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It's been 7 months, but I happened to find this while looking for something else…
http://rawscans.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=16613
The first set of re-uploaded links (second post) seem to work.
Just keep in mind, of course, it's all in Japanese. And another standard caveat, it IS a manga with some sexual themes.
Having read the first volume, this will probably be impossible to follow without knowledge of the language because it deviates so much from anything historical. You might be able to follow parts from DoaE portraits and RoTK knowledge.
I did a map editor, but it doesn't include stuff like hidden items (and doesn't include towns – mostly because I don't have much info on them).
This has a lot more comprehensive information (hidden items, caves, towns, warps inside them, etc), but it's just information. Cool information, though :)
Hey guys,
Since I haven't been super motivated to make progress for a bit, I figured I'd release what I have.
http://www.niahak.org/images/DOAE/DoaEdv097h.zip
What this does:
-Allows movement of battles and warps on the map screen (thanks to MeteorStrike for the interface suggestion)
What this doesn't do, but I had hoped it would prior to release:
-Update the references to "recovery towns" (e.g. where you return after you die in each chapter).
-Update gull wing locations
Note that you'll still need a castle/town entrance where you're moving warps to. Battles have no such restriction.
In what way were they garbled? I haven't messed with character sprites, but I know there's a specific order you need to load them in… MiDKnighT probably knows more.
Hey guys,
I have a few questions about warps. I think I've got the basic stuff down (…once I figured out that a warp HAS to be on a cave/gate/castle entrance), but on the first page there's some stuff that's touched on a little too lightly for me to code up.
1) Does anyone recall how many gull wing addresses there are? It looks like the pattern of data significantly changes at 0x38e33, which means there are most likely 12 (48 bytes of gullwing data). I'd appreciate confirmation on that from DoaE vets.
I'm thinking of showing the gullwing destinations as a different color, but making their movement separate from their brother warps.
2) Xuzhou's actual address appears not only in the "warp" section, but in the section I'll call "secondary warps" – where Luosang's second address appears.
Luosang's is at 0x36001, but Xuzhou's is at 0x36011. Looking at it now, there's clearly something else significant about this data – take a look.
Code:7F05000201061C0907071309170C1700
7E03000B0308010B0707120D070C0100(Spacing intentional – note that 7F is Luosang's code, and 7E is Xuzhou's code, while their addresses follow shortly afterward).
The question is, what kind of other data would be stored in here? I skimmed through the posts at the beginning of this topic, and didn't find any info about anything else we'd found here.
We might be able to glean something from the fact that there's only a subset of locations in this section:
Luosang, Xuzhou, Changan, Nanyang, Jizhou, Guiyang, Chengdu, Jianye, Luoyang
The only thing I can think of is (other than Luosang) these are all pretty significant story landmarks. Maybe these are all the important places to Invite Liu Bei?
There's also another pattern that's interesting: Each one after Xuzhou has a pattern of 000712081E starting two bytes after the city code.
Any thoughts?
/edit: One other thought – where is the secondary location for the Bar and for other "House" entrances (e.g. Zhuge Liang's, Ma Liang's)? I wonder if they're 'baked in' some other way than being stored directly in this section.
/edit2: I tried moving Luosang without doing anything to the "Secondary Warp". It worked fine, aside from the fact that when you leave Luosang for the first time (i.e. your 'origin' wasn't on the world map) you come out at the location specified above! So there is no "secondary warp" storage, per se – these must be initial drop-off locations for your party when you resume/start the game in certain chapters.
Quote:I've always taken a linking to Chinese history books, espeacially in Warring States, Spring and Autumn periods and of course Three Kingdoms. Have you read any Chu-Han contention books yet? It was the fight between two warlords Liu Bang and Xiang Yu and two briliant strategists Zhang Liang and Fan Zeng, I think it's worth reading.I don't think any books along those lines have been published in the US – if so, they must be out of print. I can find a couple of Sima Qian's history volumes and the Warring States book I mentioned above, I think that's it.
I've unfortunately only read Three Kingdoms and Water Margin (it looks like there's a new translation out! I wonder if it's better than the one I read). Both are great works – cerebral novels, with a clear depth of history to them.
Quote:Actually, reading this made me wonder of a super-easy solution that can be implemented in DoaEd, but I doubt Niahak would want to do it. Picture this:An option in DoaEd that asks for the following input from the user:
Input / Output ROM File to Edit: Full file path.
Input ROM File to get data from: Full file path.
Start address for Input file 1.
Start address for Input file 2.
Number of bytes.
It's easy in theory, but in practice it might be a support nightmare (no more usable for the novice than FEIDIAN).
The other concern is different numbers of patterns-per-portrait – for example Gemfire NES has 40×48 portraits and DOAE has 48×48, so a direct conversion's not straightforward.
If someone could convince me otherwise I'd consider it.
On the other hand, direct image input was something I was considering eventually (input 48×48, 4bpp BMP and an index, and it'll overwrite the next 6 strips with the BMP). Since I have a limited framework that can convert from the patterns to an image, I can also do the reverse, hypothetically.
Sonic's pretty much described how my priority list works – get the most frequently used stuff working, then the less frequently used stuff. And I'm not even sure how much this stuff gets used – I certainly don't use it myself :P
P.S. Warp/Battle movement on the map's nearly complete, I just need to troubleshoot it a bit… although gullwing locations may not update initially.
I get the impression from most of the 'anecdotes' included in the book that the translator deliberately removed names.
For example, there are two pages dedicated to Lu Xun & Lu Meng's taking of Jingzhou from Guan Yu. Throughout the entire piece Lu Meng is referred to as "the retired Wu general" and Lu Xun is "the other Wu general". Sun Quan is "the King of Wu" and Guan Yu is "the Shu general". It seems entirely unnecessary to go to such lengths to avoid confusing people with (fairly straightforward, and in the case of Guan Yu highly recognizable) names.
Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei, and Cao Cao are all apparently famous enough to merit naming – as is Sun Bin – but Sima Yi, Guan Yu and Sun Quan are not. I don't think any Warring States figures are named aside from Sun Bin. Otherwise the book is well worth reading as a matter of self-improvement (although I doubt conquering a five-developer software product will have that many parallels to facing off against an enemy nation).
Quote:I once watched a TV serires related to mind-fighting between Sun Bin and Pang Yuan and that's all I know. But one thing I can know for sure is this Warring States period is fucking awesome.I'm a little jealous, I doubt a TV series like that would ever get translated much less shown over here!
Looks like there is a "Legends of the Warring States", but it uses the old Wade-Giles transcription style ("T'sao T'sao", "Sun Ch'uan", and so on) which I find horrifically unreadable. I may still give it a chance, but there's no guarantee I'll recognize names when I see them written in Pinyin afterward.
There also appears to be a movie ("The Warring States") focusing on Sun Bin and Pang Yuan that is subtitled, but reviews don't seem that great. Has anyone seen it?
Quote:I would argue that ASM is easier than a higher level language due to its limited syntax and well-defined, simple instruction set. It is only harder because it requires more code to do the same thing, it's less "logical" than higher level languages, ( bad use of the word but w/e ) and the jumps can really lead to spaghetti code very easily, but if you know Java or C# you should be able to look at an NES assembly instructions cheat-sheet and make sense of it. I'm sure other people would disagree with me on that though…As a programmer who has worked with C# (and little else) for the past few years – you're absolutely right. Someone with no ASM experience might have a little trouble, but any programming experience should be enough.
The main reason I haven't looked into ASM myself yet is that everyone else here lets me be lazy, so I get all these nifty locations of data, figure out what the data means and I just put a simple interface on top of it. I don't have much need to go outside that.
I remember MIPS ASM not being so unreadable several years ago in college. http://www.romhacking.net has a few documents on 6502 assembly, but I don't know which would be the best to start from.
Quote:Text banks in bank 3 i believe tend to overflow and bork my roms. There doesnt seem to be a warning like the other banks.There are only two banks, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. If there's a line I can look at, that would give me something to go from.
Let me know when you do find the other issue.
Quote:Then, if the user right-clicks on that tile, a menu pops up with the option "Select Warp". Then the user can right-click over a new tile, right click, and select "Move Selected Warp Here".That's better than anything I could think of. I'm not sure why I couldn't come up with a "warp-grabbing" system.
Shouldn't be too hard to do, either. I can probably knock that out soon. Thanks for the suggestion!
Battles are already moveable (via the Battles tab), although I'll admit it IS kind of a pain.
Warps I could make moveable through a similar mechanism (separate warps tab).
I still haven't come up with an interface I like for it that's still not a pain for either me or the user.
Maybe I could do a "Pick spot" button that you can click in the battle/warp menu?
If you click it, it brings up the "big map" in a separate window Clicking on that zooms into the localized map, and you can click exactly where you want it on that. When you're done, the right values are filled in for that spot.
First of all, thanks for stopping by :)
Quote:WTF is with the HUO-HU-WHATS-HIS-FACE reference? Can someone give me the back story on that?He's the one completely fictional character who is useful for a good section of the game.
Plus the powder thing.
Re: map generation stuff, I have a tool in place for editing them… shouldn't be too hard to make a few modifications to that tool based on new information.
Quote:if you guys had combined all your efforts in hacking this game for the past x-number of years, you guys could have made your own DOAE style game from scratch using SDL or something?Almost certainly, but it's a lot harder to get the initial framework in place for a game (I've done it a couple times), vs. adding a new small feature to an existing tool. I find reverse-engineering old stuff kind of fascinating, and I think there's some value to others in it too.
We finally got a trailer with some brief gameplay.
Looks pretty good, much better than Tierkreis. I like that the main characters don't look high school age, although they may act that way…
