Topic: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)

[TerraEsperZ]

People like JonLeung and Revned know I've trying to fully map a GBA Castlevania for a very long time. In fact, mapping all three of them was my goal back when I first started mapping but I didn't have the skill or attention span to do it. Since then, Circle Of The Moon and Harmony Of Dissonance have been mapped by other people, and soon I'll complete that holy triumvirate with maps for Aria Of Sorrow.



This is why I've been mostly absent from the board for the last two months:







As you can somewhat see despite the size and JPG-induced blur, it also includes all the bosses and items (and they're labeled too!).



The final, full size map hasn't been fully assembled yet (I'm still mapping the boss rush mode and making my way to include the Hard Mode items), but I'm working on it, so expect the real thing sometimes next week.



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Current projects: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA), Bucky O'Hare (NES), Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES)

[Revned]

Looks great! You'd better submit it fast, because with your luck someone else will submit one tomorrow  ;-)



I never really liked the palette in the GBA games, they seems too washed out. SotN is so dark and vibrant. Speaking of which... I need to work on that. It's been what, 2+ years since we started?

[Maxim]

The GBA famously had a dark LCD (at least, before the SP) and so many games would have a "washed out" palette to compensate. You could do a gamma correction to adjust for the difference between its LCD and a monitor. A typical monitor has a gamma of about 2.2, the GBA's LCD is estimated to be about 4, so a gamma correction of about 0.55 might do the trick.

[Maxim]

Here's what it looks like if you badly change the background to black, and gamma correct by 0.55:

[TerraEsperZ]

That seems to improve some parts of the maps, but makes others that are already darker worse like The Arena. In any case, I want to preserve the original colors since they don't look that bad like this, just a tad too bright.



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Current projects: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA), Bucky O'Hare (NES), Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES)

[TerraEsperZ]

I'm tentatively pushing the finished maps back a few weeks. Recently, I've been overworked and underslept, and various family obligations are essentially taking away my weekends. I want to go see Star Trek tomorrow, I need to catch up on sleep real bad, *and* not crash from exhaustion. So the maps will have to take a back seat for a little while. Not long, just enough to recharge my batteries.



Explanation: Long story short, I'm at my most active around 10 pm. Always have been. That has unfortunately, since I was a child, made it difficult to go to bed before 1 am, and usually closer to 2 and 3. Usually, I spend that time reading, drawing, playing games, listening to music, etc.



Considering I start work at 8h30 am, I'm always missing sleep during the week and catching up during the weekend when I can get up at 10 or 11, something I haven't been able to do recently thanks to said family obligations (my parents recently decided to divorce - amicably - but they've needed help with boxing things and finding new places to live; also, a few spring celebrations as well as the whole family coming together to build a terrace for his new house).



Heck, I'm starting to babble as if I was drunk (lack of sleeeeep...) so I'll end this soon. I really wanted to finished this this week, but I need to set my priorities. Sleep now, map later.



*thump*



*snore*



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Current projects: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA), Bucky O'Hare (NES), Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES)

[TerraEsperZ]

As I know, 2 Chinese mapper have mapped Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow years before.



AA61300346AA mapped it in 2006, the same time I mapped circle of the moon. We declared to map one castle each, and he finished in August, I finished 2 month later.

(http://bbs.newwise.com/viewthread.php?tid=257074)



His version is not pixel-perfect, and missed the 6 areas of the garden.



zerofighter mapped it again in 2008.

(http://bbs.cvcv.net/viewthread.php?tid=51860)

His version is perfect, but not a full map. He made a html-link system to show the rooms one by one with all the weapons and items' position.



The forum links above shows the time they finished the map, the download links are possibly invalid. You may catch them in my website: http://fcfantasy.cn/maps

[TerraEsperZ]

I get some experience through mapping castlevania: circle of the moon.



All the rooms are supposed to be 256*256 in size, or the integer multiple of it. But by the limit of the GBA window's scale, you always could only see rooms with 240 in long, or 160 in high.



For example, all the save point room, is 256*256, but we could only see one screen, 240*160.



another example, in your version or AA61300346AA's version, we could find so many obvious difference/mistakes between your pictures and the thumbnail in game:

 [img=http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/396/sampleb.th.png]



I suggest to fix some reasonable bricks to enlarge all the rooms 256 in high and 256 in long. With this method, I think my com map could look correct.

[TerraEsperZ]

the sample picture:

http://fcfantasy.cn/sample.png

[TerraEsperZ]

I already know that (that the full size map leaves a lot of empty space, not that others had already mapped it) but Aria Of Sorrow leaves more empty vertical space than both Harmony Of Dissonance and Circle Of The Moon.



I would find it acceptable to enlarge a room by 16 pixels to fill an horizontal gap between two rooms, but vertical gaps here would require enlarging rooms by 96 pixels. That would be kind of cheating, because players would notice while playing that some passages are nowhere near as tall as on my map (not to mention that some would appear to be unpassable without the double jump or bat soul, while in reality they are so short you can just jump up and land up there without any upgrade).



In short, I chose to "collapse" the map like Zeric did with Harmony Of Dissonance map, and moved the rooms around to leave as few spaces between them as possible. So yeah, it won't align as well as the mini-map, but it's more accurate to how it appears while playing.



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Current projects: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA), Bucky O'Hare (NES), Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES)

[TerraEsperZ]

Well, it seems I've deleted the half-size mockup without the empty space removed. But trust me, there was a lot of it.



See, unlike Circle and Harmony where vertically-scrolling rooms had heights that were multiples of 256 pixels (and thus fit nicely in a 256 x 256 grid where everything is aligned), Aria *always* cuts 48 pixels from the top and from the bottom of those rooms, meaning they are always vertically shorter that they should be (416 px instead of 512, 672 px instead of 768, 928 instead of 1024, etc). That means that every room with vertical scrolling would need padding, and I prefer to remain faithful to the real map instead of adding stuff just for the sake of it.



Also, now that I'm thankfully well rested, I should finish the maps this week. It's just taking more time than I had planned to had a border around all the playable areas by hand using tiles from the save select screen. It doesn't as great as I had hoped, but now that I've started, I'm going to see this through.



I've also finally calculated Paint's memory usage limit, which appears to top out around 1.3 GB after which you can't do anything (not even quit the damn program). So I cleverly split the map in two and I'm working on one half at a time which Paint can handle without any problem.



*Cue fellow posters telling me how stupid/stubborn I am for sticking with Paint instead of something better *



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Current projects: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA), Bucky O'Hare (NES), Metal Storm (NES), Clock Tower (SNES), Ristar-The Shooting Star (Gen), Sonic The Hedgehog (Gen), Sonic CD (Sega CD), Mega Man Zero (GBA), Battletoads (NES)

[TerraEsperZ]

Wow, mspaint seems to be the most challenging choice for mappers~~



Maybe KONAMI began to cut down the budget of building the castle since Aria

[TerraEsperZ]

After a short hiatus, this project is on the verge of completion. Both main maps (Castlevania and the Chaotic Realm) are finally finished, with labels, map key and all; however, the main castle map is ~15 Mb in size, so I can't even send it to JonLeung the usual way, using Hotmail. I'll look into creating a download link with MegaUpload or Rapidshare.



Anyway, here's a half-size and color-reduced preview of the final Castlevania map (for size reason), as well as the final Chaotic Realm map (full quality).



Castlevania:





Chaotic Realm:





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Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)



Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)

[TerraEsperZ]

Oh yeah, I forgot that the Boss Rush map isn't finished yet, but should be soon.



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Current project: Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow (GBA)



Upcoming project: Castlevania Legends (GB)

[JonLeung]

Congratulations are in order, I believe.