Death Fuck '89 progress thread

[Rotwang]

I like the part where he rhymes "them" with "them"

[Rotwang]

On to the next phase of this hack. Cody is still Pseudocody, so now I get to port all the stuff I did in my Cody hack from a while ago. Since the last thing I did for 2 Play mode is move the subroutine for loading player palettes to expanded ROM, I've taken the first step of creating a new entry to load Cody's palette (his character ID originally pointed to a duplicate of Guy's palette load data pointer)

ff_2play_cody_prelim.png (24.13 KiB) Viewed 2967 times

[Rotwang]

Well, here it is! For literally the first time ever, Cody and Guy reunited in SNES Final Fight!

ff_2play_cody_guy.PNG (41.48 KiB) Viewed 2962 times

[rock23]

Great work

[Dr. Floppy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atzLwyecuZg

[Rotwang]

Thanks guys, for the kudos and also for making this thread seem less like I'm having a conversation with myself.

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[Dr. Floppy]

Some of my all-time best conversations have been those held with myself.

tl;dr- TOSpots weep softly in the corner.

[tettsui77]

Thanks guys, for the kudos and also for making this thread seem less like I'm having a conversation with myself.

ff_2play_brofist.PNG

lol how long did it take you to get the perfect fistbump cap?

[Rotwang]

Half a minute. If you use the frame-by-frame key in snes9x debug you can do inputs like attacks to be frame-perfect, so the hard part was just walking around until it lined up.

[Rotwang]

It has been brought to my attention that a Spanish language forum has been discussing my 2 player hack, and they have some questions which I will try to answer. Sorry, but I will have to answer in English because I don't know any Spanish and I don't want to mangle my answers by using a translation service.

¿Tiene pensado integrar todos los cuadros de animación del arcade? "Do you plan to include all of the arcade animation frames?"

Meaning the additional frames for the player walk cycles? It is possible, but there are bigger priorities right now.

¿tal vez optimizar el uso de los sprites para poner algún personaje mas en pantalla? "Maybe optimize sprite usage to fit more characters on the screen?"

Optimizing the sprites is something I have considered to fix the flickering issue, and I have the sprite arrangement data reverse engineered so it is entirely possible. Unfortunately, there is simply not enough space in VRAM to fit more enemies than there currently are. Also, a lot of the code for this game assumes that there are only 3 enemies, so even if there was enough video memory to fit another enemy it would be a massive amount of work to implement.

¿y las voces y efectos del sonido del arcade? "And the voices and sound effects from the arcade?"

Dr. Floppy and I have been working on a plan for this! Right now the game only has enough room for one player's sound effects, and all 3 character's sound effects would have to be loaded at the same time in case a player continues as a different character mid-level. A lot of reorganizing will have to take place to fit all of these voices. Final Fight has all of the music tracks loaded into audio memory at all times, which takes up a lot of space. The plan is to change it so the game loads only the necessary tracks for the current level which will free up room for more sound effects. The game already loads some sound effects on a per-level basis (Damnd's laugh is only loaded for Slums, EDI-E's gunshots are only loaded for West Side, etc) so doing the same for music is a possibility. Audio memory is very limited, so not every voice/sound effect can be implemented but the plan is to at least have a bit more variety. Even a couple more of the voices (Haggar's piledriver, Cody's jump kick, etc) would be nice, but it will be a while until we figure out how much room we really have to play with. No work beyond planning has been started for the audio hack, though. I want to make sure the game is at least fun to play before worrying about it.

¿Sólo 2 enemigos? "Only 2 enemies?"

...tampoco se si el segundo jugador está ocupando una de las entradas de los enemigos... "I don't know if Player 2 is occupying another enemy's space"

There can be three regular enemies on-screen at the same time, or two enemies and one boss, with or without Player 2. With scenes like the one below, however, some sprite flickering occurs. It will have to be tolerated in the meantime. This is just a hack after all, not a commercial product, so it's best to keep your expectations low. Player 2 does not conflict with the memory used for any of the enemies.

ff_2play_5chars.PNG (46.16 KiB) Viewed 2838 times

pero ahora mismo veo mas importante que se centre en la fase industrial "But right now I think it is more important to focus on the Industrial Area"

That is the dream. However, new tiles and background maps would have to be created, and even worse, there is no programming in place for Rolento or his grenades. It would be a HUGE amount of work to add all of this. Realistically, we should make our peace with the Industrial Area in the SNES version.



Remember, this is "Final Fight: Unlicensed Hack" and not "Final Fight: Arcade Fix". I will do my best with this project, but I won't promise the world!

Thanks for your interest!

[tettsui77]

this is prety awesome. by "this" I mean that this hack is being discussed on another forum period, but in particular one in another language.

[Rotwang]

Yeah, I was happy to find out about that. Kyo also informed me that the Chinese have discovered it too. http://f.ppxclub.com/684593-1-1

[Duwango]

The actual possibility is a snowball chance in hell due to the 68000 architechture, but have you thought about perhaps converting the assets of the Amiga/Atari ST ports to the SNES? For what it's worth, they do have the first half of the Industrial Stage intact.

(I haven't read the entire thread yet so for all I know someone else might've made more-or-less the same suggestion eons ago.

[Rotwang]

The Amiga graphics are just ripped directly from the arcade game, and having looked at the Atari ST graphics they are the same as well but with fewer colors. Graphics for the SNES port are adjusted to compensate for the CPS1's weird aspect ratio, while for the other ports they did not go through the same effort. There would be no point in using those graphics over the arcade version.

As for the Industrial Area, even if the tiles for the background were ported over, the metatile data would have to be reconstructed. Doing the background maps wouldn't be as big of a deal as programming Rolento and the grenades back into the game. It would be an insane amount of work, especially without access to the original arcade code, which the team who did the SNES port clearly were working from.

[Rotwang]

I know I've been quiet lately, sorry guys. I need to take a break from this stuff every once in a while to keep from getting burned out. Back into it, though. Last night I reverse engineered the character select screen. Here is the code for it: https://pastebin.com/raw/bViZRa6S

[Rotwang]

Going to put together a temporary 2 player character select screen. In the meantime, Cody's portrait is fixed.

ffight_codyportrait.PNG (32.6 KiB) Viewed 1746 times

[Rotwang]

Work in progress screenshot of the placeholder character select screen. This features the unused "S E L E C T P L A Y E R" text hidden in the ROM.

ffight_charsel_temp.PNG (4.99 KiB) Viewed 1696 times

[Señor Ventura]

Work in progress screenshot of the placeholder character select screen. This features the unused "S E L E C T P L A Y E R" text hidden in the ROM.

ffight_charsel_temp.PNG

Hello... I'm following this project for some time, and at least i would to ask you some questions (with your permission).

What you have in mind to do the "select player menu"?, Three slots like the arcade?, or two slots like the FF3 of the own snes.

What is the actual status of the game in terms of level completion?.

Can you give some details of how do you have planned to change the actual snes sprites by the ones of the arcade game, with all its animations?.

And the last one... What about the actual sound effects?, These have some kind of compression that difficults the substitution?.


Thanks in advance

[Rotwang]

The character select menu will eventually resemble the one from the arcade version with 3 character portraits. For testing purposes I just want it to allow for both players 1 and 2 to make a selection, and include Cody. With the normal SNES character select screen I have to edit RAM directly to select Cody or set player 2's character, so this will make it at least work more like a real game for the meantime. I will worry about the artwork later. This code I'm writing can be reused when it is time to change the graphics.

I have not touched the levels yet. That is fun stuff, and fun stuff has to wait until the hard work is finished.

The animations are not a huge priority for me, but sometime in the future I might reorganize the arrangements for the player sprites to be more efficient and use more 16x16 sprites than 8x8. This should free up enough on-screen sprites to decrease the flickering effect. New animation frames are possible, it would just be very tricky to implement. Again, this is not yet a priority.

I am sure it is possible to add new sound effects. The sound effects do have to be compressed into BRR format, but I already know how to do that. The challenge is fitting them into ARAM, which is already quite full. I don't expect that all of the arcade sound effects can be ported, but having a few of the player character's distinctive shouts and grunts will make a huge difference. I've brainstormed with Dr. Floppy about ways to do this and we think we have a good approach in mind, but it requires more investigating.

In conclusion, I have a lot of fun plans for this hack but I am trying very hard to not get sidetracked with improving the graphics or audio until 2 player gameplay works the way a normal person would expect it to. Enemies still ignore Player 2 and will not actively seek him out, the Game Over condition is still bound to Player 1's lives, there is not yet a way for Player 2 to continue after losing all of his lives, and there are several more issues where the program will only take action on Player 1. This all requires rewriting the rules of the game, and there is still a lot of work to do.

[Rotwang]

The placeholder character select screen now works 100%. I threw in a fun little extra: If both players are the same character, player 2 will have an alternative palette.

ffight_codyalt.PNG (28.83 KiB) Viewed 1678 times

ffight_haggaralt.PNG (38.54 KiB) Viewed 1678 times