Secret of Mana, Turbo - Beta 231108

[Josenev]

Hello again, it's been some time since I post something, I find the pixel work harder this time and I am not 100% satisfied with it, but I hope to enhance it in future versions (it was hard making the new hair animations, especially the Randi hair). This is the walking front animation sequences.



The references are still the same, Hawk, Angela and Carlie from Seiken Densetsu 3.

The colors tiles are the repeated tiles and the mirror tiles, there are some rare tiles positions in the animation sequence of Randi, I hope not to have made any mistakes.



If there's any color which does not belong to the palette, it´s a intruder color result of the pixel work, and it will be removed. On the other hand, I will do something with the compatibility problems of the palette colors with the background game colors (thanks Queue).

See you later.

[alien nose job]

Hello again, it's been some time since I post something, I find the pixel work harder this time and I am not 100% satisfied with it, but I hope to enhance it in future versions (it was hard making the new hair animations, especially the Randi hair). This is the walking front animation sequences.



The references are still the same, Hawk, Angela and Carlie from Seiken Densetsu 3.

The colors tiles are the repeated tiles and the mirror tiles, there are some rare tiles positions in the animation sequence of Randi, I hope not to have made any mistakes.



If there's any color which does not belong to the palette, it´s a intruder color result of the pixel work, and it will be removed. On the other hand, I will do something with the compatibility problems of the palette colors with the background game colors (thanks Queue).

See you later.

Wow, this is all very impressive, it is beautiful, congratulations !

If I may add constructive feedback, Randy's hair normally would almost roll over his face before flipping back into place after each step.
You missed that detail in your rendition and the hair look a bit flat.
I think in general, the original art being simpler, the devs chose to enforce movement by zooming in an exaggerated way on things moving forward at the end of the move (girl and guy's hand for example).
Just my opinion, anyway it is very difficult and really nice !

[Queue]

Version 2021-09-15:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/n7o4jz

Changes:
- a Changelog is now included in the readmes folder, thank you derula for the preliminary version!
- added event 5F8 to Text\Event_Fixes, this is an animation timing fix related to the final Pure Land cutscene
- implemented Miscellaneous\Better_Pure_Land_Cutscene, adds a fade-in where otherwise the heroes would appear abruptly
- enhancements to Miscellaneous\Tasnican_Countryside:
-- slight tweaks to collision and art
-- changed and moved one of the decorative enemies
-- compressed map piece data
-- optimized map piece decompression code (which benefits loading speed for all maps)
-- added 4 new map piece compression command bytes allowing for even better compression (only used by Tasnican_Countryside)
- slight improvement to Miscellaneous\Revisit_Pure_Land to improve load speed of first/last Pure Land map
- fixed Miscellaneous\Generous_Gold_Chests interaction with Text\Reborn (was missing a closing parenthesis)

Technical Changes:
- documented which map pieces use the data compression "stamp" capability
- improved code/data comments for spell animation data
- slight tweak to comment formatting to remove any remaining intentional trailing spaces; makes finding and cleaning trailing spaces going forward easier
- improved semi-automatic patch compatibility for map headers
- slight tweak to Overwrite_Unused_Data for bank $CF



hmsong, I vaguely recall some of the elemental summon animations being one frame shorter or longer than each other, buuut... I might be misremembering. Even if they are, the timing difference would be tiny; a human generally wouldn't notice, we're talking maybe ~83 milliseconds. The spell cast animation the character plays isn't set per spell. The elemental summon is, and a unique variation could technically be made for every spell, but I'm not even sure how that'd interact with other aspects of spell timing (and it'd only affect the heroes, for better or worse).

Anyway, to change them, you'd need to follow the elemental animation pointer the spell data specifies, figure out the format of the elemental summon animation data (as far as I recall it's actually a simple list of animation frames), find some free space in that bank ($D1) to make a new variant of the animation, and change the spell data's pointer to point to the new variant you made.



Josenev, like usual, beautifully done. I'm incredibly happy to see how you've taken the limitations and constraints imposed by the hardware and SoM's animation data into account since they were brought to your attention. I'm looking forward to the upward-facing walk animation; that should round out the initial stuff, namely standing and walking.

[hmsong]

Woo, an update!

Thanks for fixing the Generous_Gold_Chests paranthesis thing.  I noticed it too earlier and I was gonna mention it a while ago, but I forgot about it when I got to the computer (I don't like typing stuff on my phone).  Heh.

I'm not noticing anything from Better_Pure_Land_Cutscene.  What is that supposed to do, specifically?  I thought it affects when you land from Flammie, but I'm not seeing any difference.  I don't know what other "fade in" there are in Pure Land.

Tasnican_Countryside is so huge, that I literally can't notice anything different, mostly because I can't remember where anything is (other than that Scorpion gang cameo).  Also, have you thought about connecting Tasnican_Countryside with Turtle_Tour?  I mean, I know it's a huge EXP gain, not to mention the high level drops from the monsters there, but if you change several visibility flags of the monsters, I'm sure that's manageable.  Of course, it may be dangerous, since there's no recovery point there, and finding the jump pad will be a pain, since you can only have 3 sprites on the screen, and if there are already 3 monsters, then you can't even see the jumping pad.  Still, an idea to fiddle around with.

Hmm.  So it's by spirits, not spells.  I suspected that was the case, but I was hoping.  That idea is scrapped.  Oh well.  Guess I'm gonna wait until you fix the Magic Recharging.  Heh.



@Josenev

That looks beautiful.  I wish Randi's hair color was darker.  The current version looks too bright (and shiny), and too similar to Popoi's.  Also, Primm's pants look a bit too thick.  I know that it is supposed to be thick to a certain level, but I think you may have gone overboard.  Maybe this is just my taste (and therefore not reliable).

[Reld]

Josenev those sprites look really really nice! I'd love to play a hack of Secret of Mana with SD3 style graphics like that. Personally I think Randi's hair was a little too floppy in the original and yours looks fine like it is to me. I do think Primm's pants look a little extra thick, but I'm not really bothered by it. Maybe they could come in a little bit more as her leg crosses over in front of her body? That might make her look a tiny bit less wide in the downward walking animation. Or maybe not. They all look great already.

[Lime_Lime875]

Hello, I'm really enjoying this hack so far, I have a few requests and suggestions for additional options though. It would be nice to be able to have the confirm and cancel options be mapped separately from combat. I think many people like to have A = confirm and B = cancel, as the way it is now "B" being confirm and "Y" being cancel can be a bit annoying for menu navigation and changing the buttons for this makes combat awkward. I really like the new Turbo HUD but my one gripe is the player numbers, they are pretty much ineligible. I get what you were going for with the slanted numbers, this would work much better in a modern game, but for the SNES, it just looks awkward and the original number icons were much preferred. Lastly, it would be very nice for the charging sound to be a separate option outside of turbo mode. I personally prefer the game without turbo mode and with fast stamina regen, but the charging sound is very obnoxious and vastly improved in turbo. Like many of turbo's improvements it would be nice for this to have it's own checkbox.
This hack is truly incredible and I want to thank you for your hard work in creating it, I always really liked Secret of Mana but the subpar translation and clunky gameplay always held me back from loving the game, all these improvements elevate it to perfection.

[WhiteT982]

Like many others just wanted to say how much I appreciate all the work everyone has done on this game. I have a lot of memories playing this as a kid with my mom and sister and this has really made it enjoyable to play again. The game looks beautiful, the pace is so much nicer, and there's actually a little bit of a challenge now.

Only thing I have a question about is I see in the patcher the option to change weapon and magic exp but how do you actually change the defaults? Ive always wanted to level all weapons and magic to the max but it takes so long and by the time you get there you're so over leveled  the game is even more of a joke. Just wanted to know how to increase the exp rates to a higher level. I know they're already defaulted higher than vanilla but wanted to try something a little higher.

Again just saying thanks and I can't wait to see what else comes along. Wonderful wonderful work.

[Queue]

hmsong, Better_Pure_Land_Cutscene affects the final Pure Land cutscene where you reach the Mana Tree. It adds a fade-in to the scene transition between standing on the cliffs and when everyone is lying on the ground before the tree.

The changes to Tasnican_Countryside are tiny, things like replacing some solid purple flowers with ones you can walk through, removing some tiles from one layer that were subtly overlapping the other layer, etc. I had considered attaching it to Turtle_Tours, but there are tons of downsides, and basically no upsides. And again, putting conditions on the enemies means the map will feel even more underpopulated, which it already does; I would have if it played well.



Lime_Lime875, it would require quite a feat of re-engineering the input code to split off confirm / reject button behavior. Believe me, I know many people would like different menu buttons; it's a common request / complaint about vanilla SoM. It's just not likely to happen. It doesn't help that I personally think B/Y is the most natural button pair since the resting position of my right hand is with my thumb on B (e.g. in Mario World, I'm a Y-run / B-jump player, and consider reaching for A an annoyance)... so I have little personal motivation to do a massive amount of work for a feature I'd have off. Talking about this did make me ponder over what it'd take to make it work, and I'm not sure how to deal with certain issues that'd arise from trying to split up behavior, or what a good approach would be to implement it in the first place. The way the game uses buttons is: it reads the controller, remaps the buttons based on your controller config remapping, uses the remapped button layout to feed into all code that acts on controller input. Basically, code that reacts to input sees a virtual controller where remapping has already been processed: confirm is technically always reacting to "B" even if you remapped that to "A" and there's not a sane way for it to see the state of the physical "B" button.

When you say "turbo hub" I assume you're referring to Turbo_HUD? I assume it's the charge number art change you're not a fan of? Those were the only numbers I changed. I can appreciate not caring for their aesthetic, but it is sort've a take it or leave it scenario: splitting it off as a separate feature is probably more trouble than its worth. If I can do so without drastically complicating the existing code, I will, but don't hold your breath.

I should be able to make a stand-alone no-charging-sound feature for the next release. While it's an intentional part of Turbo Mode, it was also technically a side effect of sorts: removing the function call to play the sound freed up some bytes to let me fit in the code that defers showing the charge gauge until the 9th frame of charging (so that the gauge wouldn't flicker on and off as you spam-mashed the attack button).



WhiteT982, in the patcher, there's an "Advanced..." button. When you click that, you'll get a tall "Advanced Options" window where you'll want to locate "Weapon Experience Value" and "Spell Experience Value" (they're a little above the center). Vanilla values are 9/9, Turbo defaults are A/C (the values are hexadecimal numbers). What the values mean are explained in Quality_of_Life\Faster_Weapon_Grinding and Quality_of_Life\Faster_Spell_Grinding. You might be happy with just bumping each value up one (so B/D), but read the feature descriptions for more info.



I've had very little free time recently. I've spent like half of the past month away from home, and have other things I needed to attend to when home, so the next Turbo update will likely be a bit meager.

[Lime_Lime875]

Queue, thank you for responding. I didn't realize how much of an undertaking the remapping the buttons was. It would be nice if this could be a feature but I definitely understand if it is far too much work. 
Sorry, that was a typo for HUD. I was actually referring to the number relating to the controlled character marker. P1 is labeled as "1" in the top right corner of the character portrait. The Turbo HUD changes these numbers to be slanted, I personally much prefer the original, upright numbers. If this isn't that complicated of an option to implement I would really appreciate the implementation.
That's actually very funny to hear that it was originally a side effect. It's a great improvement that helps you hear the music much more without interruptions.

[Queue]

Ohh, those, I totally forgot about them. The replacements aren't even meant to be numbers, just ambiguous graphics where a human can learn which appearance means controller 1/2/3. Since the vast majority of people play solo, any little indicator that migrates between character portraits is adequate to inform which they're currently controlling.

Anyway, same deal as the charge numbers: if I can cleanly split off sub-feature toggles for the HUD art, I will, just no promises.

[hmsong]

It sure has been quiet on this board.  I wish I can contribute something more, but I have no more ideas to contribute (for now).  And any request I have, I already said it.

I guess it's sort of a good thing, since that means there's no error or anything.

[Djbrotherson]

The sendspace link isn't working

[lexluthermiester]

The sendspace link isn't working

Working for me. Using Firefox in ultra-secure mode.

[andrewclunn]

So I accidentally go back down into the ship where the Alfie fight was (recovering the stolen water seed).  Oh hey!  It's a chest I must have missed when I was down here before, with a whip orb!  Awesome!  Wait... how the heck to I get back up to Gaia's Navel?

[hmsong]

So I accidentally go back down into the ship where the Alfie fight was (recovering the stolen water seed).  Oh hey!  It's a chest I must have missed when I was down here before, with a whip orb!  Awesome!  Wait... how the heck to I get back up to Gaia's Navel?

Magic Rope.

[kaine23]

Thank you, i love this hack. Can't wait till goes fully live
November 26, 2021, 09:29:14 AM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Are those flashback scenes like before sprite came from the upper land and luka was the ghost before you go to upper land  restored content?

[WhiteT982]

Is there some reason why three players doesn't work with Turbo? Im emulating with snes9x2010 on a raspberry pi 3b and I've changed the two player port to multi-tap. It works fine on vanilla SoM as well as other 3-4 player games like Bomberman.

But if I'm playing Turbo whenever I push start on controller 2 it selects Prim and Popoi. So the two characters will run around together being controlled by the same controller. No inputs on controller 3 work at all.

If I deselect controller 1 then pause with controller 2 it unselects Prim and reverts to controlling only Popoi. I can then press start on controller 1 and have two characters working normally and can use select to switch between all three. But controller 3 can never select a character.

[stragusmagus]

What are the updates regarding the testing? Is more help needed?

[hmsong]

@Queue

So... it's been a while.  Anything about SoM Turbo that you're working on?

[lexluthermiester]

@Queue

So... it's been a while.  Anything about SoM Turbo that you're working on?

I've been wondering that too. In all fairness, the current version does not seem to have any problems at all. Maybe it's time to release it as a full on utility?