Topic: Tips, Tricks, What the Hell's?

[Trop]

Thought I'd make simple a thread for asking how to get out of those little jams we all run into occasionally.

I'll start off with a couple; I began in on Super R Type and hit the wall right off the bat.  The first area starts with several screens of background and no foreground.  Of course background and foreground scroll at different speeds so I can't just take pics as I'm going along because I wouldn't get the measurements right.  Also there are no static items in the foreground to line up so I'm stuck being unable to accurately measure empty space.

Here's another one just for fun.  I've been playing DKC3 lately and as I go I've been absentmindedly sizing it up, mapping difficulty wise.  In the waterfall levels I noticed a cute animation trick that stretches the waterfall layer vertically from top to bottom.  The effect moves with you so it always looks like the water is speeding down faster and faster and I can't help wonder how different people would map this.  You could just stack the unstretched frames of waterfall and hope no one would notice or you could stretch starting at the top of the map.  It's a funny problem.

[Peardian]

Interesting. I'd try loading a savestate of the room in bgmapper and see how it handles it. You might get lucky and get the whole non-stretched background.

[Maxim]

If the scrolling goes at an integer number of pixels per frame, you can count frames to determine the distance scrolled. My autostitcher does that for you automatically provided you stitch in the right direction.

If the background scrolls at an integer fraction of the foreground rate, you can stitch the background and then infer the foreground size. I'm just glad I work on a platform that doesn't support hardware parallax

Finally, there's the big dirty secret of mapping: if you just guessed, nobody could tell...

[Trop]

For r type I think that frame counting is the only thing I can do at this point.  Although your last suggestion looks a lot better.

As for the waterfall, yeah bgmapper rips it fine, but after that there's a lot of things you could do.  When you run into funny transparencies would you rather attempt to duplicate them to the best of your ability, or simplify them to make your map look more like a map and less like a photograph?

[Trop]

Got another one; what's up with the water in Maridia?  Instead of using the the same water transparency featured in the rest of Super Metroid the designers used some kind of room specific transparency.  I've tried all kinds of tricks but I can't figure it out.  Is it even a transparency at all?