Lunar Magic suggestions and discussion (LM v3.40) - Resource & Tool Releases

Animations don't seem to be working anymore. Not sure if it's just my computer. They always worked before though. $#wario{-_-?}$

Edit: nevermind for some reason wine in Linux is now starting lm with animations off. Pressing 6 fixes it.

nice update!

i had two ideas pop up tho:

1. Why hasn't OW export/import been implemented? I know the bug exist via opening another rom while overworld editor exists but an official method sounds very useful.

2. What do you think of a way to sort of have a small tab maybe on "Modify Screen Exits" to allow jumping straight to a sublevel or a level. Or maybe even a list/notification bar while opening a level number that allows you to see what levels have been modified or unmodified. It would help keep track of levels imo.

So this near final ROM of SMW was about to be dumped. Support for it in Lunar Magic could be interesting if it somehow doesn't open at all, I think, but I can't imagine why it shouldn't.

so i tried to do a palette remap on page b4 and it crashed lunar magic
im using 3.02 but i noticed it works on 3.03 too.
it seems to happen on a clean rom too

i am doing something wrong here?

plz pm me ideas to put here cause i dont have ideas

Originally posted by Kiatus

so i tried to do a palette remap on page b4 and it crashed lunar magic

Looks like that's a known issue that'll be fixed soon.

Originally posted by Ruberjig

1. Why hasn't OW export/import been implemented? I know the bug exist via opening another rom while overworld editor exists but an official method sounds very useful.

See https://smwc.me/1463630. Also, that's not a bug. That's been the official method described in the help file for transferring overworlds for as long as the overworld editor has existed.

Originally posted by Ruberjig

2. What do you think of a way to sort of have a small tab maybe on "Modify Screen Exits" to allow jumping straight to a sublevel or a level.

Probably more appropriate as a button. But there's already a mouse gesture in the level editor window to jump to the level of the screen exit under the mouse cursor. Hold Alt and press right mouse Button down, move right, release. It can also be assigned to a keyboard shortcut.

Originally posted by Ruberjig

Or maybe even a list/notification bar while opening a level number that allows you to see what levels have been modified or unmodified. It would help keep track of levels imo.

Likely only in smaller hacks. In bigger ones it wouldn't help much unless you could label the levels or something.

Originally posted by Gregor

So this near final ROM of SMW was about to be dumped. Support for it in Lunar Magic could be interesting if it somehow doesn't open at all, I think, but I can't imagine why it shouldn't.

Maybe, would have to wait and see if it's different enough to be of interest.

I think there might be something wrong with object Z-ordering, at least in respect to screens. Unless specified otherwise, shouldn't objects be processed in order by screen? I have an object on screen 02 that spans multiple screens and is clearly going over top of objects on screen 03 and beyond, and I've already set the Z-order as low as Lunar Magic will let it go.

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here. Progress: 63/95 levels.

Is it an object LM knows how to render, or one of your custom objects? If it's the latter, you can force it with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Plus/Minus. But if it's the former, you may need to give me a sample mwl to see what's going on.

Oh, I see. I forgot about that shortcut.

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here. Progress: 63/95 levels.

Probably a very useless suggestion, but here it is:

I was thinking of something today: Would it be possible for Lunar Magic to "support" this hex edit in the editor? It's known that Lunar Magic actually "supports" the hex edits made for changing the last 4 choices in the Layer 2 (BG) Scrolling Rate dialog, effectively changing them to the edited setting. So in this case, the sprite will always show in the Add Sprites Windows if the SP4 is 04 (and wouldn't dissapear if the Cloud button is pressed).

Layout made by MaxodeX
2021 TRENO vibe check thread

Hey! I have the following suggestion:

If you try to open a ROM that was created in a new version of Lunar Maigc (say, 3.03) in an old version of Lunar Magic (say, one of the 2.x versions), you get greeted with the following warning message:

Quote

This ROM has already been edited by a newer version of Lunar Magic. Using an older version of the program on the ROM is not recommend due to potential incompatibilities that may cause corruption or data loss.

Recently, I have been running into the opposite problem however - People try to open and edit a ROM that was made in an older version of Lunar Magic (in this case, JUMPhalf) in the latest version of Lunar Magic, v3.03.
Doing this also causes the ROM to break: Goal tapes won't work properly at times, a lot of custom ASM code that was written for the project gets glitched out, and in short the hack becomes completely unbeatable.

Since the people who try to edit the ROM this way do not get a warning message, they're likely to think that everything is fine with doing that, resulting in frustration and a lot of false bug reports.

So my suggestion would be to add an additional warning message that handles this case, something akin to this:

Quote

This ROM has already been edited by an older version of Lunar Magic. Using a newer version of the program on the ROM is not recommend due to potential incompatibilities that may cause corruption or data loss.

Thank you for your time.

Originally posted by Shiny Ninetales

I was thinking of something today: Would it be possible for Lunar Magic to "support" this hex edit in the editor? It's known that Lunar Magic actually "supports" the hex edits made for changing the last 4 choices in the Layer 2 (BG) Scrolling Rate dialog, effectively changing them to the edited setting. So in this case, the sprite will always show in the Add Sprites Windows if the SP4 is 04 (and wouldn't dissapear if the Cloud button is pressed).

Most experienced users probably have the cloud button turned off anyway, but I suppose it couldn't hurt.

Originally posted by Ryrir

So my suggestion would be to add an additional warning message that handles this case, something akin to this:

Quote

This ROM has already been edited by an older version of Lunar Magic. Using a newer version of the program on the ROM is not recommend due to potential incompatibilities that may cause corruption or data loss.

A message saying that implies LM isn't backwards compatible with itself, which is flat out wrong. As it says in the help file, Lunar Magic is backwards compatible with hacks created in older versions of the program all the way back to version 1.0.

The type of incompatibilities you're talking about are all with third party ASM patches and tools. It can't make recommendations for those, as there's simply no way for the program to guess at all the possible customizations that may or may not have been done to any particular ROM outside of LM. That's on the hack author to keep track of.

For those editing hacks that they are not the author of and want to play it safe, you can always use "File", "Scan ROM" to find out the last version of LM that was used on a ROM and then use that version.

By the way, I noticed something curious: when you are in the Extra Options dialog, whenever you mark/unmark any option the tooltips doesn't work anymore, forcing you to re-open the dialog again to show them again.

Also noticed the tooltips last arround 20 seconds shown, which even being a decent amount of time to read them, there are some of them which are longer (like the Prefer Saving on 2MB+ ROM Area's) and takes a bit more seconds to read before they dissapear (especially considering that some non-native-english speakers reads english slower than native speakers).

Though, I'm not really sure if these are LM's behaviour or OS' behaviour (I'm on Windows 8.1).

Layout made by MaxodeX
2021 TRENO vibe check thread

Originally posted by Shiny Ninetales

By the way, I noticed something curious: when you are in the Extra Options dialog, whenever you mark/unmark any option the tooltips doesn't work anymore, forcing you to re-open the dialog again to show them again.

Yeah I know, it's been bothering me since I first added those. But I took another look at it tonight, and finally figured out what was going on and fixed it.

Originally posted by Shiny Ninetales

Also noticed the tooltips last arround 20 seconds shown, which even being a decent amount of time to read them, there are some of them which are longer (like the Prefer Saving on 2MB+ ROM Area's) and takes a bit more seconds to read before they dissapear (especially considering that some non-native-english speakers reads english slower than native speakers).

I can bump it up to about 32 seconds, which is the max that the tooltip control in windows allows for.

I'm not sure if this is just in my end or if it's the current behavior, but could you make it so LM doesn't uninstall the custom overworld sprite hijack when it's already installed? It seems to do that when I erase all sprites. (or at least it seems to get rid of the pointer at $0EF55D...)
Optionally, and if possible, it'd be cool if it got automatically installed when saving the overworld for the first time. It's not intrusive.

Originally posted by Erik

I'm not sure if this is just in my end or if it's the current behavior, but could you make it so LM doesn't uninstall the custom overworld sprite hijack when it's already installed?

What hijack?

Originally posted by Erik

It seems to do that when I erase all sprites. (or at least it seems to get rid of the pointer at $0EF55D...)

Well yeah, of course if you erase all the sprites the pointer to the sprite table will be cleared... there's no longer a table to point at. From the help file: "If the pointer is 0xFFFFFF, no custom sprites are present on the overworld. Lunar Magic manages the table on its own and will delete, change or relocate it when needed, so keep this in mind."

I keep doing stuff with tile numbers past the end of what LM supports (e.g. layer 3 tiles $200+, overworld tiles $300+). I understand that this is very niche, so I won't complain if you decide not to do anything about this.

First, a small bug(?): Layer 3 tiles $200+ are displayed as empty (all transparent) tiles in the overworld layer 3 editor but as repeats of $000-$1ff in the level preview. I assume that just one or the other is the intended behavior.

Second, a hopefully reasonable request: Could they not be empty/repeat tiles? I don't know the ideal way to display these tiles but empty tiles don't seem great, mainly because empty tiles show up a lot naturally whereas if a past-the-end tile shows up it is either by accident or as part of something complicated, and in either case they should be easy to spot. Similar logic applies for using repeats of earlier tiles. Replacing the all-$00 empty tile with an all-$55 alternating column tile would be good enough I think, since that's ugly and weird enough that it probably won't show up much in regular graphics.

Originally posted by Katrina

First, a small bug(?): Layer 3 tiles $200+ are displayed as empty (all transparent) tiles in the overworld layer 3 editor but as repeats of $000-$1ff in the level preview. I assume that just one or the other is the intended behavior.

They're pretty much both intended. The overworld editor just happens to be used for multiple things, so I didn't bother to restrict the tile range like I did in the level editor.

Originally posted by Katrina

Second, a hopefully reasonable request: Could they not be empty/repeat tiles? I don't know the ideal way to display these tiles but empty tiles don't seem great, mainly because empty tiles show up a lot naturally whereas if a past-the-end tile shows up it is either by accident or as part of something complicated, and in either case they should be easy to spot. Similar logic applies for using repeats of earlier tiles. Replacing the all-$00 empty tile with an all-$55 alternating column tile would be good enough I think, since that's ugly and weird enough that it probably won't show up much in regular graphics.

They could, but... I wonder if it might not be better to just put in an unofficial layer 3 GFX override for design purposes in LM, where you could temporarily specify all 8 files to use for tiles 0-0x3FF. Then if you're using those tiles you'll have a way to see what you're doing.

Though as for layer 1/2 overworld tiles 0x300+, there's already 2 different times LM will put stuff there. One is the unofficial overworld 2bpp viewing mode that was added in 3.02. The other is combining the "merge GFX slots" option with a certain edit in the ROM to enable 8 FG slots, though you probably don't want to do that unless you've done your own version of something like smkdan's VRAM patch for the overworld as the game will upload those 2 extra GFX slots to VRAM right over the tilemap if it's still in the way.

A graphics override seems like it would be pretty nice if you're willing to put it in.

Quote

Though as for layer 1/2 overworld tiles 0x300+, there's already 2 different times LM will put stuff there. One is the unofficial overworld 2bpp viewing mode that was added in 3.02. The other is combining the "merge GFX slots" option with a certain edit in the ROM to enable 8 FG slots, though you probably don't want to do that unless you've done your own version of something like smkdan's VRAM patch for the overworld as the game will upload those 2 extra GFX slots to VRAM right over the tilemap if it's still in the way.

I actually do have such a patch, although it puts FG1-FG8 at VRAM $0000 instead of combining them with any SP slots so I don't know if the ROM edit you're talking about would necessarily be enough to actually load the combined FG+SP slots.

Sounds like it wouldn't mesh well with that setup. Guess I'll include an override for both then. You'll be able to use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G to bring it up.