Zelda Parallel Worlds v1.2 public beta

I found one such room, the pipe room in Turtle Rock (I think it's room 21 or 26). There's also a few others that do the same thing in a vertical arrangement, like the Dark Palace there are 2 of them. That's how I found the addresses above. I'll play around with those rooms a bit more in HM and see if I can understand the mechanics a little better. I know the one in Turtle Rock, I tried reversing the direction and it created the same bug, so at least I can recreate it. Mostly, yesterday I was hours deep into random stack traces trying to understand the code, and I wanted to post so I didn't lose those addresses in all of the pages of notes...

Nice improvement hack!

Ok, so this is really weird.  I'm using room 20 in the original aLttP to test this out on, because it has a door combo of this type in the lower right, type 0 on the left, type 12 on the right (in room 21).  It works fine.  Reversing it so that type 0 is on the right and type 12 is on the left acts exactly like the guardhouse door.  Same if I try to do the same with the upper right hand quadrant.  But if I do the same door combos on either of the left hand doors (to room 19), they both work in either direction.  It doesn't seem to matter what combination of doors I use in any room, the right-to-left never works from room 21 into room 20, while every other direction does, including right-to-left from 20 into 19.

Puzzledude wrote:I suggest you look up Alttp where you have a normal door in one room and a shutter door in the other global room and look at the door-types (namely there are multiple types of doors who look alike).

The buggy door in PW is already using the same door combination found in this room. type 0 for the open side, type 12 for the closed side.

OHMYGOSH I THINK I FIGURED IT OUT.

Ok, so I think Puzzledude mentioned in a PM that it had to do with a limit on the number of special doors that could be in a single room, and I think that limit applies to the ORDER OF THE OBJECTS AS WELL. Meaning that it's not just the number of doors, but it only works for the first few doors. Not sure what the number is exactly

The hex data for BG3 of that room is

Code:

0x11305E
60 00 63 00 80 38 70 00 83 18

The door in question is the 83 18 at the very end.  By moving it to the beginning instead

Code:

0x11305E
83 18 60 00 63 00 80 38 70 00

IT WORKS.

I've tested all doors in that room, into and out of that room, and all of the surrounding rooms.

*happydance*

Great find. We now finally know. I knew there was a limit for special doors per one room, never bothered to actually look at the hex code to bring the door closer to the beginning of the bg3  code.
Maybe in the case of a shutter going through 2 global rooms, the code for this door must indeed be the first in the hex code for bg3.

You can have at least 2 shutters on the exterior room boundary simultaneously (see my Turtle Rock example above), I would assume they need to be first and second. When I was testing the non-working room, I got the upper right door working by deleting two of the doors, while the lower right still didn't work, then deleting a third door made both shutters work so that probably demonstrates the limit (I didn't take note of the hex order on that room though, so I can't be more specific). Basically, if you're going to make rooms with this arrangement, be sure to place your shutters (type 12) first, before any other doors in the room.

I made a few changes to the Day/Night cycle:

-Loading your game starts at "noon" instead of "midnight" (I thought about having it save the time of day in the save file, but for now I don't feel like messing with it, it just starts at 00:00 every time you load your game, so I rotated the lookup table by 12 hours so $00:00 = noon and $0C:00 = midnight).

-Time doesn't advance during part 1 or part 2.  Before, it was possible to stand outside your house and have it turn to daylight while the rain was falling.  Now, it's set to midnight and it stays there until part 2

-At part 2, set the time to 04:30 (well, actually $10:30, because of the rotated lookup table).  "Dawn" occurs at 05:00 ($11:00), so the player always exits the church at night, and sees the first palette change within 5 minutes.  It actually sets the time right as Zelda takes her place in the church, so it's possible if you spend more than 5 minutes in the church that you'll miss the first change, but that's unlikely.

I've made a few more changes/fixes, and updated the patch. See the OP for the current state of things, I'm not sure what's new in this update vs the previous one. What I do know, however, is that this is getting really close to release-worthy. I'm actually going to start doing a live-stream LP of my playtest run through on Twitch, if anybody is interested. If all goes well with the LP, and I don't find any additional bugs, I may be ready to call it complete.

Ok, I'm about to start streaming the playtesting LP.  Let's see if this goes any better than my first attempt last night.  I'll try to get through the Guardhouse, at least, tonight.

https://www.twitch.tv/qwertymodo

I'll be exporting the archives to YouTube as I go too.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCnXNxndQh_Bdbhhh9iXIhnPGd9DdsCOf

Ran into a really weird bug when playtesting tonight.  Really not sure what happened, but the second time I tried.  At the time I thought I'd just gotten the scale in the previous segment, but you can see earlier in the video when I pause to switch items, that isn't the case.  Then I reset, and I couldn't recreate the bug... so, I really don't know what happened.

(Skip to 7:35 for the bug)

Ok, so here is my current to-do list.  If anybody knows of any other issues that should be addressed, please let me know.

-My Day/Night cycle changes neglected to account for the clock display in the HUD, so that's broken.  I'm thinking of just disabling that display during part 1, since I'm essentially "stopping time" until you bring Zelda to the Sanctuary. Then I can sync it up properly when I manually set the clock at that point.

-Tweak the soldier speed.  I need to backtrace the speed hack and see if I can actually modify the speed increase, and lower it a little without completely reverting it.  If not, I'll just disable the speed hack.

-Disable bomb damage, to ease up the difficulty of bomb jumps.  Missing a jump will still cause fall damage.

-Still need to do a complete script read-through/copyedit.  I know of at least a few typos that need to be fixed (e.g. "dimesion" in the ending triforce dialog).

-I'm mulling over the idea of eliminating the third tower climb.

-Complete MSU-1 re-write.  Not that the MSU-1 code needs to be re-written, by any means.  This is entirely a side project so I can "learn by doing" and be able to write my own MSU-1 code to possibly do other MSU-1 hacks later.  It's easier to build on an existing project that I know works.  The only real change I'm looking to make is to add a fade-to-half-volume routine for entering a house, since I know Conn didn't want to do that.


There's also a few other minor issues that I don't know if they can be fixed:

-There are a few entrances and staircases where the tiles surrounding the entrance don't have proper priority (e.g. the entrance to the frozen pyramid in the Icy World overworld, or the staircase in room 39 or 218).

-Palette issue in Naryu's Bay, if you return to the main floor after going down into the flooded basement.

-At the top of the Parallel Tower, when you cut the curtain that reveals the hidden door, the "you found a hidden door" tone plays, but the curtain gfx remains unchanged, as if it was never cut.

Ugh... something happened to my source files and I just found a bunch of random regressions.  I don't know if BTSync decided to take a vacation and randomly roll back a bunch of files or if it might be related to some of the other random FS corruption issues I've been having with my desktop, or what.  Thankfully, I hadn't bothered to update the patch file in this thread for awhile, so I was able to disassemble that and restore most of the faulty code.  And no worries, I have my source directories syncing between 3 different computers, which may have caused the issue, but more importantly, my server is also snapshotting hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly, so even if I *had* lost everything, I could have restored from a snapshot, I just really didn't want to have to go there.  Long story short, I think I'm back in business with everything working properly, but I definitely need to restart my playtest/LP.  So, I'll take this time to add in the last few updates that I have on my to-do list, clean up my code a bit, and then we'll give that a shot.

I got bored, but also really tired of debugging... so, instead I spent the night playing around in OBS to build a nice streaming scene, instead of just streaming the raw game footage.  Yay, it's fancy.

Well, I managed to break the shovel, which crashed my stream twice, but other than that, things are looking good.  It was a silly mistake, where I had neglected to label one of my jumps, and then moved the code, so the hardcoded jump broke, so that's fixed already.

But hey, my stream looks all fancy and stuff, so I got that goin for me, which is nice. Hopefully the 720p option shows up eventually, I did stream in HD...

Ok, so doing some of the more mundane touch ups, and I revisited the trapdoor limitations, and I have determined that door types 12, 27, and 28 should be limited to the first 4 door slots in BG3 (which come after all of the other BG3 objects).  I haven't actually tested the 5th slot, nor am I sure if any other door types are also affected by this limitation, but the room example that I have to confirm that at least the first 4 slots work is room #36 in aLttP.

Edit: Slot 5 may work. Seems to work ok in room 26 of PW (the type 27 one-way trapdoor between NW and NE). YMMV

Just wanted to demo the cool new feature I've been working on for awhile now.  New background music for the overworlds, triggered by collecting the Master Sword.  This is based on the existing functionality that allows you to have different tracks played at different points in the game, which you can set in HM.  However, I had to fix a few things to make this work right.  First of all, I used 3 of the tracks that aren't used in PW, the Dark World/Bunny track, the Kakariko Village Soldier Alert track, and track 15, which isn't actually used in the original game either. I used the more "energetic" versions of the tracks from the aLBW soundtrack (actually, I think the Icy World tracks are reversed from the way aLBW uses them, but I like it this way). Track 15 has the fanfare intro for when you first get the sword.

In order to make SPC fallback work properly, I had to copy the existing overworld tracks into those slots as well, which took some doing.  But, with MSU-1 audio, you get entirely new tracks.  I then added the ability to have alternate tracks in the Icy World, where the original only had alternate tracks in the Light World.  Also, I removed storm overlays after you get the Master Sword, similar to how the Lost Worlds clouds are cleared after you retrieve it in aLttP.  I'm still having a little bit of an issue with the snow overlay (actually, I'm pretty sure it's the Ganon's Tower lightning flash effect that's causing the issue), but I wanted to show it off, if for no other reason than to motivate myself to actually finish this dang thing...

Figured out the overlay issue. The to-do list continues to shrink...

qwertymodo wrote:OHMYGOSH I THINK I FIGURED IT OUT.

Ok, so I think Puzzledude mentioned in a PM that it had to do with a limit on the number of special doors that could be in a single room, and I think that limit applies to the ORDER OF THE OBJECTS AS WELL.  Meaning that it's not just the number of doors, but it only works for the first few doors.  Not sure what the number is exactly

The hex data for BG3 of that room is

Code:

0x11305E
60 00 63 00 80 38 70 00 83 18

The door in question is the 83 18 at the very end.  By moving it to the beginning instead

Code:

0x11305E
83 18 60 00 63 00 80 38 70 00

IT WORKS.

I've tested all doors in that room, into and out of that room, and all of the surrounding rooms.

*happydance*

Thanks for discoverying this.  It's a problem that's plagued me for over a decade.  I can't believe it was so simple.

I managed to fix every door in Master Quest, and I plan to release an update soon.  As far as I can tell, you can have a total of three special doors (Shutter/Key/Big Key/Bombable).  If you have more than that, one door may not function properly (though I do have a room with two shutters and two locked doors and they all work).  Shutters won't close properly, and you can walk through any closed special door. Finally, I have a room with two staircases and one shutter, and the shutter door didn't work properly until I removed and reinserted the staircases.  Odds are you already know this by now, but perhaps this can benefit others.

I have a room with three shutters, and they all work.  I fixed a shutter in another room only to break a bombable door.  There were three shutters in that room so I had to remove one that didn't need to be there.

Thanks again!

The way you can fix it in HM rather than in hex is with the move up/move to top move down/move to bottom commands

Move up, move to top commands?

Care to explain or maybe a screenshot of what you mean? I have one of those shutter doors in one of my dungeons that opens when you go through but doesn't open when you back through it. You can still make it to the other side but the animation doesn't happen, you just walk through it.

qwertymodo wrote:The way you can fix it in HM rather than in hex is with the move up/move to top commands

V and B? I was aware that you use these to move sprites before or after one another, but I didn't realize they were also used for tiles until I just tested it.

Jeimuzu wrote:

qwertymodo wrote:The way you can fix it in HM rather than in hex is with the move up/move to top commands

V and B?  I was aware that you use these to move sprites before or after one another, but I didn't realize they were also used for tiles until I just tested it.

Yeah that sounds right.

Lord SePH wrote:Move up, move to top commands?

Care to explain or maybe a screenshot of what you mean? I have one of those shutter doors in one of my dungeons that opens when you go through but doesn't open when you back through it. You can still make it to the other side but the animation doesn't happen, you just walk through it.

Yes, that's because you need to put this shutter door to "most lower layer" according to all doors, and yet in one global bg layer. This also can be solved like this: remove all doors and then insert this one first and then all others. Assuming all doors are on bg3 and other items on bg1 or bg2, this should work. The other method is to "move it to the lower layer" of the same bg. The game actually knows this with the way the elements follow each other in the hex string. With the "move up/down" command HM is capable of moving the elements within the string.

If you insert a chest and then the statue. The statue will "go over" the chest. Same with doors. You just need to make sure the special door is inserted first or at the very bottom, ie first in the hex string. One room should allow 3 special doors, but they must be inserted first before any other doors, so that they start the bg3 layer code/string.

Puzzledude wrote:Yes, that's because you need to put this shutter door to "most lower layer" according to all doors, and yet in one global bg layer. This also can be solved like this: remove all doors and then insert this one first and then all others. Assuming all doors are on bg3 and other items on bg1 or bg2, this should work.

Yeah, I just removed and reinserted the regular doors thus moving them above the special doors.