Mega Man X3 - Zero Project (V4.6 & Source Released)

[justin3009]

Sorry if progress has been slow.  I was pretty sick starting Tuesday and still kind of am.  Getting better but I missed a full day of classes and I have a lot of homework to do.  I'm still working on this just have other things to worry about now since school started back up, but this won't be abandoned.

Edit: Ride Armor Icon bug with Zero fixed.  Next up is the level start icon/life bug.

[blacksniper]

Sorry if progress has been slow.  I was pretty sick starting Tuesday and still kind of am.  Getting better but I missed a full day of classes and I have a lot of homework to do.  I'm still working on this just have other things to worry about now since school started back up, but this won't be abandoned.

Edit: Ride Armor Icon bug with Zero fixed.  Next up is the level start icon/life bug.

Are you kidding? Progress on this has been blazing along at break neck speeds. I'm amazed at what all you have gotten done in such a short amount of time. Hope you get well soon.

[justin3009]

Are you kidding? Progress on this has been blazing along at break neck speeds. I'm amazed at what all you have gotten done in such a short amount of time. Hope you get well soon.

- xD;  Thank you!  I couldn't have done most of this without john though, he's definitely a huge help in all of this.

Also, I THINK we have the icon bug almost fixed.  I told John about the code I changed yesterday but it destroyed the first level of the game.  So I had it check if the first level was loaded, it'd do the code but if not, then don't run the code.  I tested it out and it seems to be only the first level freaked out, so it loads fine everywhere else.  But I'm going to do a full playthrough soon just to test.

There's ONE more icon bug though.  Dear god they have the icons load on like 6 different occasions, slightly over exaggerated.  The last one is if you start a new level with Zero in the select menu.  It'll load X's, find that and put a check, voila.  X/Zero will be completely playable for the most part.

--Moderator edit--
Code tags changed.

[WeebeeGeebee]

This could be possibly be the coolest damn rom hack evarz.

[justin3009]

A lot more progress has been made on the life bug, it's essentially fixed but there's one more bug with it and then starting a new level with Zero SHOULD be okay.

I also messaged john about a little feature that I think maybe a good idea to implement once we bug fix this stuff and finish everything else.  Hopefully we can have a good method to work for it.  I'll explain more if he wants to approve of it.

[andrewclunn]

Question, have you guys done much to document the boss / enemy AI?

[justin3009]

We haven't documented enemy AI too much.  I've found a few memory values for some enemies where it has a delay timer before they perform their next attack, or how many shots they do per attack, what's their life etc..We'll definitely be breaking that down in the future for obvious purposes.  Again, we'll probably release all of our documents once this project is complete so you can see how the code works and what exactly we've found so far.

Also, john approved of the idea.  You know that giant X on the select screen where if you try selecting it, it just goes DING obnoxiously?  Well we're going to change that to be the character select on the menu so you can choose who to play as right as the level starts, and you can still switch in game

[WeebeeGeebee]

Also, john approved of the idea.  You know that giant X on the select screen where if you try selecting it, it just goes DING obnoxiously?  Well we're going to change that to be the character select on the menu so you can choose who to play as right as the level starts, and you can still switch in game

Will you be able to play Zero at the very begining stage, or would that cause problems?

[justin3009]

Not at the first level you start the game no.  But after, yea you can.  Once we understand levels a bit more you'll be able to start the game with Zero to see his side of the level.

--Moderator edit--
Code tags changed.

Thank you Lenophis!  I'm so used to the "code" tags that I put that down on accident xD

Edit: Just an update to everyone.  Right now, we're on the bug busting stage of the project.  We have about..hm..10 bugs to fix.  2 of them are animation errors, 2 are event errors, 1 is X/Y coordinate errors, and 5 are graphical errors.  After that, it's just new dialogue and special features.  Then this project is officially done.

[blacksniper]

Not at the first level you start the game no.  But after, yea you can.  Once we understand levels a bit more you'll be able to start the game with Zero to see his side of the level.

--Moderator edit--
Code tags changed.

Thank you Lenophis!  I'm so used to the "code" tags that I put that down on accident xD

Edit: Just an update to everyone.  Right now, we're on the bug busting stage of the project.  We have about..hm..10 bugs to fix.  2 of them are animation errors, 2 are event errors, 1 is X/Y coordinate errors, and 5 are graphical errors.  After that, it's just new dialogue and special features.  Then this project is officially done.

I have glee from this update. GLEE! Seriously though, awesome news.

[justin3009]

I'm nailing down some big bugs still.  The biggest issue right now is the X/Y coordinates for Ray Shot on Zero.  I've semi-found them..but it's just strange.

I'm going to keep that area in notes then see if I can fix the events for X/Zero.

Edit: Ugh..The graphics for X will not load if you're Zero in the event.  It looks like it's loading whatever graphics are pre-stored in VRAM or something but I'd have to check that with BSNES.  I'm not entirely sure how I'd be able to fix that without forcing X to be the main character in the event and swapping the coordinates of the characters.

Edit 2: X/Y coordinates on Zero for his sub-weapons are about fixed!  Had to move a couple areas around but now everything is going according to plan.  Sub-Weapons should NOT be buggy with Zero so much anymore.  Animations are still wrong because they don't exist for him, but the ones he can use now won't be so effing buggy.

Edit 3: Most if not all X/Y coordinates for Zero are fixed and working correctly now.  Pretty much the rest of the bugs are graphical bugs.

[slidelljohn]

Here is a little something for everybody to play with. This is the palette location for zero in rom and ram.

(Offset Rom)
0C:B580-0C:B59F

(Offset Ram)
7E:0420-7E:043F

(Hex) 2 bytes per color 16 colors
88 21 84 12 8C 72 00 51 9C 63 94 52 8C 31 9C 00
94 00 8C 00 94 21 9C 42 88 23 1C 03 94 01 84 10

If anybody comes up with some great looking palettes for zero post them on here for everybody to see.
Who knows we might even use a few of the palettes if they look real good. Have fun!

[justin3009]

When I found this out I had to post something!  I show you the first very cheap edit of a level in Mega Man X3   No this won't be in the final, this is just a test

- The energy tank platform is shrunk by one.  There is another platform to hop on to get to the energy tank :3  Of course though, this is in RAM.  So once you reload the savestate it's gone.  But wow is it incredibly simple to edit tiles!

Edit: More news.  We're almost able to add new frames!  I just looked through some old notes that john gave me and thanks to that, I've been able to find how animations partially.

With this we now have:

Pointers to Sprite Assembly
Sprite Assembly
2-Byte Pointer to animation data. (You have to reverse them then add the value to the base value)
Animation Data

The only thing we don't know exactly is how each animation is called.  We know that:

Code Select Expand

$04/A7F5 E2 30       SEP #$30                A:0002 X:0002 Y:0015 P:envMXdIzC
$04/A7F7 A9 70       LDA #$70                A:0002 X:0002 Y:0015 P:envMXdIzC - Event to use for Ray Shot
$04/A7F9 20 00 B9    JSR $B900  [$04:B900]   A:0070 X:0002 Y:0015 P:envMXdIzC

Is the event.  It loads 70, goes to 4B900 which it stores it to memory.  I haev a whole list of those but I just am not sure how these are all linked to the animations.  Once that's figured out, hello fixing up animations for Zero!

[Mauron]

Awesome work, Justin!

[blacksniper]

A little something I did for my own pleasure about 2 years ago. ^_^

My inspiration: http://megaman.wikia.com/wiki/Zero_Armor

[RetroHelix]

Wow, that looks great blacksniper.
I tried to change the palette myself but failed. The hair would just look wrong colored blue.

btw. I found the address to change the colour of the healthbar by accident:
7e0442 and 7e0443

[justin3009]

Oh wow, that's actually going to be useful Helix for the future Helix!  Thank you very much for that

And both of you, nice palettes!  I like them so far :3

[blacksniper]

Just toying around. When I made the Black Armor I used a conversion program to make sure the colors I wanted were possible on the SNES and with these 8 mods I just used the replace color function... so if used on a SNES they would take a very slightly different shade. Still, it was quick and might give you some ideas. It's just a shame that they used a color on his armor that they also use on his hair since that limits what you can change without also fully changing his hair too, although with some editing you could change that.

[Fox13]

The blue Zero look incredible! Hope you can fix the hair problem and put it in!

[slidelljohn]

Everybody is doing a great job on the palettes. And just to let everybody know we can fix the hair problem
if anyone was wondering. Here are some more palette locations but they are just for ram. If I get some time
this weekend then maybe I will doc the rom locations for all of these palettes and put them on here for
everybody to play with.

7E:0420-7E:043F  Current character
7E:0440-7E:045F  Life bar
7E:0460-7E:047F  Current weapon