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View topic - STH1EDWV - Sonic the Hedgehog editor

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Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2021 10:45 am
You can now add and remove objects from the right-click menu.


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Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2021 4:55 pm
I've migrated to .net 6 which brings some benefits for people with screen DPIs other than 96 (i.e. scaling >100% in Windows).



This is incomplete (in particular, the floor editor and screen previews are not scaled) and some bugginess seems to come from the framework (dragging between screens with different DPI seems to sometimes accumulate scaling).

I also changed the space usage display to use pixels, rather than columns, as its minimum unit. This doesn't change much but it was bugging me.
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Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2021 6:14 pm
Maxim wrote

* The generated ROM is now trimmed to a multiple of 64KB (for Everdrive compatibility you can't crop any tighter).

Thanks for paying attention to such things.

Your progress is amazing
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Post Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2021 8:01 pm
This is incredible stuff! I'm in awe of these types of projects. It's a dream for non-programmers like myself who have always dreamed of making my own level alterations.
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Post Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2021 12:46 am
Thanks. I’d really appreciate some feedback on how recent updates are working for people with projects to edit the game, as there have been a few bugs recently and I’d like to squash them all before adding new functionality.
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Post Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2021 9:33 am
I'll redo the emeralds/1-up moving mod with the new version this evening and report back. Am I to understand I now don't need to steal existing objects to repurpose them as new ones? Maybe its safer to first do it as I did before and confirm that's bug free, then try adding in extras.

Awesome work as ever, such a full featured editor for one of my favourite games popping up 30 years later has been an absolute joy :-)
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Post Posted: Sun Dec 12, 2021 7:55 pm
Today we have SDSC tag support. This allows you to embed your metadata in the ROM in a way supported by some emulators (hopefully Emulicious soon...). Here I have a crop to show how it looks in Meka:



Note that the SDSC tag needs to use space in the lower 64KB which is unfortunately very scarce; so you can't type a lot - but when I add in the ability to edit sounds, much more space will be available.

I've also made it possible to resize the space used display to be even bigger (it defaults to small, I've made it huge above). This is kind of silly but I like to see the pixels change as I type.
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Post Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2021 9:29 am
Very nice feature. Can't wait for x-mas! :)
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Post Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2021 3:40 pm
This editor is awesome goes beyond of just modding the game but expanding the stages, I was wondering is doable to somehow expand the horizontal resolution from 192 to 224 of the Master System II?, and detect whether is Master System I or II to display it, this would prevent to easy deaths in some stages like the jungle for example even would help the waterfall stage since is unfair a bad jump and lose a life.
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Post Posted: Sat Dec 18, 2021 5:42 pm
It’s not really possible because the game uses all the video memory and can’t (easily) spare the extra 256 bytes needed. Of course nothing is impossible, but it would require a lot of changes to the code.
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Post Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2021 12:05 pm
I've been diverted looking at the sound engine, re-ripping the soundtrack (including SFX) and considering compatibility with PSGLib.

As a diversion from the diversion, I've added the ability to view and edit some (but not all) of the places where the game draws things over the static screens:




This replaces the "game text" functionality we had before, but gives more flexibility. There's a bunch more to add, but I'm working through things a screen at a time. Next will be the ability to edit other aspects, e.g. the title screen timeout and text flash rate, and maybe also the animation data.
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Post Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2021 10:18 pm
Another very interesting feature, thanks!

*buns spotter* ;)
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Post Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2021 9:47 am
I added in support for changing certain values in the ROM. This allows us to start hacking certain behaviours...



Some of them are only slightly related to the artwork they are classified under. I'm open to suggestions for things to make editable like this.
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"image is not paletted"
Post Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2022 7:27 pm
ok, so, everytime i edit sonic sprites and import a new sprite sheet, it says that the "image is not paletted" even tho i checked the colors 5 times every second to see if they were ok, i already edited it with 2 pixel art editors, none of them worked, do you know how to solve this? and yes, they have the same color as normal sonic sprites (this only happens after i edit an image, if i just added 1 pixel to the image, it would still say that)

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Post Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2022 6:53 am
I don't really know how the editor works, but based on that error message, I assume you're not using a file format with a fixed palette. Maybe you're using PNG-24 instead of PNG-8?
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Post Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2022 8:57 am
Last edited by slogra on Thu Feb 17, 2022 10:18 pm; edited 2 times in total
Yes, the image must be in 8bit paletted format containing exactly 256 colors. Less colors will not work either.

Only the first 8 colors are used by the Sonic sprite.
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Post Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2022 3:17 pm
The framework I’m using converts paletted images with transparency to 32bpp automatically. Make sure transparency is turned off.

I only use Paint Shop Pro 7 for editing, let me know what tools you have trouble with and I can try to make it work better.

It’s a part of the software design to not try to interpret the images more than necessary, and let you manage the palette. Otherwise cases where there are duplicate palette entries (eg white in Green Hill Zone is used as part of the water animation as well as for white things) would be destroyed.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2022 6:33 am
Thanks for this!

I've been working on a Sonic 1 project hard way using hex and tile editors. Just about to release it when I find this tool which I'm hoping will make it even better. But I still have to ask...

Any plans for support of the Game Gear version?

As it stands, you can get some stuff to load simply by changing the file extension of the rom from .sms to .gg
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2022 7:31 am
There’s a lot of data inside the code regarding certain data locations from which everything else bootstraps. The intention is to swap in the various other games using the engine - Sonic GG. Prototypes, Coca-Cola Kid - later on.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2022 10:10 am
Coca Cola Kid uses the Sonic Triple Trouble engine, though. At least iirc.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2022 12:17 pm
I didn’t look closely at all, you may well be right.
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Post Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2022 6:08 pm
Well, it's been a long time since I posted an update. I've been dabbling with the music engine, which is very nicely documented but is also a real pain to figure out how to make an editor for, as I'm not familiar with these things. Attached is a screenshot of the current iteration, which is

* Parsing the music data out of the ROM - but in a way that means it won't see the Marble Zone music
* Dumping it as JSON on the left
* Attempting to convert it to a tracker-like format on the right, with the idea being to let you edit in there

I'm still a long way from being able to edit things and push it back into the ROM... but it will encourage me if I post this.

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