The old Dark Room bug

[Mad German]

***Note to anyone just reading this:
If you're interested, I decided to post this issue in the ZC Bug forum to see if I can get the attention of anyone up in the ranks (hopefully DN) and get my question answered whether anyone has attempted to or plans to fix this bug. Read on if you'd like to see what was covered so far...
***

I just spent an hour digging around through the ZC forums for any information on the bugs with dark rooms (dark room flag doesn't work when you first enter the dungeon, doesn't darken rooms again after you enter\leave item rooms\passages, etc.) and couldn't find anything on it other than another comment someone else wrote about. I then spent another ten minutes reading through DN's fixes for the latest version he's working on... and I still don't see anything about this bug. Is DN aware of it? On one of the maps I'm making, one of my Dungeons themes is completely dark (and rather amusingly, the treasure you're after in it is the blue candle), but after entering one of the item passages and returning to the main room, the dark flag no longer seems to be noticed by the game engine. It's going to drive me crazy!

Anyways... this is my first post to this forum, yes, I'm new here, I didn't know about Zelda Classic until a week ago and I feel completely stupid because I fell in love with that game the first time I played it when they still sold it in stores... and always dreamed about something like this... and here, five years or so after it's been around, I finally find out about it. Ah, oh well, glad I found it at all. Now I can fall in love with it all over again. Nice to finally join the rest of you fans!

See you around the forums! *Crosses his fingers and hopes someone will pull a fix out of their hat*

[Freedom]

I know of no fix to this, and am not completely sure it's even a bug, did it work like you describe it in the original?
I don't recall ever coming out of a passageway into a dark room or the dungeon enterance ever being a dark room.

[Mad German]

Hmmm... off the top of my head I cannot recall any instance in the original Legend of Zelda quests (either 1 or 2) where you enter or exit a dark room into a passage\item room.

Tommorow, though, I will journey back into the depths of Nintendo's dungeons and search room by room to see if this ever occurs in the actual game. But for tonight, it's time to hit the sack. I'll get back to you on this tommorow after I've determined this... but I'm not doing anything particularly special with room setups, so if there WAS a passage\item room in a dark room, I'm pretty sure it didn't work and, since none of the dungeons were dark in every room, if a player was to re-enter one that was previously dark nobody may have noticed. But yes, anyways, I'll look into this tommorow and edit this reply with my findings.

[Freedom]

I haven't been able to get dark rooms to work on any screen you warp into, I think that's just the way the original was, but have to say I haven't ever set down and looked screen by screen in the 1st or 2nd to be sure.

[Mad German]

Well, if I DO find a dungeon room on ZC like this, I'm going to pull it up on the NES as well to find out. Should be interesting to see but I doubt I'm going to find a room like this even with complete search of every dungeon. Nintendo didn't use their dark flag much. =(

Here goes the search... I'm actually hoping I won't find a dark room like this, because if this isn't the way the original NES game was supposed to function, that's all the more likely DN would attempt to fix it. And I'd just like to take a moment to compliment his and the other programmer's work on this thing - I've seen a lot of clones and stuff, and the amount of control you can exercise here to keep this game look like the original is profound - add to that the fact that it's flexible if you want to add new things, and "perfect" is the first word that comes to mind.

Off to the Dungeons now... *Sets an alarm clock for lunch time so he doesn't neglect to eat*

***Edited this post to give you a progress list... sure, I could skip some of these dungeons easily, but I will not be satisfied until I've done a complete scan of every dungeon... so, these dungeons have been checked so far that didn't have the elusive room we're looking for:

~~~Just a random thought here on my walk to the second dungeon... is it possible that if there was a dark room with a passage on the NES\ZC, that after having used the candle to light it nobody would really notice the fact that it didn't get dark again after re-entering the room?

---Quest 1---
Dungeon 1 (There are NO dark rooms in this one at all...next!)
Dungeon 2 (No dark rooms here either - oh well, Dodongo is always fun.)
Dungeon 3 (No dark rooms - but I know for sure they have them in the next one.)
Dungeon 4 (7 dark rooms in total - but not a winner.)
Dungeon 5 (5 dark rooms, again no passages in any of them.)
Dungeon 6 (6 dark rooms... bet the next one has 7? Lol.)
Dungeon 7 (3 dark rooms, guess I lose the bet.)
Dungeon 8 (4 dark rooms.)
Dungeon 9 (10 dark rooms... Ganon bites the big one.)

~Well folks, that eliminates the first quest. Now to check the second...

---Quest 2--- (I broke out the NES for this one!)
Dungeon 1 (No dark rooms here. Ever wonder why they chose an E for this one?)
Dungeon 2 (No dark rooms... first walk-thru walls in the game I think though?)
Dungeon 3 (Still no dark rooms, and now I remember what the thing with the letters was - E, A, L, D, Z, for the first five labs - Zelda scrambled, duh. :rolleyes: )
Dungeon 4 (5 dark rooms... still no winners.)
Dungeon 5 (4 dark rooms I think, no passages.)
Dungeon 6 (2 dark rooms... starting to think a dark room /w passage doesn't exist)
Dungeon 7 (3 dark rooms - only two dungeons remain!)

Amidst searching Dungeon 8 I'd like to add that I hate this dungeon. All these passages are giving me a headache... wait... maybe that's because I neglected to eat lunch anyways! :odd:

Dungeon 8 (2 dark rooms... the lack of which is probably thanks to the fact that there are so many passages - this almost gives me the impression Nintendo either didn't set it up to mix passages with dark rooms, or just couldn't get it to work themselves... this brings me to the last Dungeon... wish me luck!)

Dungeon 9 (6 dark rooms - no, I didn't count Ganon's room either time)

Well, that does it. I have personally verified that there are NO instances of rooms in either Quest 1 or Quest 2's dungeons that are both dark and contain a passage\item room stairway. So what does this mean? Only that this bug wasn't in the original quests because there are no rooms like this in them. I think it's safe to assume that if NOA wanted to mix dark rooms and passages\irs they wouldn't have left a bug in there that made all the rest of the rooms light once you came back up. But I guess we'll never really know, eh?

All I know is that, since fixing this bug would have no impact on the original gameplay, is that I fervently hope this will be corrected in the next release. Until then, I guess my "dark" dungeon is going to have light rooms. :(

DN, if you take a look at this and try to fix it (or have already) let me know... and don't forget that the dark room flag doesn't work when you first enter a dungeon either. Don't know if it's because of the same "bug" or if those are two entirely different issues altogether, since the entrance room becomes dark again after you leave and return from another room in the dungeon.