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The terrible Dragon Roost Island SPC is giving me strong The Lion King SNES vibes, must be using some of the same instrumentation as the Pride Lands theme from that game.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:09
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FPzero posted:
The etecoon room is really neat, how they used a mix of blocks that are destroyed by creatures and gates that you have to shoot open to create a little puzzle obstacle course for you and the etecoons. Honestly, it’s just really neat how they made a bunch of mini challenges/puzzles for this area.
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Mar 5, 2024 21:48
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XavierGenisi posted:The etecoon room is really neat, how they used a mix of blocks that are destroyed by creatures and gates that you have to shoot open to create a little puzzle obstacle course for you and the etecoons. Honestly, it’s just really neat how they made a bunch of mini challenges/puzzles for this area. That's the one I had trouble with. I must have triggered a loop in their AI or something because I could not get them to do what they needed to do for the life of me, so I had to reset the room
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Mar 5, 2024 22:50
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:That's the one I had trouble with. I must have triggered a loop in their AI or something because I could not get them to do what they needed to do for the life of me, so I had to reset the room I actually never really had any problem with that room. I wanna say that if you just wait, the etecoons will start up again, but it's honestly been a while, so I could be misremembering. The power bomb room, meanwhile, gave me a lot of trouble for some reason. I don't really know why, but it was just a lot of running out of ammo in trial and error because I just wasn't getting how I'm supposed to hit the switches without activating the middle gate.
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Mar 5, 2024 22:56
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Judging by the video I watched to figure out how to get that one item in the reef. It looks like the etecoon's routine only moves onto the next step is samus is near them when it goes through whatever part of their loop involves 'should i move on?'.
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Mar 5, 2024 23:00
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This is honestly one of my favorite Super Metroid Romhacks and I'm very happy to see other people enjoying it.
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Mar 6, 2024 13:21
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 Episode 26 (FINAL): The Perfect 99.1% Run It's just so strange that the game doesn't seem to have enough items to get to 100%. How peculiar...  Thank you for watching Subversion! I'm not going to have a video up for this thread on Tuesday but I'll be back with the first video of the next hack a week from today. -------- Unrelated to Super Metroid, if you liked my previous Ocarina of Time romhack LPs (Nimpize Adventure, Master of Time, Gold Quest, Sealed Palace) I will be streaming a bunch of Hyrule Modding's Escape Room Competition on my Youtube at 4PM EST and then again later tonight at 8PM EST. They're escape room OoT mini hacks and we're gonna have a good time solving them!
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Mar 9, 2024 19:03
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What an ending. Congratulations on your totally-not-100% 99.1% run!
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Mar 9, 2024 19:13
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That was an excellent bonus boss. I guessed the correct chassis, but hadn't anticipated the wrinkles they threw in. Definitely impressive. Thanks for the LP! I'm looking forward to what you do next. EDIT: also, drat you for actually picking up that last ammo tank, instead of just looking at it and leaving the room 
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Mar 9, 2024 19:30
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Thanks for the LP of a neat romhack!
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Mar 9, 2024 19:50
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this was a cool hack
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Mar 9, 2024 21:48
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This was a great LP. Sad you had some annoyances with how you routed some items, but a really good playthrough. Some notes: As you mentioned, the Second Quest shuffles the items. A lot of the time when you guys were like "maybe you can sequence break here sooner?", those paths are actually meant for when you have a completely different loadout in the Second Quest. You take a VERY different path in Second Quest, which requires some pretty harrowing navigation without some of the mobility upgrades you got early on in the normal game. Additionally: There's an entire sequence of events you can do to receive a long series of hints as to how to unlock the secret thing, which starts with Saving the Animals. You can, however, skip right to the end of that sequence if you want! If anyone wants to rush ahead and check things out, you can go to Stair of Dawn, the vertical room on the right side of the Sky Temple with the wall spitter enemies, find the one with only one eye, and unequip all your beams but Ice. Then, you just shoot it. That'll unlock the way into a little room that fills in the map square to the left of the Stair of Dawn, the Odd Chamber. Inside is the unlock for the Second Quest, and you can just save and quit and start it immediately. I don't think you need to beat the game for that. It should also be noted that I'm pretty sure nothing happens if you attempt the sequence of events on a Second Quest file. So far as I know, that's the only real big unlock left in the game. The rest of the challenges and stuff in the menu are just that, challenges. Subversion is an amazingly good hack and a great display of what SMART can do. I hope we get more insane hacks like this going forward, because we've seen what people have done with the old tools and it's nuts, so I can't imagine what they'll do with new ones.
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Mar 9, 2024 22:10
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Kurui Reiten posted:This was a great LP. Sad you had some annoyances with how you routed some items, but a really good playthrough. I'm glad that thing I noticed ended up being something after all.
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Mar 9, 2024 22:41
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I really liked the second quest. Giving you the Screw Attack so early emphasizes exploration, which is my favorite part of Metroid
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Mar 10, 2024 01:54
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Cool hack! Feels like that's going to be tough to follow.
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Mar 11, 2024 02:34
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Until the second fight went faster, I was ready to say that the final Torizo fight was a bit over-indulgent in terms of how much damage it was soaking up. I still don't know why it didn't die the first time.
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Mar 11, 2024 03:12
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Geemer posted:I'm glad that thing I noticed ended up being something after all. Yeah, definitely. Shooting it with only ice equipped is pretty unlikely - but if doing that is at the end of the chain, what is the start of it?
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Mar 11, 2024 12:32
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DoubleNegative posted:Until the second fight went faster, I was ready to say that the final Torizo fight was a bit over-indulgent in terms of how much damage it was soaking up. I still don't know why it didn't die the first time. Who knows how much damage the beam does with all those damage amps, but I'm gonna guess it's "a lot more than a super missile", like probably around 4x more. And the accel charges mean you can fire them nearly as quickly as supers.
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Mar 11, 2024 12:40
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Crazy Achmed posted:Yeah, definitely. Shooting it with only ice equipped is pretty unlikely - but if doing that is at the end of the chain, what is the start of it? Saving the Animals, like I said. If I remember correctly, you have to run past your ship and head down, then right, and they're in the room below. As for it being the "last step", it's a bunch of stuff leading up to you getting the final instruction on what to do; you can just skip to the Ice Beam shot if you already know it. As it is, the specifics are more like Saving the Animals gives you a hint to check the demos, beating the game adds a new entry to the demo reels, there's a specific difference in one that leads you to a door that's otherwise invisible, that room gives you an instruction on how to get the final hint, and you figure that one out and it tells you to shoot only Ice Beam at the cyclops wall thing in the Stair of Dawn.
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Mar 12, 2024 00:52
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Ah, right. I love this kind of thing, a meta-puzzle is always on brand for the type of itch that metroidvanias let me scratch.
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Mar 12, 2024 11:36
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Welcome back! The next hack we're playing is Super Metroid: Searching for Items, created by Terimakasih way back in April 2005. It's very short, but it holds a certain level of significance in the community. The Metroid hacking community has some terminology to describe the way hacks are and the relevant ones here are "half hack" and "full hack". Half Hacks are hacks that build a new game on top of Zebes's existing room layouts. This was mostly due to editor limitations early on, as well as the general difficulty of hacking the game at the time. The world layout and map screen will be nearly identical to the vanilla game, but the contents of the rooms will often be changed. Half hacks are much more commonly seen in the early days of SM hacking, though you still see a handful of them pop up these days as either first projects or challenge hacks. Full Hacks are the hacks that change both room layouts and map layouts. Subversion was an example of a full hack, as it was completely different from the original in all ways. Most people attempt to make full hacks these days because not being restricted to the original game's layout allows for much more creativity. However, it's a lot harder to make full hacks due to the extensive requirements of working directly with the game's code, and it's only within the last few years that editors like SMART (mentioned during the Subversion LP) have made these processes more accessible. Searching for Items, then, is notable for being one of, if not the first, full hack completed and uploaded for all to play. It's not very long, and is only about 1/3 the size of the original game, but it crams the full 100% of items into its world and sets the player loose to uncover its secrets. It would hold on to this title for about a month, when the very next month, in May 2005, Super Metroid Legacy was released and became, in many peoples' eyes, the first "true" full hack by virtue of having all the qualities of a full hack described above and being about the same size as the original game. SFI has held up over the years, being a quick and easy hack to play with a constant dopamine drip from all the frequent items you'll be picking up. It's fun to take the time to go back and see an era of hacking this game when it was notable just to be able to do this at all, and that's what this quick LP is gonna look to do.  Episode 1: Door tube appreciation
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Mar 16, 2024 17:12
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I like Super Duper Metroid (except for the bland pallet), but it did always feel like a tech demo to me and now I know why. The open exploration didn't bother me, but how simple the bosses were did, but that makes sense for a demo. "Here's Draygon, you know what to do, here's what else we got"
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Mar 16, 2024 17:59
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oh man, I'd forgotten about the half-hack vs. full-hack thing. There was also a brief fad for one-room hacks, I dunno if you're planning on doing any of those. FP's rant about rails in Metroidvania design aligns closely with my own strongly-held opinions about the genre. Wide-open worlds sound great from a "freedom of exploration" standpoint, but they also all too often lead to the player going "OK, I just got a new thing, can I use it here? no, can I use it over there? no, can I use it at that spot? no, gently caress, where do I go next?!" Super Metroid, in contrast, doesn't give the player access to more than about half of one zone at a time until after they've climbed back out of Red Tower and gotten Power Bombs. Prior to that point, the gate in Green Hill Zone, and the giant fall in Red Tower itself, keep the player penned in so that they have to finish exploring Upper Norfair, assuming they don't know how to walljump or sequence break. I'm not going to claim that Super Metroid's world design is perfect, by any means, but it's very easy to tell the difference between it and games that just kinda toss you into a big open world and expect you to figure everything out yourself. (ask me about playing Hollow Knight and failing to stumble into the City of Tears until I'd been everywhere else )
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Mar 16, 2024 18:09
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I know you said you're not going for 100% items, but there is very obviously something to the left in the room directly above the Kraid Nest. As you arrive at the door down, the screen keeps scrolling to the left, ever-so-slightly.
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Mar 16, 2024 18:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:oh man, I'd forgotten about the half-hack vs. full-hack thing. There was also a brief fad for one-room hacks, I dunno if you're planning on doing any of those. A lot of people gush about how you can break out of the linear path in Super Metroid, but the thing that's missing in a lot of games that try to recreate it is having a linear path in the first place. You CAN do a Hell Run to get some stuff early, but that's in no way intended and the game is trying to lead you away from doing it. SM doesn't always succeed at that guidance as much as people might remember (hardly the only game where sometimes where to go is "obvious" only because we already know where to go) but they get it right, say, 90-95% of the time.
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Mar 16, 2024 18:42
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I enjoyed Super Duper Metroid. I felt like solidly decent romhack to show off all the various customization poo poo going on with Project Base and also some other shenanigans, but it wasn't anything truly outstanding. Just a pretty solid vanilla+ experience, more or less, though yeah, it had issues with being too open compared to other hacks, which can be annoying if you don't know how to get around, or don't have a map handy. This is an pretty intriguing hack so far. It might be old as hell and fairly basic compared to the sorts of things that later hacks have gotten up to, but it does look like it's held up pretty well despite that. The oldest hack that I've checked out myself is the original Redesign (I played it back in January), and that one absolutely has *not* held up. I think what likely works in SFI's favor is that it's smaller and shorter. It's just the first episode, and you've already collected a ton of items and beaten one proper boss. I can only imagine how quickly the rest of your playthrough goes if this sets the tone
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Mar 16, 2024 20:33
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XavierGenisi posted:This is an pretty intriguing hack so far. It might be old as hell and fairly basic compared to the sorts of things that later hacks have gotten up to, but it does look like it's held up pretty well despite that. The oldest hack that I've checked out myself is the original Redesign (I played it back in January), and that one absolutely has *not* held up. I think what likely works in SFI's favor is that it's smaller and shorter. It's just the first episode, and you've already collected a ton of items and beaten one proper boss. I can only imagine how quickly the rest of your playthrough goes if this sets the tone Hack size is a really big deal. It's surprisingly "easy" to make a hack that's just too big and has too much stuff in it. The pacing gets ruined, those critical dopamine hits from getting new items and unlocking new areas get spaced too far apart, and the game stops being fun. On the other hand, you very nearly cannot go wrong with a small, fast-paced hack.
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Mar 16, 2024 22:20
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I played one recently, I think it was called Cryogenics, that was short and did some pretty cool things. It was fairly short, but one thing I liked about it was it turned those big sections of rocks that are normally just platforms and walls and turned them into caves. Like, you'd go in the side and the black screen transition would happen, and you'd be in a cave system
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Mar 16, 2024 22:55
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In case it does actually come up, modern versions of Snes9x have compatibility features for old ZSNES bugs that some hacks have relied on. They're under Emulation -> Hacks.
Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 14:38
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Bruceski posted:A lot of people gush about how you can break out of the linear path in Super Metroid, but the thing that's missing in a lot of games that try to recreate it is having a linear path in the first place. You CAN do a Hell Run to get some stuff early, but that's in no way intended and the game is trying to lead you away from doing it. SM doesn't always succeed at that guidance as much as people might remember (hardly the only game where sometimes where to go is "obvious" only because we already know where to go) but they get it right, say, 90-95% of the time.  To me, the sign of a good hack is whether or not you can put it in front of a new(er) player of the base game and have them get through it while enjoying their time. But also game design is hard.
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Mar 18, 2024 19:08
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Ahh, someone else loved the Retsuplay videos. TELEPORT!
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Mar 18, 2024 22:33
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 Episode 2: Becoming ungovernable by 2D space Uh-oh. Contrary to the tone set at the end of the video, I've made the decision to continue playing the rest of this hack because it's not exactly very hard or time-consuming to get back to where we were. We just haven't recorded the remainder of it yet, so in the meantime, the next few videos will be of a different hack I had planned to start after finishing SFI, then we'll return to this.
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Mar 19, 2024 17:08
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This update reminds me of Rocman X (a.k.a. Thunder Blast Man), which Yagamoth ran at a GDQ once. He characterized it as a "puzzle platformer" because the screen scrolling would break in a similar fashion, rendering it very hard to tell where you needed to be. I guess the takeaway lesson is that you should be dropping savestates periodically 
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Mar 19, 2024 17:36
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Oh my god, that screen scrolling got bad. What even triggered it, besides bad luck?
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Mar 19, 2024 22:27
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DoubleNegative posted:Oh my god, that screen scrolling got bad. What even triggered it, besides bad luck? I think what's going on is that there's a vertical room with an unlocked horizontal camera, so when Samus goes near the edge of the screen, the camera scrolls left/right to keep her centered. At the bottom of the room, there's a horizontal door. If you go through that door without the camera first returning to the middle of the room, then you've triggered the issue. It's probably something like, the door tells the camera "scroll X units to the right", and assumes that this places the camera in a specific location, but since the camera is offset, it actually puts the camera on the wrong tile. And it stays offset from then on, which confuses rules about which tiles are loaded when and where those tiles are drawn.
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Mar 19, 2024 22:37
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So right around 10:25 in the video you'll see me fall down, shoot open a door, and go into it. What ends up happening is that the camera scroll doesn't move over quickly enough to be in the right position for a room transition to take place, so I end up transitioning the room while the door tiles are misaligned with the screen edge. This seems to screw everything up going forward and the result is what we saw in the video. A hard reset will fix the issue, but like I said there are no working save points in this hack so we were left with no option but to stop.
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Mar 19, 2024 22:38
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It's so weird that saving was such an issue considering how central to any game it is. It makes me genuinely wonder how Super Metroid handles saving internally for it to not just keep working with changes.
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Mar 20, 2024 00:31
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Searching For Level Geometry at the end there.
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Mar 20, 2024 00:36
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Good on Samus for finding a new way to destroy planets. There have actually been a few Link to the Past hacks come out in the past few years. A particularly well done one is Gerudo Exile. It's a pity Quest for Calatia never got finished, though.
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Mar 20, 2024 01:51
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Blaze Dragon posted:It's so weird that saving was such an issue considering how central to any game it is. It makes me genuinely wonder how Super Metroid handles saving internally for it to not just keep working with changes. I don't actually know how saving works under the covers, but from my background in software and gamedev, I'd asspull that it looks something like this: - Every map tile has associated save data. At minimum you need 2 bits for "is this tile drawn / has it been visited". Visiting a map station sets the "drawn" bit for some tiles. - Every save station has associated save data: the coordinates on the map (or the room ID) where Samus loads in when the save is loaded. (Notice how all of the save rooms look the same? that saves them from having to record where specifically in the room Samus loads in; it's always the same spot unless it's the ship, which presumably has a special hack) I assume that the original SM developers had level design tools that just set these bits of metadata automatically for them. But those aren't bundled into the ROM, so hackers had to independently re-develop them. Remember how early hacking tools were absolutely barebones? I'm pretty sure the earliest versions only let you change tiles and enemy placements, so e.g. you couldn't even re-point door transitions. Editing that metadata on the save station wasn't in the cards. For awhile you had hacks where the author would say "I'm pretty sure save stations work, but map tiles might get screwed up". Which is, I assume, because the hacking tools weren't properly recording map state as part of the saving process. The vanilla ROM assumes a certain layout for the map, which of course doesn't work when you've moved rooms around and changed their shapes. For example, say that the vanilla map is 1000 tiles, well, there's 2000 bits in the save that are allocated to map tile save data, in a precise ordering. Change the map and that no longer works.So, again, the tools needed to be updated. There's also issues like, when you load a save the backgrounds get hosed up. I don't know the exact details on how all this works, but I know that the parallax scrolling clouds on the surface tileset are pretty persnickety, and there's a few other areas like around Kraid's room, where you have to (or had to, anyway) be careful about things to make sure that data got loaded/unloaded correctly. I think this is also why you see corrupted tiles in vanilla if you do the Kraid standup skip. Anyway, loading a save also needs to do those loading steps properly, and of course early versions of the hacking tools didn't do that for you.
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Mar 20, 2024 02:20
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