Tuesday, August 29, 2017

v0.84

New things and such.

- Character color palette designer
- Gnome's speedup spell now increases your movement speed
- The moon phase and placement of stars on the end screen should be randomized like in vanilla SoM
- Additional fixes to hopefully prevent ring menus on edge of screen from softlocking

Link

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Character color designer

This is a thing I've had a few requests for, and I randomly felt like making today.


You can manually specify all 3 characters' colors and save them to a file so you can just load the same colors for every run if you so please.

It will probably show up in the next revision.

Discord Server

For discussions and suggestions.

https://discord.gg/YfmUHqU

Saturday, August 19, 2017

v0.83

I wasn't planning on putting out one of these for a bit, but I've fixed a bunch of stuff, so here we go.

Changes:
- Add a few random statistics that show up at the end after you beat the mana beast.  More are planned, but these ones are just what I had implemented when I fixed the other stuff here: Total kills, total deaths, damage dealt (total, physical, magical), damage taken (total, physical, magical), distance walked (in pixels), chests opened.
- Theoretically fix softlock that Yagamoth encountered related to opening NPC players' menus when they're on the bottom of the screen.  The threshold for that has been tightened by 16 pixels.
- Checking magic descriptions shouldn't crash the game anymore.
- Tonpole & friends should have their MP properly clipped down to the setting from the difficulty values now.
- Fix issue where when in some countries the application would try to parse decimal difficulty values with a "," instead of a "." resulting in way higher than normal values and a failure to generate the ROM.  This is something introduced under v0.80 when I added the configurable difficulty stuff.

Next up still:
- New tileset
- More statistics
- Music stuff; there are a lot of custom tracks available now but I'm having some minor issues with properly loading them sometimes, so for now they've been left out.

Link

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Current work

At the moment I'm sort of working on a bunch of different things at once, so progress is a little slow overall, but the next drop or two should have a bunch of new things.  These include:

- A new tileset

- I'm looking at a fix for the glitch where the background palettes flicker while layer 3 messages are up, particularly during some boss fights.  Seems to be an issue with certain types of sprites being on screen, and it's almost certainly a vanilla bug that I'm just triggering more often somehow.  There's a subroutine call I've found at $F4B7 that flips through the frames of the boy character's sprite every 5 frames that seems to have an impact on it, but I'm not sure why yet.  Certain sprites do and some others just don't.  I suspect they're accidentally corrupting VRAM under certain conditions for one frame but I have yet to find where or how.

- I'd also like to fix the vanilla glitch where casting lucent beam (or other palette-modifying spells) then immediately leaving the map causes your palettes to be totally fucked until you cast lucent beam again.  I have a pretty good idea what causes this, I just don't know where to look for it in RAM yet.

- Tracking for meaningless statistics similar to the credits of the LTTP rando.  I've gotten a few requests for this so I figured it would be fun to throw in.  Stuff like total kills & deaths, total physical/magical damage, chests opened, total distance moved, etc.

- A couple custom songs, which may or may not include the FF7 one posted earlier just yet.  I've actually come up with a routine to import the entire SD3 soundtrack, so I may end up using a few of those here and there.  I'm trying to get away with not bringing in custom samples when I can, and some of these actually sound pretty alright in SoM's sample set.

And longer-term:

- I'd like to have "bonus floors" that have some sort of boost associated with them (exp, gold, etc) and have no "indoor" map.  This would allow me to use some of the simpler tilesets like the desert, ice country, and luna palace interior without having to shoehorn in a way to have NPC houses.

- I want to add the "?" item to the drop pool and have it give a random effect--long lasting things like increased/decreased stats, and instantaneous effects like full heals, killing all on screen enemies, or dropping party HP to 1.  This would add an optional gambling element to the game that I think could be fun.

- More tilesets

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Music experiment

For a while now I've been wondering how feasible insertion of a song from another game into Secret of Mana was, without replacing one of the existing tracks.

The answer seems to be "kind of."

Here's a version of the FF7 boss theme injected into an ancient cave ROM.


It isn't perfect, but it's a proof of concept, and could probably be used to bring in all sorts of music if I wanted to.  As it stands, I don't know if/where I'll even use this or other tracks, though I think it would be neat in particular to bring in some SD3 or Legend of Mana tracks.

Here's an SPC Capture.