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.