Nightmare's Quest Development

[Nightmare]

Goriya, paging Dimentio (also known as Arceus)'s on this subject. He did the touch-ups on New Quest 2 2015 (and did an awesome job mind you, and that's why there was a bit of a dramatic delay between development wrap-up and release). I have a tendency to blunder this kind of stuff really badly. I have no touch quite frankly, and I'll admit it.

-James

[Samer]

I think adding sand tiles is a good idea, the world looks like a nuclear bomb hit killing off the earth.

Doesn't have to be overboard, a few touch up here and there wouldn't hurt. Blank screens aren't that good in my opinion but whatever floats your boat Nightmare.
With the size thing, Nintendo has a trade secret that allows them to super compress their games by a significant margin. OoT, if ported to PC, would be at least 500 MB. Yet it was only 32.

Hardware and software are two different things. Software has the driver to run it on it's own, but it needs to be modified to work on the hardware. Reverse engineering.

[Nightmare]

I think adding sand tiles is a good idea, the world looks like a nuclear bomb hit killing off the earth.

With the size thing, Nintendo has a trade secret that allows them to super compress their games by a significant margin. OoT, if ported to PC, would be at least 500 MB. Yet it was only 32.

I wish we had Nintendo's compression algorithms sometimes, but a lot of times when we judge file size we go by cartridge size when judging quests. I don't know how "terribly" accurate that'd be to the real cartridge (which is 128 KB on the gold release, ??? on the gray release). I don't know the compression ratio of .QST files, but I'm pretty sure they could still cut it down by five times.

However, this compression causes the ability to overwrite areas and glitches. This is what caused FF6 to have the famed "overwrite and crash" glitch if you went into certain battles (and this is why I don't do glitched speedruns or attempt them)

And if anybody's wondering, that blank screen that everybody sees, is like one of the very first screens ever created in Zelda Classic (behind some of Demo Quest and my very first beta quest which I lost when my computer got stolen. Not all of New Quest is even close to being that way.

-James

[Gleeok]

Nintendo doesn't have any "super secret classified best compression ever" routines. They use standard ones.

Games typically use compression algorithms akin to the LZ* family, or ones that offer similarly fast decompression, some type of huffman encoding, etc. The key to games is that decompression needs to be fast, but compression doesn't. Currently I am using LZ4 compression because it has insanely fast decompression rates, high compression, and is open source. I seriously doubt Nintendos OOT compression could beat it. They may simply use different methods for different file types based on what the binary data looks like.

[Nightmare]

Nintendo doesn't have any "super secret classified best compression ever" routines. They use standard ones.

Games typically use compression algorithms akin to the LZ* family, or ones that offer similarly fast decompression, some type of huffman encoding, etc. The key to games is that decompression needs to be fast, but compression doesn't. Currently I am using LZ4 compression because it has insanely fast decompression rates, high compression, and is open source. I seriously doubt Nintendos OOT compression could beat it.

They haven't released it publically, but they bragged at one time they could get at least ten times compression rate on their stuff. I don't know how accurate 500 MB is uncompressed for OoT, but at 32 MB that's compressed 15.625 times! That's way above industry standard (and also shows why things like the FF6 bug happened when things got overwritten)

-James

[Gleeok]

FF6 I believe used LZSS for most of the data. FF1 PSP used LZ77 for most the data. I know for a fact about FF1PSP because I wrote a utility to unpack everything, and I now have every single file that was in the iso in it's original format as used by the developers.

As for 15x compression I'm not really impressed. Some things compress extremely well, other things don't.


[EDIT] Just for fun Nightmare:
In my Core FFC engine I have tilemaps, tilesets, etc. The overworld map to FF1 in this example is 256x256 tiles with animation support, is 2 layers, and is roughly 524000 bytes, or around 512 kilobytes uncompressed in memory. On disk or in packfile format this gets compressed to 46 kb, or around 11x+. This is actually better than what square-enix used!

[Nightmare]

Demo SP Beta 2: (see later post)

Changelog:

Overworld:

1. Fixed an wall integrity bug with the water so you can't overlay into other screens anymore
2. Fixed continue point on DMAP 2

Bonus Dungeon:

1. Eliminated a test code area in the first room
2. Fixed some broken flags in a few statue rooms

Pandaemonium:

1. Scrolling warps fixed
2. 10 Death Knight Room changed to 10 L4 Darknuts
3. Aesthetic changes made to the enemies
4. Gohma 4 has new color

I still got some bugs to fix, but this should take care of the major stuff from Samer's Let's Play.

Enjoy people.

-James

[Dimentio]

Sorry if I'm late! I just got my new computer 4 days ago and I haven't been checking PureZC as often as I should. I also started a Semi-Webcomic over at MSPA Forums, so I was pretty busy.

I will have to install Zelda Classic, but just tell me what you need in terms of graphical stuff and I will do it! In fact, if you want me to, I can go and beautify everything in the game

[Nightmare]

There is a bad bug in New DLC, something I don't know if I can deal with:

But the palettes for the Game Icons have been messed up severely. They don't show up when you put on CSet 6. It has something to do with .ZPL backwards compatibility.

Dimentio, Gleeok, I don't know if one of you two would like a crack at it and/or convert the "new" default palettes to the current ones. Let me know, but I want it as close to the old ZC .ZPL as possible.

-James

[Jaydeadone]

Is there no way to get a reference to Old ZC palettes and fix them manually if you have to?