Yeah. It just seems insane though, that the only editor available is completely broken yet we're all still "negotiating" with it anyway. To call it "usable" would be an outright lie. One wrong click will permanently destroy your ROM. And you can't just learn how to use Hyrule Magic, you also have to learn to fix all of the things that it breaks inadvertently. Which basicially means you have to learn EVERYTHING about the game, how it's data is structured and how it's data is used.
With all of the data that has been mined for this game it seems like it would be easy (relatively speaking, of course) to program an editor for it that actually works. Too bad there isn't anyone with the appropriate skills that's interested in doing this. Therefore, the only people willing to hack this game have to be some sort of masochists (or insane like me). Makes me wonder how many hacks of this game have been started but never finished.
Welcome to the club. It is a fact that 80 percent of all people, who have attempted on an Alttp hack, have quit, due to their file getting severely bugged, while 10 percent have produced a final product, which is also quite bugged (similar to what you see in Bruce Campbel, where practically all pits lead to the "bug world/dimension").
You can clearly see, how difficult the process is, since some Master hacks of this game have practically nothing changed, but have quite some bugs (again).
The main problem is not just Hyrule Magic, but also Alttp as such. This game is like a closet, which has shelves, and on it books, but placed in such a way, that there is no emtpy space or very little of it.
So when you try to edit it (meaning changing and adding some books) you will eventually drop a book or have to force something to be falsly "stuffed in".
If you try to start from scratch and empty all of it, the shelf would drop out of frame, when you would remove the books from it.
That's basically what Hyrule Magic is doing (failing) when you use it on the entire filled up Alttp rom.
Luckily Math On Napkins decided to write a new editor for this game a while back, called Black Magic. If this is ever to be finished, it would radically improve the process and bring in lots and lots of new complete hacks of this game.
Unfortunately it is difficult to expect for one person to code all that, since the standard set for this editor was incredibly high (almost to much). And the author of Hyrule Magic asked MoN to not release the source code for HM, or the edited version of it (hyper irony, since the author produced a bugged program and "doesn't want" it to be fixed).
We now have enough knowledge to come up with the perfect non-bugged indoor (dungeon) editor, since I decoded every possible indoor info in hex and know how the game writes/stores the data for it (including pointers and all). It would look similar as the HM dungeon editor and would do similar tasks, but would never bug out, since it would have fixed pointers to precalculated addresses, with so much ofsets between room-codes to always have enogh space (so called maximum space possible would be reserved for the desired code). And the game would still not come pass 2MB.
But we would certainly need a help of someone, who is capable of writing a program, since this really is "the next level" of coding. We can do gfx, ASM etc etc, but currently I know no person to be able to write such an editor and we really can not ask MoN to be involved with 2 editors or to change his style/work, set for Black Magic.
Topic: Zelda III hacking *sigh* (Read 4900 times)