MK64 Pitstop (V.0.0.5.2 Beta)

[DryBoney]

(28-06-2017, 04:46 PM)mib_f8sm9c Wrote: Welp, back to testing and fixing. I'll look at it this evening, DryBoney, hopefully I can still reproduce the issue.

MRKane, I can look at that transparency issue too. As far as adding more character spaces in the menu goes, you're welcome to pursue that if you wish, I'll help you out as much as I can. The MK64 rom is very messy and a lot of information is hiding in the assembly rather than tables, so expanding the existing tables is a bit beyond what I'd personally like to try and do.

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Thanks a lot. Again, sorry for being needy, just really want this tool to reach its full potential.

[MRKane]

(28-06-2017, 04:46 PM)mib_f8sm9c Wrote: The MK64 rom is very messy and a lot of information is hiding in the assembly rather than tables, so expanding the existing tables is a bit beyond what I'd personally like to try and do.

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You're not wrong there! I've hacked it a little in the past and was stunned how much of a mess everything was. It's almost like they built off of the last version of the game and tried to turn it into something. As for extending the character roster: that problem will be a real mess of blues to do as while extending the table itself is one thing we'd have to be adding extra data and offset tables and beck! Plus it'd probably break the games AI or something. Now I think one of the big guns like Zoinkity was actually improving the game code and fixing a fair few of the issues, but if I remember right he found the task a bit too daunting. I could still ask if that'd be a help (and if he's not looking here, because I secretly believe that he's looking everywhere....) lol

[DryBoney]

Something else I've noticed, PitStop doesn't like roms with edited music. I'm working on a group project and we can't edit MK64 roms that have already been modified with the SM64 Editor. It lags forever on "Loading Kart Resources" or "Splicing Kart Resources".

[mib_f8sm9c]

DryBoney, I'm having trouble getting your issues to reproduce on my computer. Though I am doing minimal changes like importing 1 song only, and replacing textures with other, existing textures. It'd help me out if you gave me more information (how many songs do you replace before it refuses to load the file) or even giving me the m64 files to try importing myself and seeing the issue.

This goes for the animated texture replacement too. If you can provide me one of or multiple of the images that are crashing Pitstop, I can see what I can do. That code is especially dangerous; if you import a texture that compresses to a larger size than the original compressed texture, it'll overwrite the following texture and cause the system to crash when loading it.

Due to the compression used, and the lack of texture pointer tables, you have to replace textures with images that compress smaller than the original image. Which means usually that, if it's not a kart image or a course floor related texture, it'll be difficult to replace. Usually the images cannot be more complex visually than the image they replace. That's the current limitation of the system, though it could be averted if I could find some actual pointers to these damn textures.

Finally, on the Chomp Shop, it's meant to be empty when first loaded. You either create karts from scratch there, or you export them from Pitstop and then load them into Chomp Shop.

I am all on board with making this tool as good as it can be, and I've actually finally gotten full renewed interest in it again (I think I've already put in >10 hours this week on getting past the 3d rendering block I was stuck at). If you want to talk in a more immediate form about this, I can send you my Discord info.

EDIT: MRKane, I just realized the issue with that black border. Yeah, it's on Pitstop's end. The thing is that there's a limited palette of colors that every kart image can draw from (I believe it's 196 unique colors for each character). In order to save as much color as I could, I used only one transparency color for everything with an alpha of 0. I'll write up some stuff tomorrow to see how it'll look if I spend a few more palette spots on the transparencies directly surrounding the opaque pixels, it should fix up the issue completely.

[MRKane]

(30-06-2017, 04:01 AM)mib_f8sm9c Wrote: EDIT: MRKane, I just realized the issue with that black border. Yeah, it's on Pitstop's end. The thing is that there's a limited palette of colors that every kart image can draw from (I believe it's 196 unique colors for each character). In order to save as much color as I could, I used only one transparency color for everything with an alpha of 0. I'll write up some stuff tomorrow to see how it'll look if I spend a few more palette spots on the transparencies directly surrounding the opaque pixels, it should fix up the issue completely.

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I'd consider that to be a minor thing that's only apparent on emulator Could I suggest that you take the pixels that would otherwise have an alpha of 0 and assign their closest colour from the palette? Best of both words and given that it should theoretically be a similar colour I'd say you'll get away with it being unnoticeable

Also: Good job on the rest of the editor! Even though it appears that there's only two of us groupies around at the moment, there'll be more

[dashn64]

LOL MRKane, I'm another groupie! I've been following since the first few weeks of development I just don't have any ROM hacking knowledge and didn't want to flood this thread with my comments! That being said, I'm extremely impressed by everything being achieved here. I've wanted this for so long and I'm really excited for the day when we have Mario Kart ROM hacks

[DryBoney]

(30-06-2017, 04:01 AM)mib_f8sm9c Wrote: If you want to talk in a more immediate form about this, I can send you my Discord info.

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Yeah, definitely! This is a group project with a few other people, so I'll send you an invite to the group chat when you're ready.

[zouzzz]

Little video with Sonic on real hardware :

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[dashn64]

Wow that's incredibly well done, great work mate.

[MRKane]

Fantastic stuff! That video is exceptional - and I'm not just saying that. If you'd believe it I've no way of taking one myself so I'm very grateful (and have already shared it).

I really should touch up that character portrait to fit the others a bit better though. Should also finish Link come to think of it, but his hat bugs me...

Any other character requests?