Topic: FlyingArmor's Map Projects Present and Future

[FlyingArmor]

Inspired by Peardian's thread, here is where my current and future mapping projects will be organized from now on. Also, I plan on this thread being a dumping ground of sorts for various maps I've done where I don't plan on mapping the rest of the game.

Current Projects:
Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes (PC-98)
Exodus: Ultima III (PC)
Ultima: Quest of the Avatar (NES)

Completed Projects:
Paladin's Quest (SNES)
Lufia & The Fortress of Doom (SNES)
Ultima VI: The False Prophet (SNES)
Final Fantasy VI (SNES)
Lennus II (SFC)
Dragon Quest V (SFC)
Dragon Quest I & II (SFC)
Final Fantasy IV (SFC) - Japanese Version
Final Fantasy IV (SNES) - North American Version
Final Fantasy V (SFC)
Aretha (SFC) - Overworld
Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise (GB)
GD Leen/Gadyurin (SFC)
Silva Saga II (SFC)
Brain Lord (SNES) - Collaboration with Tropicon
Final Fantasy III (FC)
Final Fantasy VII (PSX)
Daedalian Opus (GB)
Bouken! Puzzle Road (GB)
Light Fantasy (SFC)
Aighina no Yogen (FC)
Legend of the Ghost Lion (NES)
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Future's Past (SNES)
Clue (SNES)
Ganbare Goemon Gaiden: Kieta Ougon Kiseru (FC) - Overworld
Snow Bros. (NES)
Golf (NES)
Shinseiki Odysselya (SFC)
Dragon Warrior II (NES)
Q*Bert (NES)
Legacy of the Wizard (NES)
Popeye (NES)
Phantasy Star II (GEN)
Ultima VI: The False Prophet (PC)
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (PC)
Nox Archaist (Apple II) - Overworld
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (C64)
The Addams Family: Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt (SNES)
Hydlide (NES)
Lufia: The Legend Returns (GBC)
Ihatovo Monogatari (SFC)
Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
Super Soukoban (SFC)

Future Projects:
Deathlord (C64)
Light Fantasy II (SFC)
Otaku no Seiza: An Adventure In The Otaku Galaxy (FC)
Questron (C64)
The Screamer (PC-88)
Secret of Mana (SNES)
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (PC)
Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (PC)

More detailed information for each project will follow soon.

[FlyingArmor]

Final Fantasy VI (SNES)

All that's left is the Lete River and Kefka's Tower. Now that Anime North is over with, I've got a lot more time on my hands so I can get back to working on these. Maybe I can get them both finished by the end of June?


Ultima VI: The False Prophet (SNES) - Britannia

I have all the mapping done for this. The final size ended up being 16272 x 16416 pixels! I still need to go over it one more time just to make sure I included all the rafts that are scattered everywhere. I'm not sure if I want to include all the reagents that can be found in the wilderness though... it may be more work than it's worth. Plus they tend to appear and disappear from time to time (the Blood Moss near Iolo's Hut does this for instance) so it may be better to leave them off.

One problem I have though is that because the map is so big, I can't run PNGOUT on it to shrink the file size (currently at 14 MB as a PNG). I'd need a whole lot more RAM than I've got at the moment (1 GB). Plus with the Photoshop I use, whenever I save a file as PNG, it applies gamma corrections to the colours, so they end up being much darker than they're supposed to be. If that wasn't a problem, I'd have no problem sending in the map at 14 MB.

So I was wondering if anyone would be generous enough to try and shrink it down on their computer?


Dragon Quest V (SFC) - World Map

I'm only planning on mapping the overworld (mainly because I haven't played this game all the way to the end). It's about 80% complete so far.


Star Trek: The Next Generation: Future's Past (SNES)

This isn't an active project, just something I like to work on from time to time. I mainly started it because I was having trouble finding all the trapped miners on Orientis Gamma IIIB. I have the Derelict Ship level almost finished, so that'll be part of the updates for this weekend.


Lufia: The Legend Returns (GBC)

This is what I will be working on in earnest after Final Fantasy VI. The randomized dungeons will definitely help cut down on the amount of mapping I will need to do. Plus I really like the look of the graphics, so it will definitely be a lot of fun to work on!

[Trop]

Ooo, Ultima 6.  Can't wait.

[Troy Lundin]

I'll shrink the world map down for Ultima. I have 16 gigs in my rig.

[FlyingArmor]

Ah, thanks so much, Troy. I'll send it your way once I'm done checking it over.

So yesterday I managed to finish off the Dragon Quest V overworld map. It's a bit bigger than the typical 4096 x 4096 world map, and would probably look better at that size, but I was going by what the Wayfarer's Map in the game indicated for finding the edges of the world, so I decided to go with accuracy rather than siding with aesthetics in this particular case.

[Troy Lundin]

The best way to accurately discern the size of a scene is to find where the actor coordinates are stored in memory. This way you can find out where (0, 0) is and start from there. Since most older RPG scenes loop, you could just move to the left one space and up one space then check your coordinates again. Since you looped around, your current coordinates would indicate the size of the scene (zero-based, of course).

[JonLeung]

How does Ultima VI look on the Super NES?  I absolutely love Ultima VI: The False Prophet on the PC - it was one of the biggest games that could run on my first computer, a 286...  Though I played VII and VIII, but not much of the other Ultimas, Ultima VI still has a special place in my heart.  Well, the space of my heart reserved for computer/video games, anyway.  

But I am also anxiously awaiting the completion of Final Fantasy VI, my favorite FF game.  You sure know how to pick 'em!

Clearly, RPGs hit some kind of peak at VI, though some would say VII.  Or at least for FF and Ultima.  (I guess for both, VIII is a bit of a black sheep...but I digress...)

[FlyingArmor]

It doesn't look all too different from the PC version. One stark difference is the colour of the dirt; it's actually brown rather than the really reddish stuff found in the PC version (guess it's really rich in iron there huh?). It's one of the very few console ports of Ultima that was pretty faithful to the original (another one would be Ultima IV for the Master System).

Heheh, what can I say? It's only natural to work on these games that I grew up playing. It's definitely an interesting way of revisiting them.

By the way, I'm just about finished with capturing all the areas of Kefka's Tower. I'm so happy that I was able to capture the entire outside area. The walk through walls code was pretty stubborn in that area, but there was just one tiny column where I could walk up and down through obstacles, so that really helped me out a ton. Next will be to organize all the pieces into something that makes at least a little more sense.

I think I would agree with that as well. VI and VII for both of those series are my favourites (still have yet to play U7 Part 2 though... something to look forward to!).

[Paco]

I think I would agree with that as well. VI and VII for both of those series are my favourites (still have yet to play U7 Part 2 though... something to look forward to!).

You should play U7 1+2 on Exult with Mods as they add some stuff to game like new Feature (Statusbar on Screen, etc), more Quests (Keyring in U71, etc) and more bugfixing.

[Troy Lundin]

I wasn't sure where to put this so I am just going to put it here. I was perusing your Lufia and the Fortress of Doom maps when I saw this map: https://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/SuperNES/Lufia&TheFortressOfDoom-OldCave-3thLevel.png

Is it supposed to be "3th" and not "3rd"? It caught my eye immediately, but I thought maybe Jon just made a typo. Then, I noticed it was on the image itself. Never played the game so I am unsure if it is that way in the game itself.

[FlyingArmor]

@Paco: I actually played The Black Gate to completion last year with Exult. I didn't enable all the extra features, but did like the character status bar at the bottom of the screen; really handy to say the least. For Serpent Isle, it's just a matter of actually finding my Ultima Collection CD and installing it, but I think I went looking for it one time and couldn't find it. It should be around somewhere though...

@Troy: Oh yeah, that's a mistake alright. Thanks for pointing it out! I have been meaning to revise that map anyway for another reason: the 14th chest hidden in the swamp/mud stuff should be replaced with a white border to indicate it's there.

When I first started mapping that game, I used half transparent chests for the items in swamps, but later switched to using white borders to keep things consistent across all maps (since in towns there'd be hidden items in plants, bookcases, etc, so a half transparent chest wouldn't make sense there).

[FlyingArmor]

The Britannia map for Ultima VI is now up on the website! Special thanks to Troy Lundin for helping me shrink it down (managed to squeeze out 1.1 MB). Phew, such a gigantic mapping project finally behind me, heheh. I've thought about mapping all the dungeons as well while I'm at it (now that the mammoth world map is out of the way), but that isn't set in stone just yet.


Over the past year or so, I've toyed around with mapping various areas in Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V, and I thought I'd post some examples of what I've come up with. If I were to map these games in their entirety, I would be mapping it in Japanese.

It's interesting the changes that were made to various towns in FF4, like the Town of Baron for instance, with how the southwestern section was completely rearranged when it was released over here as FF2.

I have labeled all the chests and hidden items individually in the FF4 maps, but I think if I were to release them "officially", I'd use a legend like I have with my FF6 maps, just so they wouldn't be as cluttered.

This isn't a sign that I'll be taking up mapping these games in earnest, it's just that these maps have been on my hard drive for so long that I thought it high time for other people to see them.

[7HFB]

yo dude
I found this thread (well an earlier thread) due to looking up maps for Twisted Tales of Spike McFang because I thought more had been done beside the jungle maze. I guess I remembered wrong but I saw an old post where you mentioned you'd like to work on it.

I'm not sure if you're still interested, but recently I saw on the Cutting Room Floor that the game has a debug menu which can be easily accessed with an emulator. While playing around with that, I discovered that when the cheat to be able to pull up the menu is enabled, it also enables you to hold the X button and dash around really fast. More importantly, this dash also works as a walk-through-walls code, allowing you to run pretty much anywhere on screen and ignore script triggers (as long as you keep moving). As you can imagine, this would make mapping the game a lot easier. I've only tested it through the first area, tho, and there might be restrictions later on (it's disabled during the auto-advancing raft sequence, for example).

Anyway, if you're not still interested, or already knew this, I'm sure someone else will find this useful if they decide to do the game.

[Trop]

Ooo can I call dibs on this?  Only I have a lot on my plate right now, I may not be able to get to it right away.

[FlyingArmor]

I did do a little work on Spike McFang a while back, but kinda lost interest in it due to doorways and other things not lining up perfectly from scene to scene, so I couldn't make the continuously flowing maps that I wanted.

The way I was capturing it was with BGMapper, and because every scene is in its entirety in memory (512 x 512 per scene), there was no need to stitch screen shots together, which was really great.

Trop, if you're up to it, be my guest!