Topic: Castlevania: Dawn Of Sorrow (DS)

[ummwat]

Glad you're working on this again

[ozzy88]

Looking really good so far! Hope you're enjoying the game as well

[TerraEsperZ]

It's alright but the castle is, for the most part, pretty unoriginal. The next two DS games apparently have much more variety in terms of location and setting.

[alucard]

Great to hear that you are working on this game again. In a way DOS was a better version of Aria of Sorrow, made specifically because the DS was just being released. I still like the game a lot though.

[TerraEsperZ]

Updated first post with The Dark Chapel.

[TerraEsperZ]

Updated first post with Condemned Tower.

Well, that one didn't take long *except* for the background of the tower. The original one is a 3D model that I couldn't extract from the ROM, much less reproduce in Cinema4D, so I just did my best and spent about a few hours manually distorting the graphics, first by resizing the tiles horizontally by hand, and then vertically one pixel column at a time to achieve the final effect. Paint Shop Pro 8 unfortunately had nothing to achieve the desired distortion so I was kind of stuck. However, I might be able to get my hand on a recent version of Photoshop soon so maybe I won't have to suffer like that too much in the near future.

Please all note that the maps posted are nowhere near final, as they are missing several effects such as light halos around candles and in the case of the Condemned Tower map, clouds in the sky. I just have to find a way to reproduce the same effect as in the game which is pretty tough considering all the parameters 3D textures seem to have on the DS (going by the 3D Viewer for no$gba, there are several parameters named Spe, Dif, Amb, Emi, Light0 to Light3, Shin, Edge, Toon & Fog). And I haven't a clue what any of that means in practice.

[Revned]

Looking good! You did a great job on the background. I did the background of SotN's Royal Chapel similarly, and it always nags at me that it's not perfect.

[Zeric]

That's some very impressive work Terra, nice quality maps as usual
I haven't mapped any games in ages since my harddrive crashed and
lost a lot of my work.
I tried mapping Ecclesia but it never worked well cause of current emus
with disable layers and such, I might do the same way as I did with MM8
but it would take ages.
So anyway I look forward to your finished work

[TerraEsperZ]

Hey Zeric, it's nice to see you around since it's been a while

I haven't mapped any games in ages since my harddrive crashed and
lost a lot of my work.7

That sucks a lot and has become a constant fear of mine. Heck, I remember putting a project aside for several months after losing a map or two in a hard drive crash. Several months ago, I bought a USB hard drive and I've been doing backups of my data practically every day. Nothing takes the wind out your sails than having to repeat several hours of tedious work.

I tried mapping Ecclesia but it never worked well cause of current emus
with disable layers and such, I might do the same way as I did with MM8
but it would take ages.

Since I'm practically doing the same thing for Dawn of Sorrow, I can fully appreciate the incredible work you did on those Mega Man 8 maps. Unfortunately, even if future DS emulators have better layer support, they still won't make mapping the DS Castlevania games that much easier. Like Mega Man 8 on the PlayStation, all three games use a 3D engine to render the stages and sprites. Every 16 x 16 tile on screen is basically a flat texture so the only way an emulator could "remove" those layers would be to have some sort of checklist of all the textures being displayed at the moment and giving you the ability to turn off all those you require. Disabling layers would only be useful in removing the status bar since that's nearly the only thing that's on a separate layer. Hacking the ROM and finding out where and how all the rooms and their layers are stored would actually be much more efficient.

The annoying thing is that even if I wanted to map the other two games once I'm finished here, it would take way too long. Depending on how many layers and graphic effects are displayed at any given time, a single room can easily take me several hours to separate and reconstruct all the layers, remove the enemies and lighting effects and add in any transparency effect. I'm just glad there is very little actual 3D going on because I just don't have the skills right now to capture/reproduce those.

*Shudders at the thought of trying to capture that area in Order of Ecclesia with the 3D ship in the middle of a storm in the background*

[TerraEsperZ]

Updated first post with Cursed Clock Tower.

Wow, that one was painful. There were *so* many rooms with multiple layers to recreate for perfect accuracy I often only managed 1 or 2 rooms per (week) day. Looks like I'm heading to the underground areas next.

[ozzy88]

Looks kinda funny when there's four moons in the same picture. Other then that it looks awesome!

Hope you're feeling like all your work gets enough pay-off.

Also, it's really nice to see you do these status updates so we can sort of follow the development of this map.

Keep up the good work!

[TerraEsperZ]

A long time ago, I tried to "merge" the backgrounds when nearby rooms had the same one but in cases like this, it meant that I would have to remove background elements from rooms where they look really good. Specifically, the moon and the roofs seen in the distance in upper rooms of the tower would have to be removed from all but one room and that would leave the rest with a rather empty background. That's why I eventually decided to map each room individually in terms of background and live with the results. It just looks worse with Dawn of Sorrow because the map is built in such a way that unlike all the previous Metroidvanias, there are never any gaps between rooms so the whole things looks a lot more compact and aberrations like the multiple moons are made more obvious.

[Revned]

I didn't notice the lack of gaps initially. Now that you mention it, it does have a very different look. I've always been disappointed with the gaps in other games, but now that I know what it looks like without, I think they actually look better in many cases. It visually separates differently-styled rooms and reduces bad seams in the map. Interesting.

[TerraEsperZ]

Also, unlike Symphony of the Night, rooms will use often use similar colors for the foreground and the background, making it a bit harder to understand the layout of a room at first glance. In Symphony, almost all the rooms in the Alchemy Lab for example use the same tilesets so the area pops out as being distinct from the rest of the castle. Also, the foreground is very light while the background is very dark which helps to make the map more "readable". I find the maps for Dawn of Sorrow so far to be really hard on the eyes, especially the Garden of Madness.

[VGCartography]

Reviving this ancient thread to share a link I found:
https://www.vg-resource.com/thread-37086-post-660862.html#pid660862
Rufaswan has some download links there for all 3 DS games that have probably 80% of the background stuff represented. Things aren't tiled or stretched or whatever and some bits are missing, but overall it would represent a nice starting point for those - I referenced it for some Castlevania maps I worked on recently that I'll submit soon. I know this is probably long since past, but for anyone feeling like mapping some beautiful 2D pixel art, OoE doesn't have much out there already.