Last November, I was working on a hack. This isn't unusual around here, though it's not very common for me.
In this hack, I was making some rather large item I wanted to interact with layer 1. This isn't very unusual either.
The unusual part starts when I decided I didn't want to write a huge code to check all tiles this item should interact with. (No, I can't remember what this item was.) Instead, I rearranged the tables at $7xC800 to remove all traces of the term "subscreen", since that makes large interaction codes easier. I also decided to make the level sizes more dynamic, because when I'm already rewriting half of SMW, why not go all the way?
And then I got tired of it. This isn't very unusual for me either, I've cancelled plenty of projects (mainly large ones).
A few weeks ago, I picked it up again. This is very unusual for me, I can't remember any other instance of picking up a canned project.
In this hack, I was making some rather large item I wanted to interact with layer 1. This isn't very unusual either.
The unusual part starts when I decided I didn't want to write a huge code to check all tiles this item should interact with. (No, I can't remember what this item was.) Instead, I rearranged the tables at $7xC800 to remove all traces of the term "subscreen", since that makes large interaction codes easier. I also decided to make the level sizes more dynamic, because when I'm already rewriting half of SMW, why not go all the way?
And then I got tired of it. This isn't very unusual for me either, I've cancelled plenty of projects (mainly large ones).
A few weeks ago, I picked it up again. This is very unusual for me, I can't remember any other instance of picking up a canned project.
This patch rearranges the level tables to allow them to go up to seven screens in each direction, or over 50 screens in either direction if you sacrifice scrolling in the other. It's mostly finished, but right now, it just addsA few thousand lines of ASM later, the project is mostly finished. I say mostly, because it currently does nothing visible at all except adding a couple of bugs and incompatibilities (I think I've killed most of the bugs, but please tell me if you find any that aren't mentioned in the readme).
It does, however, make it (relatively) easy to make levels with the new shapes; take a look at !105 and !106 in loadlevel.asm for details.
You can get it here (requires Asar 1.30), but please read the readme before applying it. Blindly adding it will just shred your ROM sooner or later.
If you prefer a couple of screenshots instead, here you go. Or if you prefer watching the pains I had to sit through to make this, I've got some stuff for you too. (It's much easier to take screenshots of bugs than stuff working correctly, bugs are so much more varied.)
Two weeks later edit: As I expected, lots of talk and nothing done. I can't really say I expected anyone to use it with all of its incompatibilities, but is finding that Donut Plains 2 and probably a couple of others paint the background red during Mario Start too much to ask for...?
<blm> zsnes users are the flatearthers of emulation