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Posts by Fennor

Fennor's Profile → Posts

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Hi!

I used an Editor called fuzee to make minor changes on all 15 F-Zero tracks and HUGE changes on the AI path. The CPU drivers drive on a much more realistic line and are a lot harder to beat


I made changes to the part of White Land II with the sharp turns. You can't just cut them all in order to get an advantage over the CPU drivers.


I also removed some unnecessary branches like in Silence. Now you have to drive through the mine field.


In the original game the CPU drivers are in the middle of the road almost all the time. In this hack they choose the fastest way, even if it means they have to drive on a very tight path between mines and the wall.


I also use Action Replay codes for this game. First I wanted to patch them into the ROM, but that didn't work with my codes that all begin with "7E...", so I just provide a .cht file with the codes. But maybe that is not a bad thing, because this way you can disable some of the codes and play it like you want to. With all the codes active this game is really very hard, deactivating some of them can make it a little easier. So I didn't search for another solution.

The codes deactivate s-boosts, make your car much more vulnerable, remove spare machines, make your car spin after hitting another car, enable master mode on default, remove brown cars and increase top speed to 478 for all cars.

Thank you smkdan for allowing me to use your Practice Mode hack.

More about "F-Zero SNES on Legend Difficulty" and a Download Link can be found on this youtube video.

http://youtu.be/da5QGYNX-oQ
Originally posted by Egadd
Wow! I'm impressed. F-Zero can be a very fickle thing to hack, I know from experience! I'm surprised you took the time to do it.

Be sure to submit it to romhacking.net!


Thanks! But I am not really a hacker. As I said, I used fuzee for it. And I guess using cheat code files instead of modifying the rom itself are "newby methods".
But I think for me it was hard enough to find codes that allow me do disable the brown cars or enable master mode on default.

The funny thing is: The only reason I found this forum is, that I searched for a place to share my game. But when I looked a bit around on this forum and on other romhacking sites, I found out how to modify things like acceleration curves. That helped me to find out by myself how to change even more things, like strength of dash plates, dirt, damage of mines, damage of walls, how to make jumping plates not boost your speed and other stuff. Especially the dash plates and jumping plates have been a problem for me. I removed them all because they give the player an advantage over the CPU drivers. Now I can simply change the dash and jump plates so that they give the player exactly the same boost as they give the CPU drivers.

If I knew all that before, I would have rebalanced every vehicle.

Edit: Maybe I'll keep this thread updated with F-Zero stuff. I made a video of some minor changes to the ROM. It allows the CPU drivers to benefit from dash plates to the same degree as the player would when using Fire Stingray.

http://youtu.be/_u8papNcHFs
Is someone interested in driving the original F-Zero with Ace League cars? I didn't upload anything yet.



Physics have been changed, Blue Falcon has the top speed, acceleration, grip, vulnerabilty and other stuff - like speed loss on dirt - of Blue thunder. Wild Goose has the stats of Green Amazone, Golden Fox has the stats of Luna Bomber and Fire Stingray has the stats of Fire Scorpion.

Of course I also adjusted the graphics.
I added a hack to my files. (F-ZeroCarHack)

It contains two patches. One to modify the classic F-Zero so that you can drive with the Ace League cars on the classic tracks. And another one to modify BS F-Zero GP 2 so that you can drive the classic cars on the Ace League tracks.

http://bin.smwcentral.net/u/21218/F-ZeroCarHack.zip
I added the text document "rominfo" to my files. You can find some rom adresses and their effects in that file. With this you can change top speed, dash plate speed, grip, damage recieved, braking speed, turn performance, acceleration and other stuff easily.
Hi,

first of all, thanks for reaching out to me. I'd love to contribute
something to this project. I am not a programmer and do not know much
about the technical stuff. Most of the rom adresses I figured out by
looking at the Rom map provided by smkdan. I simply changed Bytes
near to ones he documented and looked what happens. Since I know much
about F-Zero in general, I often already had an idea what they could change by recognizing certain patterns.

Here are a few things that may help you.

https://www.mediafire.com/?x7fwd29lckfkohf

fzeeclip includes a huge folder with different track tile sets. This
makes building tracks much more handy.

Info includes the textdocument you linked above, also some codes and
maps I used to rebuilt the original tracks. (Yes, I rebuilt them, I
didn't hack the original track data into fuzee)

Rom just includes a set of different rom hacks I downloaded. So most
of them are not made by me, I named them by the authors, whenever I
knew from who they were.

The rest are tracks made by me, I included the stuff from the working
folder. I hope those are the final versions I had (I saved them all
over the place and it was really messy). Wild Goose Master and Legend
are the only complete hacks. Rebalanced is the only one that includes
stat changes to the car. There I tried to balance it in a way that
one car has the highest top speed, another one the best grip, another
one loses the least amount of speed when going off the accelerator,
and one with the best acceleration and turning radius. The first
track was supposed to be for the high speed cup, where on master
difficulty only the cars with highest top speed and best grip could
shine. Two hacks worth mentioning are also two where I changed the 4
main cars to the F-Zero2 cars. And one where I changed the 4 main cars in F-Zero2 to the ones in F-Zero1.

I also know a lot about the fuzee editor and what most people did not
consider when building their hacks, I'll get to it when I have a
little bit more time.

A few things random stuff that just comes to my mind: I am not sure
whether it will be a good idea to give the cpu drivers different top
speeds. It will make balancing just harder. Fire Stingray may just
pull in front and increase the gap further and further. You would
also have to adjust the turning of the individual CPU cars, so that
they can play out their advantages, too.

I like the idea of having a boost like the one in F-Zero X. I don't
really like how it works in the SNES version. I would also like to
see the CPU drivers use it. My hacks always had the philosophy to
give the CPU drivers the same tools as the player. They should feel
like actual opponents, so that you have proper battles. Most hackers
don't seem to care about CPU drivers at all.

I'd love to see the top speed increased from 478kph to something
higher where you actually have to brake somtimes. I had a few
problems with that though. First of all, I didn't know how to change
the CPU cars top speed. In fuzee I can set them to 4 different
speeds. One is (on master) about 250kph, one is 320, one is 385 and
the highest 478. Also I had to use more Bytes for the acceleration,
but I think that wasn't a big deal, since before Blue Falcons
acceleration set there is another acceleration set that seemed to be
unused. Another problem was that top speed semmed to be locked at
478kph in another way than just by the 8 Bytes for the 4 vehicle top
speeds. When I changed the cars top speed to something higher and
gave them acceleration > 0 for speeds above that I could see the
speed o meter getting higher, but I did not effectively driver
faster. Only when I tried to drive diagonaly my speed increased,
which makes believe the X-speed and Y-Speed are locked at 478kph, so
when I drive diagonally I have 478kph for both, X and Y, making my
speed effectively 478 * 2^1/2. Which is wierd to me, since the boost
pads increase your speed properly.

Something that really annoys me is how collisions are handled. When
you drive 478 kph and bump into a car doing 470 kph from behind (so
just a 8kph difference) you will nearly stop, a very small touch
shouldn't do that. It would be better if it decreased your speed to
470 and increased the speed of the car infront to 478. (Btw. the
speed o meter for some reason is not proportional to actual speeds.
Half the speed of 478 acutally is 175, not 239 as expected)

Jump plates. For some reason they reduce your speed, but then for a
short amount of time you accelerate (depending on the first Byte for
acceleration of the car), making your speed go up, also giving you an
advantage over the cpu. By setting the Byte to ~20 your speed will
approximately stay the same. I made use of that in my Rebalanced
hack, I gave some cars a slightly higher value than 20, others a
slightly lower, so that I have cars that are good or bad at jumping.

I think there is a bug with boost pads and CPU drivers. Sometimes
they hit it but it still isn't working. I know that it is only
working for the player when he points in the same direction as the
boost pad. And for some reason it is also not working for the CPU
driver when the PLAYER is pointing in the wrong direction, instead of
the CPUs direction.

Something I'd also like would be more lifes and hit points in
beginner class, if that is doable. I like the feeling of having your
race end when you make just one mistake (for master mode). But the
information I have does not allow me to increase the damage done by
the track borders enough, FF damage is still low. And I don't want to
set the electric barrier to higher damage, since I want it to be
something like a curb which you are using for tight turns on purpose.

For the Legend hack I used a code to disable the brown cars. I hated
them, they are just not fun at all. An artificial way to make your
race not boring when you are in front. I would be ok with them if
they would drive as fast as you, and slow down on straights to let
you go by. But the easier way probably would be to just disable them
completely if you agree with that. What do you think about them? Are
they fun? (Should have read your post before that. You don't seem to like them either.. that's good)

A small detail: With Golden Fox it is actually the best thing to
BRAKE after hitting a boost pad to get the most speed of it. That's
because at a certain speed braking of the Golden Fox is weaker than
the deceleration when being above the top speed, while braking always
has higher priority.

Another idea: Starting further down the grid. If you decide to get
rid of brown cars, this could compensate for the lack of traffic when
removing them. And this way you will have proper battles instead of
annoying lapped cars. I believe 5 cars can be traced at a time,
before one car gets deleted to make a car behind or infront of you
spawn.
Originally posted by CatadorDeLatas
That must have taken a long time! But I found very clever the way you made the grid on the maps to be able to build them properly. Even though only Mute City and White Land II were accurate (all the other tracks needed the grid to be 8 pixels higher to be accurate), that might explain why you didn't find all of the original tiles.


I think the maps didn't show the whole track, so I didn't know where the track would actually start. Horizontally it is clear where it has to be within one section (set of 16 tiles). Because you can only place the start/finsish checkpoint right in the middle of it. Vertically you can move it around, I just assumed that most tracks would also have the track in the middle of a section, this way it looks more "right" in the editor. I remember noticing that it could be wrong though. As far as I remember I moved one part of port town by 8 pixels to get the magnet stripes in their, I couldn't find the proper tiles without moving them.

Originally posted by CatadorDeLatas
I don't know if this info is correctly because I haven't looked too much into it yet, but it looks like the game has 4 tables for all of the 4 difficulties, and each of these table I believe are divided into 3 sections: Main machines, purple machines and green machines.


The 3 sections part seems accurate. On lower difficulties green and purple cars are slower than the main cars, and I believe the green ones slower than the purple ones. I think it also depends how far down the grid you are, the purple and green cars seem to get worse or drive a different line when you are behind.

Originally posted by suFami
I feel like the cars from F-Zero 2 (Ace League) are all more balanced, but it has a negative effect to me, like they all kind of drive the same it feels like sometimes. No one car really stands out (maybe the Luna Bomber with it's top speed).


Yes, I think overall it is a little bit better balanced. Lunar Bomber is about the same as Fire Stingray, maybe a little bit worse, but also depends on the track. Blue Thunder and Green Amazone are both better than Blue Thunder and Golden Fox. For some reason Fire Scorpion is about the same as Wild Goose, not a improved version. It is slower than the Blue Thunder, has worse acceleration, worse grip, loses more speed when not on the accelerator... Just like the Fire Stingray seems be better in everything, the Fire Scorpion is worse in everything.

Grip is probably what has the biggest effect on making cars feel unique. Fire Stingray has shitloads of it which makes it feel much different from other cars. Lunar Bomber does not have that much grip, it feels the heaviest though with its high turning radius. In the original F-Zero weight feels more similar between the different cars.

Originally posted by suFami
You're right, there's a lot about Fuzee that most people don't take to their advantage. Like you mentioned speed is one of them. Another is the setting on the cars' tendency to slide around corners (if set at 3 they can turn really sharp turns with no problems). Also see the info about Bits under Checkpoint Properties and Machine-Sppecific Checkpoint Properties in Catador's document.


I myself set the turning properties for AI cars to the best for each checkpoint. I just layed out the checkpoints in a way that they form a realistic racing line. It was much easier for me to make them follow the line I want. If you make them slide, they will just be carried to the outside of the turn, try to move shaprly towards the racing line, overshoot and having to sharply turn the other direction again. That's especially extreme in GP Legend. If there is a combination of a few very light right and left turns, they will just slightly get off the line in the first turn, by trying to get back in the middle and overshooting they get even more off the line for the second turn, and at some point they will hit the wall.

Originally posted by suFami
I never knew that the Golden Fox's brake is faster than acceleration after hitting a boost. Reminds me that the speedrunners do something called break boosting (even with Fire Stingray I believe).


Actually Golden Fox can also do that trick with the boosts you gain every lap. With Golden Fox it just works the other way around. Fire Singrays braking ist much stronger than the speed it loses naturally. The boost sets you to ~525 kph, and as soon as you dropped down to 478kph it will jump up to 525 again. So if you break at 500kph you will get to 525 faster and spend less time at the low speeds of 478 - 500kph. With the Golden Fox you can break from 525 to 500 to stay at the speed longer, then release the brake until you get to 525 again. You would have to brake much more frequently though, and the effect is much smaller than it is for Fire Stingray. With WIld Goose it works the same way as for Fire Stingray, but also not as effective. For Blue Falcon it does not work at all, since braking is just as strong as not braking.
The boost pad trick for Golden Fox works only when braking at the right speeds. The natural speed reduction is constant, while braking power depends on your current speed. At about 630kph both are the same, then you have to start braking.

Originally posted by suFami
What do you mean by starting furter down the grid?


You start in something like position 10. If you remove brown cars, it would be a good idea to give the player something that makes him busy. I understand why they implemented them into the game, they didn't want them to have an easy race as soon as you are in front, while struggling for the whole race just because you messed up in the beginning.
The wipeout games have a similar philosophy. They let you start at the back of the grid, so that you are busy overtaking for the whole race. Which is more fun than just driving ahead of the field for the most time of the race.
Rubberbanding is another way many racing games handle it. They are driving faster when they are behind and slower when they are in front, what feels more like being cheated on as a player though. The warp mechanic of the CPU cars is similar, but I think is even worse since it can instantly reset any gap you made.
Maybe you would have to stretch the grid at the start, though. Of course you can't display oll 9 cars in front of you, so you have to make the 5th car - the last one you can see - far back at the horizon, while others in front spawn as soon as you catch up.
I assume "SlightOffset" is the thing that lets Fire Stingray drive a little more to the left and Wild Goose more to the right? (And Blue Falcon left, middle or right depending on what car you are using)

In your video it is almost always on "true", but in Mute City II it seemed to get turned on and off all the time. Not sure what it is even good for except for branches, by having the cars that tend to drive more on the left take the left branch, while the others take the right branch. Maybe they can also overtake eachother better when they are not driving on the exact same line.

I had it always turned off for my hacks, because I wanted them to make use of the whole width of the track. Having it on true would make some cars hit the walls. It also makes cars on the inside of turns perform better, since they have a shorter way. Especially if there is one checkpoint with slower speeds. The cars at the inside will have to spend less time on the slower checkpoint, so that they won't slow down as much before they can start accelerating again.
A few thoughts about the boost mechanic:

- If you make the boost work like in F-Zero X, you probably want the CPU drivers to trade health for boost power. That means you'd want them to drive on the refill areas, how would you handle that? Just making them drive there on default would create chaos at the start, since usually the refill areas are right after the start. You would need a different route in lap 1. Maybe the best way would be if you lead the ai path through the pits, but have the "goStraight" checkpoint argument on true, but set it off somehow at the end of the first lap?

- As far as I know, all cars have the same amount of health, they only differ in damage recieved and regenerated, is that right? If boost drains a set amount of health, that would make boots really strong for the Golden Fox, but weak for Wild Goose, since the Golden Fox can refill it much faster again. So the health of cars may need to be rebalanced.

- You said you wanted to make them use the boost "randomly". So even at turns like the middle section in White Land II? Or will you set some checkpoints to allow or not allow boost for CPU? I'd like them to boost at specific checkpoints, especially since - if it really works like in F-Zero X - boosting once in a while is less efficient than boosting multiple times in a row at certain spots.

-I am not sure how it exactly works in F-Zero X. But I think the acceleration bonus is added to the normal acceleration. Above the top speed, you have a slow decceleration, so that with a boost you have a slow acceleration. If you get even faster, the natural deceleration and the acceleration from the boost even out. When you are even faster through other sources, you decelerate slightly even when boosting. In F-Zero SNES you have a constant deceleration when being above top speed. Having a constant acceleration above top speed, simply limited by a top speed for accelertion - not by acceleration - could be problematic. Because in that case it would be best to boost until you reach boost top speed, then stop boosting, start boosting again when it would be just enough to reach boost top speed again, then stop boosting again and repeat. Which also sounds a little cheesy.

-boost pads in F-Zero X work the same, if you boost before one it will stop draining your energy as soons as you hit the boost pad, so that you won't lose out on health because of wrong boost timing. (In case you want to make boost pads work like in F-Zero X, too)
Originally posted by CatadorDeLatas
Also, the "goStraight" argument only actually affects the start of the race, as soon as they run into a checkpoint that has it set to false, it will be ignored on all the other checkpoints they run on.


Hm... I thought that when I built my hacks, I sometimes wanted the CPU to drive slightly diagonaly on the start finish straight, simply because there is the racing line, but couldn't do it because they had to be set straight there because of the start. Maybe I just never tested it and just assumed it wasn't possible... or it gets resettet after every lap, so that they can't go straight after it has been set to off, but can do it again in lap 2?

Originally posted by CatadorDeLatas
Speaking of the Silence mine path, look at this non-sense of an AI path that the game has by default:


Well, CPU likes to behave akwardly around mines in general. Whenever they see them, they try to do the moose test or something, especially obvious in sandstorm 1. :p
Originally posted by CatadorDeLatas
- Modify AI to drive on the pit area after the first lap (don't even know how xD);


You said they wouldn't go straight anymore after it being set off for the first time. Sou couldn't you just make the normal AI path go through the pits? In the first lap they wouldn't drive through it because they are still set to go straight. In lap 2 they would ignore it and follow the route through the pits.

Tested your patch for a few minutes. Worked well so far! Killing CPU cars - even intentionally - is quite hard, though. But on default collision damage between cars is pretty low, so that is kinda expected.
Originally posted by CatadorDeLatas
Let me know if you find any bugs:
Patch for Fuzee hacks.


Still messes up the tileset for me. I tried it on different fuzee hacks. Only worked on the original F-Zero game.

I am wondering why it doesn't simply work by patching the original F-Zero, rename it to fzero and use it as input for fuzee. So that when you save your tracks in fuzee it modifies this version. But it seems to reverse the changes. I know that it works for other stuff like car physics. When I made my Rebalanced hack I never created a patch and applied it to my fuzee output, I just modified the original F-Zero and used it as input.

So for some reason it overwrites your changes, but since CPU collisions have nothing to do with what fuzee does, why does it change anything there?


Cool that you fixed the boost pad bug. I used to avoid creating boost pads after turns because of that, so that I could avoid being at a different checkpoint direction than the CPU cars.
So far your patch worked. I tested it on my "Wild Goose" Master hack. In this hack I guided the brown cars through the walls because I didn't want them to be on the racing line at any time.

What I noticed is that the first brown car will survive a few seconds outside the track, the second one will explode instantly. But then I remembered you said you didn't know yet where the code is for spawning brown cars so that you can set their health, so I guess that is expected. It is kinda satisfying though to see them blow up all the time.

I have another small suggestion. Can you make ice change grip of the car instead of making them just get more out of control after you already lost it? The way ice works now it doesn't really make a difference, especially for Fire Stingray with its huge amounts of grip. You don't need to adjust your driving to it, mistakes are just punished harder.
Originally posted by CatadorDeLatas
I'm assuming you're wanting the ice to act like in the later games, where the cars are in a constant "sliding" state?
I haven't looked on how the game handles sliding/drifting/whatever it's called, but I think I can easily find something by looking where the game retrieves the "minor slide" tables from your document.



Yes, at least something similar. The important part is that I want it to feel different immediatly, not just after you already lost control. The current ice does not really feel slippery to me. Most of the ice patches I can simply ignore. Maybe it slightly matters for the hairpins in Whiteland I and II when driving a car other than Fire Stingray. Because for hairpins it can be useful to just slightly drift into them, which could make you get out of control too much on ice.

But ice patches like the one in Fire Field does not really matter. You don't want to drift there anyways, since that makes you lose speed even without ice. So it only makes a difference when you already made a mistake.

--------------------------------

Originally posted by CatadorDeLatas
I have also found that the player has special "surface flags" that CPUs don't such as "is on pit tile", "is on left/right wind tile" and "is on ice tile". It's really bad that ice doesn't affect CPU cars in any way, that's just too op.
There are also some other op things I noticed with the AI, the dirt normally divides the player's turn speed by 2, CPUs will still have normal turn speed on dirt.


Do CPU cars even slide? And if they did, I think giving them less grip on ice would be problematic, at least without changing the layout of the AI path. The AI would just try to turn as always, steer too much, lose control and mess up the turn completely. I think that would even happen on normal turns without ice.

In my first post I mentioned that I think it would be very hard to make every car behave differently according to their stats. Because if you give one car the advantage of better acceleration, you also have to give the other car a the advantage of having better grip to keep things balanced. So you would have to add grip for CPU cars, but also the CPU car would have to know how to handle low grip. It has to know that it can't just steer on full lock all the time, because that will make him get out of control.

It is weird to me that the developers even tried to give the CPU cars different turning performances for different turns. Their racing line already is totally unrealistic, they always try to stick to the middle of the track. So by changing their turn performance, they try to make them behave more realistic on a totally unrealsic line you shouldn't be able to follow in the first place. There are some turns like the last before the big jump in White Land II where you can see them overshoot a little and then shoot to left again right away to get back to the racing line. No human driver would behave like that, it doesn't really look better than giving them better turn performance so that they can stay in the middle of the road.

Maybe the best solution to have them perform differently while still keeping things balanced is to make one car brake longer on a specific turn than the other. So you would balance them by manually adjusting every checkpoint. For example in Mute City I they all can go full throttle most of the time, but Fire Stingray has to brake for only a very short amount of time at the hairpin, while a car like the Golden Fox has to brake much longer due to terrible grip. (Instead of havin different speed setting on checkpoints for main cars, purple cars and green cars, could you use them for different speed settings for every single main car?)
Originally posted by suFami
About the ice, I agree with you guys that it's effects are only noticeable on turns, but not so much on straightaways. White Land I's last ice turn gets me sometimes. If you make it immediately slippery though, it may make ice too frustrating. The ice in X and GX is definitely more slippery, but the tracks have more room too if you start sliding everywhere.


I think that is just a matter of balancing. It does not need to completely mess up your turning, it just needs to have a noticable effect even before being out of control already, so that ice actually adds to the gameplay. Maybe it could still work like normal grip, so that you can avoid any sliding by not being on the accelerator. This way you can still get around turns without any problems if you are just catious enough, but have to take a little risk if you want to get around the turn as fast as possible.
Are the hitboxes even bigger than the graphics? If anything, I would have made them smaller. It being very hard to drive close to another car without somehow crashing into them is something that always bugged me. Maybe it would look ugly if the hitbox was smaller than the graphic and you clip through them when overtaking the other car. But I think you wouldn't notice that if the hitbox was just a little bit smaller than the graphics. Can you (want to?) change the hitbox?

Since I am at it: Before I talked about collisions as a player. But collisions between NPCs are even weirder, especially when they lap a brown car. Sometimes the car who wants to overtake crashes gets slowed down by the brown car in front, sometimes they just drive through them, sometimes the drive through them and the brown car gets slowed down. And when I say "slowed down", I mean they completely stop. It is very unpredictable when they stop, it can mess with you and it also doesn't look very nice/realistic either. The npc in front drives at 300kph, the one behind 301 and as soon as they touch the car behind seems to drop down to 0.

I also raced against your F-Zero2 Ghosts. They are definitly a lot more challenging than the original ghosts. I think Sand Storm1 is the best ghost, he does quite well in the first few laps. As you said the one in Silence messes up a little, maybe also the one in Sand Storm 2.
Originally posted by suFami
Interesting findings on the F-Zero 2 ghosts. Definitely seems like they never finished fully implementing it into the game. F-Zero 2 is very odd in that way. Like how it only has a few new tracks. You can tell it's a halfway done game that wasn't near finished. It's so odd that Nnintendo allowed for it to be released on the Satellaview. Usually they never let games get released that aren't up to the standards people usually associate their company with.



I have seen footage of a forest track with new tiles, but it wasn't in the final game. https://youtu.be/kE8B1ePtQeg
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