I've got a little something for ya

It's an editor update. Holy f@#%, Batman!

Now I know it has been a while, and I can't even remember how much has changed since the last official "update", but I can tell you that you no longer need that annoying XNA Redistributable package (/spit). I've rewritten the whole graphics part of the application in OpenGL using the Open Toolkit Package for C# bindings. You don't need to know exactly what that is unless you're going to build the code (which I know you aren't!), so all YOU need to know is you can just download and run the program now. That is, unless you haven't updated Windows for years, then you still need a .NET update, but that's your problem, pal.

Anyways, try it out, try and break it, and do tell me if you do. I like it when people try to break it, so fill yourself with rage and have at the editor! And once you've calmed down and returned from anger management, post a comment or a bug report on the issues list.

SMTC Level Editor (Changeset: cb2d164dd0, Build date: 100628)

EDIT: Updated project once more to fix a miscalculation.

Super Metroid Classic Engine Video

Youtube did something ghastly to the audio, otherwise this is a pretty accurate depiction of the engine. A download link will be posted when I have finished cleaning up the bugs.

ROCKET KNIGHT

I've created and posted a full Rocket Knight playthrough, as well as the game's soundtrack.
So if you were wondering what I was up to (you weren't), wonder no more!

May Update

I figured it's been a long time since I posted anything, so here it is.
Latest Download.

This version contains a bunch of smaller bug fixes (including some crash-related ones) and also adds water physics. Samus will now slide around in water unless you get the Gravity Suit. In order to allow for backwards compatibility, this feature has been disabled in acid until I go back through all the levels and make sure the player can escape from the acid if he/she falls in.

The Zebes Depths area has been completed but has not been appended to the map quite yet. If you want to test it out, you'll have to set your SMTC.cfg to start you in Rooms/Dept00.mcl. I worked hard on those levels so at least pretend to appreciate them.

Scripting is in the works at the moment but is only partially functional. To see some examples of what it can do, go to your SMTC.cfg. The cvars on the bottom can be used to edit the properties of water physics in-game. More options will come once I work out the bugs in the parser.

As for the more global picture, Toasty and I have been talking about starting a new project. It won't be a remake, instead it will be a completely original game mixing RPG and Strategy elements. Very few details have been even discussed but you can expect to hear about any betas on this blog at some point.

What's this? A review? Oh my!

After noticing Sudtrap's comment about a month ago in Salty's Useless Update Post:

Sudtrap said...

I've gotten the Gamersnark interested in reviewing the game and game engine, and he'd like to do a interview as well, when you release it!
(A link to one of his better videos)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO9q9M5Irl0

Otherwise, I look forward to the release! ^_^

I should probably note that Gamersnark has completed his review and it's up on his website and in his YouTube channel. Take a look, let him and us know what you think! It also features a Q&A interview with Mr. SaltyJustice himself. Perhaps we'll contact him for another review in the future if you guys like it.

http://www.gamerzsnark.com/Salty%27s%20Metroid%20Review.htm

Ubuntu Build

I toyed around with SMTC in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) today. Altered the build settings, changed some paths to be compatible, etc. Here's the end result:

SMTC in Ubuntu

Although it's still got some issues to track down (such as not accepting input..), it is compile-able! The libraries are also usable in Mac OSX and other distros, so you may see those as a possibility.

More on this when I decide to work on it further.

Source Release

This is the download link for the existing SMTC Source. I used Codeblocks for this, and Allegro 4.9.x 4.0.3. The Audio library I used was BASS 2.4.

This release is for you amateurs out there, as well as anyone presently interested in helping port the game to other operating systems. I will upgrade the source releases as the RCs come out.

Final RC version

This is the final version of the SMTC RC1 version. It contains fixes for the Mother Brain encounter, as well as all the previous patch versions rolled into one.

The next RC will probably be released next month, or SMTC 1.0 if I think it's polished enough. While I won't be immediately patching any minor bugs until then, feel free to post whatever bugs you do find.

Update: A few fatal errors have been patched, as of April 4.
Elevators should no longer crash the program
Helix beam hitting a corner should no longer crash the program
Transitioning in rooms should no longer crash the program sometimes
Non-standard door positions should no longer cause scrolling

SMTC Release Candidate Mark I Released!

At long last, here it is. SMTC 1.0 (Mark I), a fully playable Metroid Classic game experience.

There are FAR fewer parade floats and flying streamers than I had come to expect.

Anyway, you can download it here.

As always you can get the latest release at www.g0dsoft.com/smtc/Downloads/SMTC_Release_Latest.rar.

For the love of god, read the readme I included. All of it. I'm serious.
And start pimping this to your friends/neighbors/victims/people you don't like. Get the word out people!

Update: Just encountered a crash. Using the elevator from Ridley's Lair to Norfair. Haven't been able to reproduce it yet. SAVE OFTEN. As in, every time you pass a save room.

Also, the list of known bugs is nowhere near up to date. I'll post a new one soon.

Update 2: Patched a crash issue in Tourian. Please download the zip/rar again if you got it earlier this afternoon.

Update 3: If you are experiencing a crash in the Mother Brain's room, please try this patch and leave a comment if it works. If not, back to the drawing board.

Update 4: This patch should solve some minor problems in the Ridley's Lair section (and one major one, yeesh). Replace your old Rooms folder with the new one included. Also contains some other minor bug fixes.

FYI: If you're downloading this for the first time, the package is being updated with the patches, so you won't need them.

Updateless Update

Okay so we're going with the monthly format here.
February doesn't get an update because February was midterms/swine flu month.

The Editor is nearing its final version, barring some unforseen bugs.
Kraid is done (it only took a few hours to build and test him, but you try fucking doing that with swine flu).
Ridley is done as far as I know.
I'm going to work on the Mother Brain now. The Zebetites and Rinkas are already done but they're "harmless" to allow testing unmolested, which you may have seen in the case of Ridley and Kraid. Those two are now fully armed.
Screw Attack has been added and seems to work.
Fixed a massive crash that had to do with doors opening and target lists.

I probably did some other stuff but forgot what I did (I'm like that).

Expect an actual release next week. More importantly, next week's release will be an RC, meaning it might be the finished version (or 1.0. Metroid 2 will be 2.0, but that's getting ahead of myself).

Finally, I'd like to see you people (okay, you two) make a video or somesuch that I can post on youtube to pimp the RC. So if you're interested in doing that you can mail me or post a comment.
I'd do it myself but my system refuses to record sound internally. Also I suck hard at video editing.

The Full Map

Here's a preview of the full map. No, it's not even close to complete, as Maridia and Brinstar Green need to be added.

You will note that Brinstar Red (in the bottom) is way below the rest. That's because I there's not much space between Kraid's Lair and Ridley's Lair.

I find backtracking across Brinstar to be tedious, especially with the plethora of vertical shafts. Brinstar Red connects two fairly disparate sections of Brinstar, allowing an alternate route back once you've collected Bombs and the Ice Beam. Going further into Brinstar Red will require the Wave Beam and Screw Attack, and allow access to Maridia (which shortcuts to Ridley's Lair) and Brinstar Green (which shortcuts to Kraid's lair).

The Space Jump will be found in Brinstar Red, as will the Spazer Beam and Gravity Suit.
The Helix Beam will be found in Brinstar Green.
The Shock Beam and Burn Beam will be found in Maridia.

Obviously this is still a work in progress. I'll append more sections to this map as I go.

I am not happy about this

I don't know why but I'm just not happy with this release, and I'm doing it anyway. Please post bugs that you have found, if any.

Known Bugs:
Unmorphing in midair causes Samus to land and stop for 1 frame before continuing to run.
Collecting an item during a certain run frame causes the sound of footstep to repeat for a while.
Several rooms still have bad positions on the minimap.
That's all I can think of.

New Features:
Wow where to begin.

==== Sound ====
Pretty sure I got all the sounds and music from the original Metroid. Made some progress in other Metroid games as well. Have to fix a sound bug or two.
All the Music entities in the Editor work and are correctly integrated.

==== Editor ====
Added a bunch of new entities to the Editor's list. All current entities except Metroids and Rinkas work.
Note: The Save entity should be obvious. The stuff next to that is the Minigun entities that exist in Mother Brain's room.
About 1/4 of the tiles from Metroid 2 have been added, in color!

==== Enemies ====
Enemies work. Period. Send any bugs you find in. Apart from the Rinkas and Metroids, all the enemies on the Editor's list should work fully.
Ridley is fully functional. You will find him in Ridley's Lair. He has around 200 hp and splatters into gibs when he dies. If you want to fight him without traveling down there, press 6 at any time to spawn him on the top left side of your room. Killing him nets you 75 missiles.

==== Rooms ====
There are about 3 rooms in Norfair that I have not completed yet, and most of the rooms in Norfair have no enemies yet.
Kraid's Lair is done (though lacking a Kraid)
Ridley's Lair is done
Tourian is done
Brinstar is done
Save Rooms have been added to the game. Check the maps in your Images\Maps folder to find out where they are. Press F3 while on top of the save pillar to save your game. It will use the name of the game you loaded with, or entered at the start of the game.

==== Items ====
Most of the original game's equipment, and then some, is included. Still have yet to do the Screw Attack.
The Beam weapons have been overhauled. I added 3 extra beams though support for some is still lacking:
Burn Beam: Sets enemies on fire for a few seconds, dealing out damage each second. Presently not supported to actually deal out damage. Needs more graphical support. The Burn Beam is incompatible with the Ice Beam and Plasma Beam.
Shock Beam: Stuns enemies 3-4x longer than a normal beam impact. Increases damage by 1. The stun is not supported yet, but the damage upgrade is. Not compatible with the Wave Beam.
Helix Beam: The Beam becomes a Helix form, creating two seperate beams that criss-cross through the air. Increases damage comparable to the Spazer Beam. Allows the mixing of Burn and Ice beams (one on each carrier).

You no longer start the game with a default loadout. You now start with just 99 energy. If you need to test equipment, press 5 to enable the gear.

==== Misc ====
Press T during the starting music to skip it.
Don't use campaigns yet, they have not been improved to the latest formats.
The Cvar for fireworks mode causes Missiles to spray fireworks all over the place. Use it!
Old Savefiles are no longer anywhere near compatible. Delete them please.
Random games should still not work. I'm not sure if I'll include them in the final game at all.

As always, you can get the latest release at
www.g0dsoft.com/smtc/Downloads/SMTC_Release_Latest.rar
or, by clicking here.


Please report bugs!
Also, the game is very close to completed. Here's a todo list to make the game playable from the start to finish:
Finish up Norfair (not looking forward to this shit...)
Add Acid to all rooms that don't have it.
Put in Kraid.
Put in the Mother Brain.
Put in Metroids and Rinkas.
Put in the Screw Attack.

Twitter finally does something useful

After I found out Toasty was on Twitter, I decided to berate him about it.
However, I did find 1 (one, exactly one, no more) thing that Twitter has done properly.

http://twitter.com/awesometf2names

My name is on that list, about halfway down. Suck it Toasty.

Open Source SMTC Level Editor? It cannot be!

Following some experimenting with Mercurial at my workplace, I've done some toying around and am now using it for the Level Editor. What does this mean for you? Well Google Code hosts Open Source projects and has support for Mercurial, so where better for me to try it out?

You don't know what Mercurial is? Find out!

And, then, if you wanna give it a try, feel free to check out the editor source code! The Google Code project is located at http://smtcleveleditor.googlecode.com/. For those who want a direct link to see the source, here you go. For checkout instructions, please click on 'Checkout' just below the Source tab.

I have tested the project file with Visual C# Express Edition with the XNA Game Studio 3.1 package installed. However I have not compiled it, but as far as I know it should be good-to-go.

This post, like my previous, is likely to fall on deaf ears.
Maybe if it doesn't we can convince Salty to make his Open Source =P

Edit: Oh. And I signed up for Twitter. Follow me if you want.

Ohh no another damned readme!

I've updated the readme to reflect the changes made in the latest version.

As always you can find it at http://www.g0dsoft.com/smtc/EditingReadme.htm

The One That Sounded Good

Today's release has been coming for two freakin weeks but I'm sure you guys will like it.

This one includes music!

Yes yes, hold your applause.

Here's a quick changelog. And by quick I mean not quick at all.

Music and Sound has been added. I've gotten all the sound effects I can think of, and they're in ogg format in the Sound folder. Might be missing a few.

The Room file format has been updated to version 1.2. As before, the Editor is backwards compatible but SMTC is not. Please load your custom rooms in the editor and save them back out to update their format.

The Editor now supports Objects. Objects consist of Enemies, No-Clip, Explosions, Items, and the Samstart object. It also has the objects that change the level's music but those don't work yet, as I only have the Brinstar music anyway.
Note: You must place a Samstart entity in your level to cause the Brinstar music to play. If you load into a room with no Samstart, Samus will begin at position 64x64 (top left corner) with no music and no intro music.

The entities are pretty obvious. No-clip makes the tile unclipped and can be moved through, the explosion makes the block a breakable, and the items/enemies are, uh, items/enemies. Note that placing an item inside a block will turn that block into a breakable and place the item inside of it.

SMTC itself has received several upgrades.
Gerutas and Sidehoppers now work. The existing maps do not have any in them but you can place them in the editor.
A new program called Detector.exe is bundled. Running it will cause Allegro to see which screen modes your graphics card is capable of. It sometimes hangs until you press Esc a few times, not sure why. Be careful when using it.
Several rooms have been fixed with their minimap problems. Several remain unfixed.
You should no longer get jumped by a Geemer when opening some doors.
Some of the items have been placed in their respective spots in Brinstar. Since Norfair is not done yet that's as far as you can go.
Palettes have been improved. There are now 4 palettes, activated by 1 2 3 and 4.
Press 5 to give/remove the equipment. Some rooms in BrinRed were designed for the High Jump Boots so you might need those to get around. Alternately, look around for breakables!
Hidden items have been implemented but only in BrinRed (since Metroid didn't have a lot to begin with). Find them all!

Toasty said he'd post a readme for the editor later on, so be on the lookout for that. Comments or complaints go in the comments section. Please also tell me about bugs you find.

Download it here.

As always, the latest SMTC Release can be found at
http://www.g0dsoft.com/smtc/Downloads/SMTC_Release_Latest.rar

Patch'd

This is a patch for the latest SMTC version. It's a new .exe, so overwrite your old one.

I've applied this patch to the SMTC_Release_Latest as well as the 04112009 release.

This patch should fix the camera scrolling error that some have been reporting.
To find out which screen modes you can run the game in, download this utility.
The utility may need to be run more than once as it sometimes hangs for reasons uncertain, but it will attempt to set all the screen modes and report which ones work and which don't.

The Post that Seems Impressive but Really Isn't

Today we have a version of SMTC that seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of the old version but, in fact, is not. Okay so it is, and I'm being humble.

The latest version can always be found here.

What's new? What isn't!

Minimap support has been implemented, and if you press ENTER you will be taken to the subscreen (since Metroid had none, I've used the Super Metroid template) you can view the full map. Sadly, there's no support for scrolling on this map, but there will be, I swears!

Press W on the map screen to switch to the inventory subscreen. Press X to enable/disable the item your cursor is on, and use the arrow keys to select items. Press Q to return to the map screen. Remember to press 4 to enable the improved loadout.

Full maps have been made for Brinstar Red and Brinstar (The one from Metroid) and work in conjunction with the subscreen. They can be found in the Images\\Maps folder if you're curious.

Full support for Enemies has been added. And by "full support" I, of course, mean the bare bones minimum. Rather than design a seperate mode, I told Toasty to turn them into tiles. So simply select the Zoomer tile in tiles mode and, uh, place the Zoomer! Note that Gerutas (the purple one on the right) don't work.

The Editor now supports DOORS! As a result, the Parser, Deconstructor, and Shell programs have been removed as the main editor now does all their jobs (more or less).
Rather, I have included a program called Updated.exe. This will update all your custom made .mcl rooms into the new 1.1 format (which supports the minimap). According to Toasty, his editor is backwards compatible but SMTC ISN'T.

Brinstar is finished, including enemies. A few things still need to be fixed (like making the pipes in some cases unclipped) and the minimap isn't perfectly aligned yet, I'll fix that at some point. Also the room to the Ice Beam isn't there for reasons I cannot recall.

More rooms have been added to the Brinstar Red series. The blocked off door in Brin0 is blocked off for a reason.

Water has been improved and looks better in pretty much every way. It should also no longer slow the system down by drawing it.

You can now select screen modes and color depths in the CFG file. Change the line
Cvar.screen_size 0 to change it.
0 is 256x256, the bare minimum.
1 is 512x512
2 is Fullscreen.

Also, you can change the color depths with cvar.color_depth to 0 and 1
0 is 24 bit
1 is 32 bit
As near as I can tell they're compatible, but I'd recommend leaving it at 1.

If you find the program cannot run a particular screen size, try changing the color depth.

Lastly, improved a few things concerning camera bounding.

Known Bugs:
Running the game, then quitting back to the main title, then running it again, causes the room to scroll back to the start. It looks cool, but it's not supposed to do that.

The minimap doesn't sync with some of the rooms in Brinstar. Cause is known, but it's a pain to fix.

If you have a bug concerning the editor, please check here. This is a google thingy Toasty uses to track bugs.
Also note that the current dependencies of the Editor are
.NET Framework 3.5
Microsoft XNA Redistributable 3.0

Post stuff in the comments. I tell you to do that but whether or not you do is unaffected. One might wonder why I do that at all.

New items and improvements update

Today we add a bunch of useful items to the game as well as fixing the older physics bugs that were giving me a headache. Here's a changelog:

Most of the game's items have been implemented, including extra items like the Gravity Suit. So far, Space Jump, High Jump, Long Beam, Wave Beam, Ice Beam, Varia Suit, and the Gravity Suit are ready. To activate them in game, press 4, and press it again to deactivate.

Samus now runs at a speed closer to the original game's speed.
Samus now jumps the same height whether she is moving or not.
Samus's jump is now about the same as the original, and higher with the High Jump Boots on.
Water has been added but has no impact, it just looks kinda cool.
Backgrounds have been added, or at least support for them has. Since the original had no backgrounds, this feature may or may not stick depending on how much I care about it.
IPF and ISF files have been upgraded to a new version. Please don't use the old version or the game will crash on startup.
Several new sprites added, some not implemented yet.
Projectiles have been updated and no longer fire past the screen's edge.

As always, the latest version of SMTC can be found at
www.g0dsoft.com/smtc/Downloads/SMTC_Release_Latest.rar
or by clicking here.

Leave comments if you have questions.

Also: I need suggestions on what exactly to do next. Should I concentrate on adding the remaining (handful) of enemies, or work on the newer content, or what?

Update from the 08102009 Release

This is an update from the previous version, SMTC_Release_E_08102009.rar .
Thanks to Sudtrap and AlexR for noticing a problem with the IPF/ISF files.
The patched version should run correctly on all systems.