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VIP 5 2019 - To everyone there is a boon, and a time to every rom hack under heaven

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Sebby19
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by Sebby19 »

I think there is something wrong with the RNG (bad seed?), if it causes the boss to appear on the top row so many times in a row. Then again, if this was better designed, it should only appear on the bottom and middle rows.
Unless you can reflect the shots by cape thwacking. Unlikely though.

I'm surprised the 1st phases are your least favorite, considering how the 2nd phase wastes your time.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by Grounder »

you know a boss is good when it has the seinfeld logo next to its health bar
Why don't you eat me?

I am perfectly tasty...

AND I'LL STEAL YOUR SOUL! :twisted:

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by KirbyComment »

I honestly didn't know there was a VIP 6, even if it's technically not finished yet. Other than peeps not being able to contribute/quit, has there been any news on this game? Is the progress at an indefinite standstill or is it expected to be finished one day?
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by Ashan »

Grounder wrote: 4 years ago you know a boss is good when it has the seinfeld logo next to its health bar
Jerry, this apple is subpar!
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by KobaBeach »

Grounder wrote: you know a boss is good when it has the seinfeld logo next to its health bar
It's actually made in post-XP version of Paint.

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Font is Monotype Cursiva.

Julius Fun Facts!:
Julius was, according to the wiki, originally meant to be Dokuo (the little goomba replacement, he's meant to be a suicidal, bitter incel), but complications happened and that idea was scrapped. I assume Julius was just made to fill the void by carol, who is an absolute RPG maniac.

If I'm not mistaken, the boss was a collaborative effort. Coding by carol, music by 757 and graphics by I wanna say 660, who does the graphics for most of VIP. I wanna say homing was involved in this too.

Anyway the boss' inspirations: Part 1 is based on the second phase from Final Fantasy Adventure:



But it also takes influence from the Shake King battle in Wario Land: Shake It:



The sword is taken from the Final Fantasy II, III and Adventure Japanese boxarts. I don't think it has any equivalent in the respective games, but it looks pretty (Amano~ <3).

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The intro and arena of the second phase are a reference to SaGa Frontier 2's final boss battle, the Egg. carol and his RPG loving ways strike once more. The little rainbow energy spheres at the start are meant to be Anima from SaGa Frontier 2, a sort of magic power level iirc.



Phase 2 is based on the final phase of Final Fantasy Adventure's Julius fight, but with the "using the enemy's move against itself" twist.



I have no idea where the Sigil in the third phase is from, but it does remind me of Seymour Omnis from Final Fantasy X. But that can't be verified, of course.

The arrow attack is based on the Shooting Star from the Egg battle in SaGa Frontier 2.

The fire and ice attacks use graphics from Mega Man 7, and the wind attack uses graphics from Romancing SaGa 2. I'm not sure where the thunder attack is from, but it could be Seiken Densetsu 3?

The fire attack is based on the fireballs from Shake King, whilst the ice attack is based on Freeze Man's floor freezing move from Mega Man 7.

The final phase, added in the later versions of VIP5, so its new to this LP, is based on the Paradise Lost phase of Lumine from Mega Man X8.

I couldn't find any footage of people doing this battle as intended or losing to it, instead just using their nuke attack on Lumine to get it over with, so have raocow's messy-ass playthrough of it.



The text that appears when you lose to his Paradise Lost is based on Lumine as well. It's a generic "You won't escape..." type line uttered by villains in media, but the phrasing is the same as Lumine's from what I could tell.
KirbyComment wrote: I honestly didn't know there was a VIP 6, even if it's technically not finished yet. Other than peeps not being able to contribute/quit, has there been any news on this game? Is the progress at an indefinite standstill or is it expected to be finished one day?
Indefinite standstill. All the project leads have basically jumped ship due to complications within the devteam. I'm sorry.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by This Eye o' Mine »

Sebby19 wrote: 4 years ago I think there is something wrong with the RNG (bad seed?), if it causes the boss to appear on the top row so many times in a row. Then again, if this was better designed, it should only appear on the bottom and middle rows.
The thing about randomness is that sometimes you do get stuff like that eight times in a row. I had test playthroughs where I was able to hit him with every attack every round too. But yes, it should've been made to not happen at all, or at least weighted to not have it happen quite as much. As far as I can tell from a quick look, this uses the vanilla RNG, but with the player's X position added to the result. No checks whatsoever for an impossible-to-hit position, only checks to make sure none of the clones overlap with each other.

So this boss actually works fairly normally on any emulator that isn't BSNES. However, BSNES and a real SNES would have severe, though not fatal problems, especially in regards to palettes.
The cause for this is that much like uploads to VRAM, uploads to the palettes' CGRAM need to happen during v-blank, and the code for this boss doesn't care at all and just uploads it whenever. The SNES at this point will freak out and put the palette data in the wrong place in RAM, and the result is this kinda stuff:

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Fixing this involved basically replacing all of the code that was responsible for setting palette colours with something that set a flag in RAM, and then injecting some code into the NMI routine that would check the flag and perform the palette uploads at that point.

On top of that, this boss has a couple instances of multiplication and division, and as usual for older hacks they don't take into account the delay that happens before the result can be safely read out. It's actually kind of interesting to see what effect this has in different applications. Take for instance the part where the clones aim their shots straight at you:

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And also the effect when you beat the boss looks more sci-fi retro (including flashing lights which is why this is in a spoiler tag):
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And fixing of course never goes right the first time, so here's some outtakes from that effort:

Julius turns to the dark side...

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...which grants him phenomenal cosmic powers...

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...that end up corrupting him.

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by Ryrir »

One more Julius related post:

If you wait around during the very final phase, the arena will continually get darker and darker, until finally...

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... and you die.

Huge shoutouts to Eye for spending sweat, tears and (presumably) blood to get both carol bosses in this hack to work.
It was by no means an easy task and things even looked kind of hopeless at times, so I'm just so glad that we're able to see them in action!
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by KobaBeach »

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better julius life bar, i had Bold on and i forgot about it
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by Piesonscreations »

That was VIP quality!
Also, i'm all for "raocow" becoming "raocow!"
This Eye o' Mine wrote: 4 years ago

And also the effect when you beat the boss looks more sci-fi retro

I really like how this looks, actually lol
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by Sebby19 »

That fast bit before the last midpoint reminded me of Flappy Bird.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

I love the terrible high-speed brutal weapon levels, and the see-saw at the end of this one in particular. But it's not quite the same without the level of sheer high-energy panic from raocow's first experiences with them :lol:
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like steel soles to the platformer protagonist

Post by Mandew »

a story about Super Mario World's Speed and Jump Interactions

SMW has a "Jump Speed" table at $00D2BD, aka the "The faster you're moving, the higher you're jumping" table. "Jump Speed" only has 16 intended entries. If Mario is going too fast, the Jump Speed taken will start taking his Jump Speed from the "Deceleration Table", which contains a bunch of $00's and $01's -- and so effectively, his jump gets eaten.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like affordable and spacious housing to a Tokyo resident

Post by KobaBeach »

ぬがよい
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like affordable and spacious housing to a Tokyo resident

Post by This Eye o' Mine »

Version 1.04 of VIP 5, which raocow was playing last time, introduced a bug in the one room castle level, and if you saw the previous LP you already know what I'm talking about. When the text at the start finished, you would get a wall of D printed across the entire space in where the text was in front of the vehicle, which wouldn't go away until you died and restarted.

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The cause of this was a latent mistake that was activated by one of the changes in the update.

So what it's supposed to do is print lines of blank tiles over the text to make the letters disappear. The way tilemaps on the SNES are structured is that each tile has one byte defining what graphic to use, and another byte defining a couple other attributes like what palette to use. Hence, the way they achieved the text disappearing effect was by having a DMA upload to the tilemap from two bytes in RAM ($FC for a blank tile, and $38 for attributes). DMA is basically a mechanism for quickly moving data from main RAM or ROM into palette or video RAM.

At first I thought the problem was that they mistook the way one of the DMA settings worked. You can set whether DMA increments the source address or not, and the amount of bytes it transfers in each go (1, 2, or 4). Since they basically just needed to transfer two specific bytes (for tile and attribute) several times repeatedly into the tilemap, they set transfer size to two bytes, and set source address increment to off so as to transfer the same two bytes every time. The problem is that if you set source address increment to off, then apparently it doesn't even increment internally during a single unit of transfer, meaning that rather than doing the attribute $38 and then the tile $FC for each slot in the tilemap, it just did $38 for both.

Now, while this is a misinterpretation of the way the SNES hardware works that could cause a lot of bugs in other situations, it actually turned out not to be the cause of this one. The real cause is that they got the order of tile and attribute bytes the wrong way around. If they'd gotten that right, it would've instead used the tile byte for both, which would've still been formally wrong but would've produced the desired result as the attribute byte is largely irrelevant for a blank tile anyway (except for the lowest bit, which happens to be the same between both bytes in this case).

Regardless, the reason none of this was caught at first was sheer luck; $38 happened to also point to a blank tile in the graphics data. Until version 1.04 that is, at which point they reworked the credits sequence with the custom enemy names and post-credits message. As part of this they put a couple more characters in the relevant GFX, one of which was the infamous D that appeared in the glitch.

Man, Infamous D is a good name for a rapper.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like affordable and spacious housing to a Tokyo resident

Post by Piesonscreations »

King DeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDee...
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like affordable and spacious housing to a Tokyo resident

Post by KobaBeach »

King DoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDo


DoDonPachi
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like affordable and spacious housing to a Tokyo resident

Post by Grounder »

KobaBeach wrote: 4 years ago King DoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDoDo


DoDonPachi
baby shark
Why don't you eat me?

I am perfectly tasty...

AND I'LL STEAL YOUR SOUL! :twisted:

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like affordable and spacious housing to a Tokyo resident

Post by Ryrir »

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Mario: I can't jump up there, the mud is in the way :(

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Mario on Yoshi: I AM THE MUD

So yeah, no springboard jump required. But it sure looked cool!
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like affordable and spacious housing to a Tokyo resident

Post by Grounder »

hey there everyone this is raocow playing the sonic 1 special stage
Why don't you eat me?

I am perfectly tasty...

AND I'LL STEAL YOUR SOUL! :twisted:

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like fish that be ruddy to tales that be muddy

Post by stormie »

I think that the way to get up to that blue platform is to spinjump off of the highest saw. I'm not sure if it actually goes high enough, but it LOOKS like it might work. The reward is just skipping most of the sawblade section, I guess.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like fish that be ruddy to tales that be muddy

Post by Ryrir »

Time for my daily gif post of things raocow missed or other interesting tidbits!

You can actually drop down an innocuous trail of coins at the very beginning of the level and end up here:

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After pressing the switch, the dragon coins of the level turn deep red, like so:

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I think it's a pretty neat secret in the sense that it makes the coins easier to collect, without being absolutely necessary to uncover.
Good Stuff!

stormie wrote: 4 years ago I think that the way to get up to that blue platform is to spinjump off of the highest saw. I'm not sure if it actually goes high enough, but it LOOKS like it might work. The reward is just skipping most of the sawblade section, I guess.
I believe the actual way to make it up there is letting the momentum of the yellow platform carry you like so:

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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like the discovery of a more recent banker's burial site to a numismatist because ancient coins are ble

Post by Awoo »

Please don't tell me that you lost another tooth today :ehh:
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like a post-game powerup to a hack player

Post by raocow »

i said it wasn't a tooth!
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like a post-game powerup to a hack player

Post by Ashan »

I've never liked those "shell bounces around hitting on/off switches on the top of the screen while you platform on switch blocks" levels. I've never seen anyone be able to read those in real time and it usually just devolves into memorizing the timing for when things change through trial and error, mostly ignoring what's actually happening on the top.

I also think it's kinda dumb to put a boo-ring in an autoscroll level because their positioning is based on where it was the last time it was shown on screen, making some attempts harder than others. Which kinda goes against the idea of learning through trial and error.
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Re: VIP 5 2019 - Like a post-game powerup to a hack player

Post by FourteenthOrder »

clearly raocow lost his tongue
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