This will no doubt seem like cruel teasing on my part, especially given the slim chance of ever completing the whole thing, but I've decided to share a few maps I've managed to assemble of this great game. Given how little free time I have nowadays, I can barely work on mapping at all so I tend to not stick to anything even more than before. In any case, these aren't official submissions at the moment, more like works in progress, though I might eventually submit them if I ever get the time to polish and finish them.
Scuttle Town:*EDIT 2017-02-05* See this later post for updated versionTangle Forest (main area):*EDIT 2017-02-05* See this later post for updated versionThese two areas have always fascinated me because of the way you can switch layers in certain spots and you literally jump either into the background or out into the foreground. When on the foremost layer, you can still see monsters and NPCs move around in the other background layers and it makes these places feel much bigger than they really are.
Mapping this game (using the Steam version since apparently no ROM dump of the DSiware version exists) was quite a pain:
1) First I had to take a lot of screenshots, and then process them for use. There's no way to configure the game to run using its original resolution (256 x 192) but running it in full screen on my end (1680 x 1050), cropping the exact gameplay window and then resizing it without resampling results in an almost pixel perfect image (256 x 191, only the uppermost line needing to be resized separately and added back). This preserves the graphics of the game perfectly.
2) I then remove the backgrounds using a colour replacer tool (thankfully, there is almost never a colour shared across multiple layers which makes this easy) and use multiple images to remove sprites and the player's status icons (they disappear during conversations with NPCs, but this doesn't happen in every area unfortunately).
3) For the backgrounds (especially the one from Tangle Forest), they couldn't be ripped in their entirety just by playing since there's always a portion that's not visible. I then used a rather unorthodox method to obtain it: doing a memory dump of the game's process using the Windows Task Manager, and then combing through the resulting massive file using the TextureFinder v2.0 utility. This is basically searching through the game's memory at the time of the dump and trying to find the graphic I'm looking for using the various graphic formats it can recognize until I can make out something that looks like the game's background and then keep adjusting the program's settings like offset, horizontal resolution and skew until I get the tiles for the texture. It took almost an hour to find what I was looking for.
4) Once the individual layers have been assembled, there's still the matter of assembling them in the same way the game does for those multi-layers areas. I quickly calculated that any playable layer, when seen in the background, is scaled at 90% of the size of the one in front of it, meaning that if I'm standing on the first layer (out of three), the second will be resized to 90% of its original size, and the third will be 90% of 90%, so 81%. A hypothetical fourth would be 90% of 81%, so 73% of its original size. Since the layers, when resized, are no longer as large or tall as they used to be, I then had to extend them in every direction to account for the empty space. It's all a bit hard to explain and I'll see if I can attach a sample of the back-most layer for the forest.
5) Finally, when standing on anything but the rear-most layer, all the background layers become lighter in colours. Using some pixel colour values and doing some quick calculations, I managed to obtain with 98% accuracy the required amount of brightness to apply to them. For Scuttle town, it's a 59 out of 255 increase (using Irfanview's measurements) and for Tangle Forest, it's 132 out of 255.
