(NES) Total Conversion Hack Castlevania 3: Aperture of Corruption

[drax01]

Sorry for the delay,
Yes it's aright to advertise with links here as long as they aren't spammed and can be somewhat related to the topic at hand.
Thanks for the help Creature!

Thanks Toffi 

[Googie]

Welcome one and all to another enthralling round of updates from the RHDN team
This April we have a lot to show! So I hope your ready for them. Without further a do, lets get started.

Opening up this round of updates is an improvement into the games lighting and dithering system, which is slowly but surely making our 3D modeling import system into a force to be reckoned with. Currently the system is rated for any model under 200 tri's and is interchangeable (though costly). Above is the older over saturated models and below is the current set up which allows for much clearer visuals without the prior systems import times.

Dithering's been tested however the resolution of a full bank means that it's much more difficult to pull off without losing a lot of poly detail.

If anyone's interested in seeing a model imported feel free to reply and I might be able to build a custom 3 color animation set for it.

Finalizing this post are some updates to stage 04 color wise and a few new WIP sections.
00 got some new colors, 02 01 got some extra graphics and 02 02 is being set up from the ground up.




REPLY SECTION
Thanks for the compliments Googie and Alkali Man OG, hopefully as this project continues we will continue to improve the quality of our work.

On the topic of the Mad Tower doubblebas85, there were a lot of technical limitations that led to the stages current look. the Sprite rotation of the spike traps makes it difficult to add a 2.5D skew to it without braking the functionality. The stair's and windows were a compression choice as a way to keep tile costs low for later sections of the stage. The asylum was designed to be a little off from the beginning, as if it's insanity wore off on the player and was engrained into the architecture. We originally envisioned this section as somewhat of MC Escher like experience, upside-down stairwells and all which might be revisited at a later point in development once the stage obstacles and boss are finalized.

Hi Xander Max! Were always open to receiving tips on how we can better polish our sprites. Thanks for the heads up and pixel art explaining what you would like to see changed. Ultimately the team went with a more hybridized form that took a few of your recommendations into account. It would be pretty interesting to see how your take on the games roster if you'd be interested in reviewing them.


I'm not sure what game the team might take after this project is done Arcade Elite. There are a lot of good choices out there and it might take a while to pick a game with the same potential as the US version of CV3.

This is lookin' tight, I love it.     

[Flaviogames]

speaking of a new game, a game that I really wanted for the Nes would be a nobo bomberman, hack on top of bomberman 2, new sprites and new scenarios with cooperative mode

[Toffi]

We've reached 300 posts!
Thank you all so much for your dedication and time watching this project grow with me. It's been a honor building and maintaining this thread for 3 years. Here are a few of my favorites:

StarWyvern:
I am still following this and still loving every update. Huge strides are being made within the Castlevania Romhacking community here. There have been way too many cool looking projects for Castlevania that went unfinished and abandoned. Don't let this be one of them.#200

Vanya:
Sounds ambitious! Good luck, it sounds like it will make for something great.
I especially want to see how the story turns out. It's intriguing.#1

Googie:
I love it, cause it's...
STRAIGHT GANGSTA #157

sics:
It's one of the most beautiful visuals I've ever seen, I've never played a full Castlevania on NES, but with your hack it makes me want to reverse this situation!#263

Your encouraging words and love you guys have for the project inspires us to keep going and never give up.


Ok, enough of the sentimental semantics. Let's get into some WIP stuff.
Thanks to our wonderful ASM pioneer Trax new game over screens have become a technical possibility. Our hope is to switch the screen per character to help bring s splash of color to what was once an empty text only section.

For those wondering how we could get so much color into the text itself the header is made up of two pallets that add extra highlights to create the illusion of greater color depth. We also had to compromise on the text to add more into the screen. Currently CV3 pulls the entire alphabet for the game over screen, which leaves the rest of the bank to be unused. Since the MMC5 has enough memory to take the hit we only loaded the letters needed to make the text on screen and filled the rest of the bank with graphical data, making it possible to extend the artistic variety even further.

3 more game over screens are planned for each character, so some more detailed busts were made to help better highlight each characters details. Most are unfinished or unused.

Lastly, the WIP section shown last time was added into the 04 02 02 section of the asylum leading up to the stage boss which is still in early development. So expect to hear more soon.



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Hey Flavio, thanks for the encouraging support. Throughout the 3 years of development so far there have been a lot of technical hurdles we have had to jump through to truly meet the total conversion portion of this title. A lot is left to be done such as the games OST and sound engine which are still in development. Were hoping to meet our 4 year deadline in late 2024, but depending on how much coding support we get it might take longer. Post 178 talks a bit more about why that is, so I'd recommend giving it a read.

Hi VincentNL, SuxMenner and Drax01! Thank you all for the feedback, more improvements are in the works for the games sprites. As much as I'd love to perfect Sonia's sprite it's easy to redesign the same sprite 20 times rather than making 20 new sprites. On a development level the more sprites we can complete the closer the hack comes to completion. At the moment were focusing on adding in new content to the game; any adjustments made to sprites will be reconsidered later in development once all sprites are completed.

Happy to hear your suggestions for titles to hack Arcade-Elite, Flavio and Drax, but our current focus development wise is on completing Aperture of Corruption and mastering Castlevania 3's code rather than taking on new engines or projects at this time.

[drax01]

This has been a great project! I love it and I am one of those who have also followed it since it started and every month I always look forward to updates with great enthusiasm and joy. Congratulations!!!  :¡guau!:   :reír:

[Flaviogames]

It will be one of the best games for Nes 8 bit :afirmativo:

[Grimlock]

This looks like a pretty neat project! I'm looking forward to seeing this reach the finish line. Nice work so far!

[Toffi]

Howdy all!
AoC team's made a lot of progress this month, especially in the realm of FX. So let's roll back the curtain and reveal the progress we have prepared for you.

First off, I'd like to introduce our newest development tool SinWaves! This sine wave bitmap generator allows us to animate warping effects onto pixel data without IRQ scrolling effects. Before this I often animated images line by line and in order to create a similar effect I would have had to hand calculate every pixel. To say SinWaves expedites that process would be an understatement.

With it I can adjust the image into wave like patterns seen in SNES titles such as Earthbound and Super Castlevania 4 then stream that data into the MMC5 animated bank to place these wild effects onto the NES. This technique, like faux scrolling or 3D rendering is costly but can be worthwhile if used in multiple area's.

So what does this enable us to do exactly? It shortens the development time for effects that can be streamed into our animated bank system, which means more 16 bit effects for more stages, the only real limit now is the color count and texture wrapping.


The effect above uses sine waves to animate each row of pixels differently creating the illusion of 2 layers when in actuality it's a single animation played using bank switching. One image takes up all the odd rows of pixels while the other uses all the even rows of pixels.

Next up: We've also bumped the ROM size from 512kb to 768.02kb which means a whopping 32 extra PRG banks, that means more samples, more room for modification and more room for new screens. In general it means a whole lot more room for ASM expansion.

A new Game over screen was added for each character's death. If you die with Germain, Quincy, Claudia or Sonia you should receive a new screen every time.

Lastly is the asylum stages boss; the Doll Ripper. This patient wanted to become a cute looking doll and after multiple lobotomies has decided the best way to do so is to rip off faces. With Dracula's help he's taken control of the asylum and turned it into his playground. Far up in the lofts resides his workshop. It's stated no one returns the same after visiting...


That's about it for this round of updates. If you have any questions about the project, want to join in on the fun or want to know more about the team feel free to reply below. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

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Thanks for the support drax01 and flaviogames, it's wonderful to hear from you guys every month and the entire team's always hyped to share what we've been up too.

Nice to see you here Grimlock! I absolutely love your Metroid stuff. Thanks for stopping by.

[Flaviogames]

great news, this game is going to be amazing :rir:

[drax01]

Brilliant!!!

[Fray]

Wow, can't wait to see how you guys implement those new special effects in the game!!!

[Alkali Man OG]

Damn that wave like pattern is really impressive. Gets more and more unbelievable that this is an NES game. I do wonder how it won't kill the framerate tho.

Is that Doll Ripper enemy a reskin of an existing boss?

[Toffi]

It's July! My apologies on missing the 4th for a round of AoC updates as it's a holiday for Americans. There's been quite a bit of progress made for the project, so lets get right into the updates.

Firstly, the doll ripper sprite set has been completed! Along with a few animations they've been gifted with a scythe hand for some of the more delicate cutting work.

One of the doll rippers attacks is to through one of their many victims bones, a single stomp can send dozens of corpses falling from the rafters so be careful when fighting them.

What good is a doll ripper without dolls to rip? Along with the boss sprite are some of the bouncy possessed toys to fight on the climb up to the top of the asylum.

Lastly here's a look at the next stage getting a touch up. Now that the FX table been drastically improved new animations are planned to really help turn up the heat on the factory floor. Below is a WIP demo for the revitalized forge stage, this is not the stages final form but pretty close to what the final design might look like. As always mores edits are on the way!


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Thanks for the compliments Flavio and Drax, we hope to continuously make big strides towards completion.

There's a lot of room in the games ROM for some pretty awesome effects Fray, I think things will come out looking epic.

I absolutely understand the concern Alkali Man OG. What's really nice about these prerendered FX is that they have the same computation time as a traditionally animated stage (such as the clock tower and aqueduct bridge stages) which is to say next to none. That also goes for the 3D stuff too!

[Flaviogames]

Toffi, this is amazing, do you think it will be finished this year or not?

[Alkali Man OG]

"This year" bruh this is a non proft project

[Googie]

The recent screens looks tight, can't wait to see more when you get around to it.   

[Arcade-Elite]

Toffi your castlevania game is looking so good, it has Blast Processing compared to mine 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8pywo5zCuw&t=64s

[Toffi]

August's post came a little later than usual due to some bug fixing thanks for being patient as we still have quite a lot to do.

Starting off with some FX expansion's. Recently the team has uncovered a system that can help us make cylindrical 3d objects rotate. While it's a bit blurry due to bakes anti-aliasing we might be able to pull off something similar to SC4's rotating hallway using a single 32x32 FX data.

We had the backgrounds for the forge stage set in stone however we ran into trouble trying to fit both the sinking sand stage obstacle with the FX animation data.

When applying the animation to the stage the data was badly corrupted

This error occurred due to the game loading the FX's bank rather than the stage data. Since the stage bank isn't loaded it garbles all the graphics associated with them. We ultimately had to rebuild the stage swapping stage and FX data which resolved the issue.

With that fixed we hope your enjoy these wavy FX!

More sections of the forge stage are underway, including an upper and lower sections which should have more news soon.


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Thank you for your support and interest Flavio, currently one of our biggest obstacles for a physical release is getting ASM help on the sound engine as that's a major chunk of the game I'd like to complete before any release. If you'd like for the project to come out faster any and all help is appreciated.

Thanks a ton for the compliments! We'll keep updating you all monthly on progress and updates as they roll along. Thanks for keeping up with us so far and replying to keep this thread active

[Flaviogames]

August's post came a little later than usual due to some bug fixing thanks for being patient as we still have quite a lot to do.

Starting off with some FX expansion's. Recently the team has uncovered a system that can help us make cylindrical 3d objects rotate. While it's a bit blurry due to bakes anti-aliasing we might be able to pull off something similar to SC4's rotating hallway using a single 32x32 FX data.
this game will be amazing, congratulations for the great work
We had the backgrounds for the forge stage set in stone however we ran into trouble trying to fit both the sinking sand stage obstacle with the FX animation data.

When applying the animation to the stage the data was badly corrupted

This error occurred due to the game loading the FX's bank rather than the stage data. Since the stage bank isn't loaded it garbles all the graphics associated with them. We ultimately had to rebuild the stage swapping stage and FX data which resolved the issue.

With that fixed we hope your enjoy these wavy FX!

More sections of the forge stage are underway, including an upper and lower sections which should have more news soon.


REPLY SECTION
Thank you for your support and interest Flavio, currently one of our biggest obstacles for a physical release is getting ASM help on the sound engine as that's a major chunk of the game I'd like to complete before any release. If you'd like for the project to come out faster any and all help is appreciated.

Thanks a ton for the compliments! We'll keep updating you all monthly on progress and updates as they roll along. Thanks for keeping up with us so far and replying to keep this thread active

[Greyfox]

Wow, amazing project. The team is extracting gold from Nes capabilities.