go off the topic of this discussion, but I was just wondering something. If there were plans to not include every Pokemon, thereby removing the possibility of catching each one, should the Pokedex still be included in the hack?

If you want it to be. The Pokedex is in every Pokemon game, even if you can't get all the Pokemon in said game.

 

[colcolstyles]

Sorry to go off the topic of this discussion, but I was just wondering something. If there were plans to not include every Pokemon, thereby removing the possibility of catching each one, should the Pokedex still be included in the hack?

I think the pokédex should be included because the player can always trade over pokémon from other games, unless you've disabled that option.

 

[Satoshi Ookami]

Also sorry to go off but I have a question for you all especially FR hackers.
Guys have you tried to resize OWs with OW Changer?
My question is if it worked in ROM and if not if there's some way to make it work.

 

[Pokepal17]

Some of you may know that I was once looking into the subject of tile animations (flowers, water, etc.). That was a while ago and back then I didn't know nearly as much about ROM Hacking as I do now. After being spurred by a particular member on these forums, I recently took up pursuing my goal of adding entirely new animations to a ROM once again. Unlike previous attempts, however, this time I have something to show for my efforts.
Ladies and gentlemen (well, let's be honest, mostly gentlemen), I present to you my latest work. Behold:



As you can see, I have achieved success at inserting brand new tile animations into a ROM without overwriting the existing animations. Late last night, I finally got the standard Ruby/Sapphire flower inserted and working alongside the standard Emerald flower but I postponed publishing my findings so that I could expand my accomplishments by adding a third and then a fourth flower (the standard Fire Red/Leaf Green flower and the Celadon City Gym flower, respectively). This process took a lot of time, much of which was spent absorbed in various ASM tutorials (see the Credits section), and effort but I am glad that I can finally say I have succeeded.

There is, however, much more progress to be made. All I have done so far is copy the code from the standard flower and edit various addresses to allow for my own flowers. However, as some of you may know, the standard Fire Red flower has five frames while the Emerald flower has only four. Moving forward from here, I would like to experiment with the routine to see about changing the number of frames in a tile animation. I plan to compare and contrast the code from the various animations and hopefully draw a conclusion on what must be done to accomplish this. I also did all of my work in an Emerald ROM (besides ripping the Fire Red flower animations) so I would also like to experiment with adding new tile animations to another ROM Base (specifically Fire Red given how widely it is hacked). Finally, my work has been limited to primary tilesets (Tileset 0 to be exact) so another step could be looking into the process of adding new animations to secondary tilesets. I believe that it won't be too different from primary tilesets but you never know.

For those of you who are interested in how I did this, I'm afraid you will have to wait for some time. This whole affair took many, many hours (not including even more hours spent on my initial attempts) and I don't think I can just simply write up the process. However, I'm planning on cleaning things up and then maybe releasing a patch which has an assortment of flower animations and maybe even some other animations (fountains, fireplaces, the list goes on and on). I might even release a tutorial on how to do this but that would take a loooong time to draft. Also, I doubt I can make a tool for adding new tile animations given my lack of programming experience beyond C++ and very basic ASM. By the way, if you're thinking about giving this a try later, adding animations doesn't require you to write much ASM code, as you can borrow from other animations to get your desired effect. However, I would recommend having a basic knowledge of assembly if you do plan on attempting it. My grasp on ASM is, to be honest, pretty abysmal so it just goes to show how much you can do without intimate knowledge of ASM.

Credits:
There are a few people I'd like to thank for making this possible.
1. Juan - He recently published a document on tile animations which, though it did not specify how to add new animations, both encouraged me to give things another shot and cleared up some issues I had run into before.
2. JPAN - His THUMB tutorial was very helpful and helped me grasp some of the basic concepts of ASM which allowed me to do what I did.
3. HackMew - Also helped me with ASM. It was a method that I discovered in his "shiny pokémon" tutorial that gave me an epiphany in which I realized how I might be able to go about adding new tile animations.

That's pretty much it. Discuss.

edit: Also, in the video, just north of the flowers you can see some water-edge tiles with an animated "ridge". This animated "border" (as Juan called it) is part of the main outdoor tileset (Tileset 0) but the only map that it shows up in, to my knowledge, is Route 122. So in case any of you are wondering, that's what it is.

edit2: Ooh! 555 posts ^_^

Awesome!Awesome!Awesome!

I have a question though, can you change which palette the animation will use e.g. door animation uses palette 7 instead of palette 9. Also, I've read this completely, but I would like to ask - can you intergrate this onto Fire Red and are you planning to make a tutorial for this?

 

[Juan]

How nice that someone took advantage of my documentation. ^^

edit: Also, in the video, just north of the flowers you can see some water-edge tiles with an animated "ridge". This animated "border" (as Juan called it) is part of the main outdoor tileset (Tileset 0) but the only map that it shows up in, to my knowledge, is Route 122. So in case any of you are wondering, that's what it is.

Eh, animations of the main tileset can be used both in the main blocks and the secondary (Route 122), but the animations of the secondary tileset should be used only in secundary blocks.

I have a question though, can you change which palette the animation will use e.g. door animation uses palette 7 instead of palette 9. Also, I've read this completely, but I would like to ask - can you intergrate this onto Fire Red and are you planning to make a tutorial for this?

'Door animations' are different then 'tile animations'.
Tile animations uses the same pallete of tile.

Fire Red animations = Emerald animations.
The only difference is the structure of the tileset, which was explained by LU-HO some time ago.

 

[colcolstyles]

Awesome!Awesome!Awesome!

Thanks ^^

I have a question though, can you change which palette the animation will use e.g. door animation uses palette 7 instead of palette 9.

As Juan said, door animations are different. However, ZodiacDaGreat recently released a tool which, I believe, can do exactly that.

Also, I've read this completely, but I would like to ask - can you intergrate this onto Fire Red and are you planning to make a tutorial for this?

Well if you had read this completely, you would know that I am planning on posting how I did this sometime in the future. I want to, however, get a much deeper understanding of the tile animations before I attempt to teach them so don't hold your breath.
As for Fire Red, it isn't much different from Emerald, as Juan said. I dissembled some of the code earlier and it looks very similar. Some offsets and some code would have to be different but for the most part, they're very similar.

How nice that someone took advantage of my documentation. ^^

If it weren't for your document, I probably couldn't have accomplished this.

Eh, animations of the main tileset can be used both in the main blocks and the secondary (Route 122), but the animations of the secondary tileset should be used only in secundary blocks.

Yeah, I know. I just thought it was weird that the animations are present in the primary tileset but they weren't used except in a single secondary tileset :\

 

[Juan]

Yeah, I know. I just thought it was weird that the animations are present in the primary tileset but they weren't used except in a single secondary tileset :\

Yeah, it took me a long time to find where that animation was used. :laugh:

 

[hi sir tomato my password is syvniti]

Sorry to go off the topic of this discussion, but I was just wondering something. If there were plans to not include every Pokemon, thereby removing the possibility of catching each one, should the Pokedex still be included in the hack?

It's SOOO hard to guess why you ask that...
Ofcause we <3 the pokedex!!! It's one of the most importent part of a pkmn game!

 

[Pokepal17]

It's SOOO hard to guess why you ask that...
Ofcause we <3 the pokedex!!! It's one of the most importent part of a pkmn game!

Aye Sebbe, so true.

New topic on scripting.

When you make scripts do you try and get them perfect and optimize them or do you just not bother due to laziness?

I'm the first one, yo'll always find me looking for offsets for already compiled things to optimize scripting space.

 

[colcolstyles]

When you make scripts do you try and get them perfect and optimize them or do you just not bother due to laziness?

I'm the first one, yo'll always find me looking for offsets for already compiled things to optimize scripting space.

I usually try to save space when I can. I have some offsets of common 'applymovements' in my XSE notepad that I re-use over and over again (like face left, face right, etc.). I also have a few code segments that I use a lot like "call @setrivalOW" (changes all OWs with Picture No. 240 to the opposite gender's OW), "call @playrivaltheme", and a function that I use for showing exclamation boxes in Emerald (because it's done a little differently in Emerald).

 

[Pokepal17]

I usually try to save space when I can. I have some offsets of common 'applymovements' in my XSE notepad that I re-use over and over again (like face left, face right, etc.). I also have a few code segments that I use a lot like "call @setrivalOW" (changes all OWs with Picture No. 240 to the opposite gender's OW), "call @playrivaltheme", and a function that I use for showing exclamation boxes in Emerald (because it's done a little differently in Emerald).

That's good, I might use those ideas. :P

However using a call to a playsong isn't a good idea because play song is the same amount of bytes so calling it would use an extra 5 bytes to the get to the playsong and an extra byte for a return. A good idea, nonetheless. :3

 

[colcolstyles]

However using a call to a playsong isn't a good idea because play song is the same amount of bytes so calling it would use an extra 5 bytes to the get to the playsong and an extra byte for a return. A good idea, nonetheless. :3

But I first have to check for the player's gender and from there have two call statements so that the right theme is played.