Topic: Filling in maps?

[The Ultimate Koopa]

OK, so here's a pretty much complete map of the level of Deck Trek from Donkey Kong Land (no items or enemies, just the stage itself):
http://i391.photobucket.com/albums/oo360/TheUltimateKoopa/1-4-DeckTrek.png


This was easy to 'fill in' the gaps. But what about this? (Reef Rampage):


It's not really that small, photoshop just made it smaller since it was 13.1 MB, and it's set to a limit of 1 MB (and the Deck Trek was less than 1 MB, since I had edited it, and saved as a PNG. I think the original file was a BMP, hence the much larger file size).

But the point is, you can clearly see the gaps.

My question is basically ... what's the easiest way of filling in the gaps (with coral)? If I was to make it accurate?

And for anyone wondering:
VBA re-recording was used. I went through the stages, trying to get as many places as I could, while not rolling off platforms to try and get normally out of reach areas, as this was easily done by copying and pasting after.

I then, played the movie back, but with the object layer off, and simultaneously outputted as an AVI (full frames)

I then used VirtualDub to extract each frame.

I then used Maxim's Screenshot Autostitcher 0.7

I then (with Deck Trek anyhow) used Paint (yay!) to just fill in the gaps by copying parts of the pole things and filling them in.

As I said, the poles are easy, but the coral it's very hard to figure out when the texture 'starts' and 'ends' if that makes sense.

[Maxim]

Nice to hear the Autostitcher is working For the gaps, try to figure out the game's grid - probably something like 32x32 or 64x64 - and align the image to it, then you may be able to find matching pieces to fill in the missing parts.

[The Ultimate Koopa]

So, if I try selecting squares of the coral, at say 32, or 64, I should start to see a pattern which repeats in all four directions?

I was thinking that they'd be no less than about 8x8 (although with the coral, it's clearly more than that )

If I found a particular full block of the coral texture, what would putting that as the 'Mask' do? I forgot exactly how the mask works.

If it doesn't do what I want it to do, what's the easiest way of 'filling in' the missing parts of the texture, as opposed to manually selecting part that overlaps it correctly, and manually dragging it to the precise position?

[TerraEsperZ]

What Maxim meant is that although the graphics are all composed of 8x8 pixels tiles, most games tend to arrange those in larger patterns in order to take less space in memory like 16x16 (very common), but even those might me assembled in larger 32x32 or 64x64 pixels blocks. Heck, in many NES games, it's not uncommon for entire screens (256x240 pixels) to be repeated with different enemies or colour palettes.

Like he said, overlay a 16x16, 32x32 or maybe even a 64x64 pixels grid over the stage map and try to see if you suddenly get a much smaller number of distinct blocks that make up the stage. It then becomes much easier to fill the gaps by using an identical block. It's too bad you only included a poor-quality reduced-size version of the stage or else we could have determined that for you.

[DarkWolf]

Not sure what image editor you're using, but when you're trying to paste piece of coral in to see if it fits, you can try to use Undo/Redo in quick succession using keyboard shortcuts to make the piece you pasted over appear and disappear quickly.  You should be able to visually see if the piece lines up because if it doesn't you'll see "jumping" in the image.

[The Ultimate Koopa]

Here's a larger image:

[Maxim]

You have some bad artifacts on there, probably from the original game. Try cropping 1px from each edge in the Autostitcher. It looks like a 32px grid after that.

Also, it's a four colour image - save it as PNG. Never JPEG.

Also also, Screenshot Autostitcher can read AVI files.

[TerraEsperZ]

Comparing this map to the graphics seen on a YouTube video reveals an ungodly amount of artifacts. The Ultimate Koopa, you might seriously need to completely recapture the entire map if you want to make a clean, authentic map.

Also, you might want to take a look at that Deck Trek map. It's almost perfect, but there are 5 colours in it instead of 4. You used pure white (255, 255, 255) to fill the empty parts of the map while your emulator uses (248, 248, 248) instead. You might want to replace all that white with the correct value.

[The Ultimate Koopa]

I assumed the emulator used FFFFFF but I'll change it to F8F8F8 if that's what it is.

Also, cropping 1 px? You mean where it says "Top" and "Left"?

Also, what's the difference between where it says Top, Left, and then Width and Height?

EDIT: Fucking idiots. I'm uploading a PNG, but Photofucket decides to convert it to a JPG.

Also what do you mean by 'artifacts'?

At least it says it's a PNG file. Or is it a "JPG" file, that thinks it's a PNG file?

I really think it'd be much easier to somehow find a cheat code of some sort to be able to move around the stage, in the style of the old Sonic debug modes, where you can go anywhere, even though solid objects, and then take pictures, and stitch them together.

The only bad part, is that if you get to a part of a level where there's an entire white screen, it really messed up the stitching process (from my experience anyway)

[TerraEsperZ]

Regarding the artifacts, there are little grey horizontal lines *everywhere* that shouldn't be there. I'm assuming that it might be caused by something that isn't being cropped properly by one pixel like Maxim guessed. Top and Left would be where the cropping begins (upper left corner) and the other parameters determine the width/height of the cropped picture starting from the upper left corner. To crop more, you'd need to increase Top/Left and/or reduce Width/Height.

[The Ultimate Koopa]

Am I blind or can I not see what grey lines you're referring to? Could you highlight them? Edit the picture with some kind of highlight, like a circle around the parts you mean?

EDIT: Nevermind, I see what you mean.

Well I can't be bothered to wait for the world's slowest operating system to load the Recycle Bin so I can actually GET to the images from the 2 AVI files (because 2 GB is too much for one, so VBARR has to split the videos), to then restore them.

[Maxim]

Get hold of the TSCC codec to make smaller videos. If you don't like piracy, try Lagarith.

To crop one pixel from all edges (looks like it might do the trick), you want to enable cropping and set top = 1, left = 1, width = whatever it said originally - 2, height = whatever it said originally - 2. Or make a mask image. You'll be missing the outermost pixels of the map, though.

[Maxim]

Also, autostitching a pure white screen will work provided the motion is constant - i.e. in a straight line at a constant speed. If not, limit the stitching rnage to stop before the white screen and then start again after it, and merge the two images by hand.

[The Ultimate Koopa]

Another question about the program, does it only work for images, if they're named with numbers?
I.e. blah001, blah002, etc?

[Maxim]

I don't see how else it would know what order they're in.