Question about possibilities and the difficulty thereof

[Draconis Kenjishiya]

I am heavily into planning my hack, and I came up with something that is sort of contingent on the possibility of the two things:

1. Is it possible to temporarily disable map access as well as the minimap in general? Like...you enter a room, and the start button no longer works, and the minimap is forced to a blank section of the map and stops scrolling, and when you exit another room, those effects end.

2. A timer. I want this same area to have a timer of, right now, about fifteen minutes. I don't use the Colony timer at all, so maybe I could use it? I am not sure.

Thank you.

[Zhs2]

Ceres is an area where pausing inherently doesn't work, so assigning your rooms to that area may just do the trick. The minimap for the area can just be set blank, though I guess this won't stop scrolling.

[Scyzer]

What zeke said. That method works, even without any ASM.

There is another method, if you need to have the rooms in a normal area. You can run a small bit of code whil in those rooms that will remove any detection of start being pressed, as well as disable the minimap from drawing.

Timers are also possible, depending on the contents of these rooms. The timer uses a shared VRAM location with enemies. If you load too much enemy GFX in any room with a timer, the timer gets garbled. I think the limit is around $1C00, but I can't remember, and I've never actually looked into the timer to see where it puts it's stuff. TLDR, bosses are out unless you want shitty timer GFX.

[Draconis Kenjishiya]

I never considered using Ceres. Would it run as is? The room in question is a large square, a huge puzzle chamber, with very few enemies (a couple of zoomers to show hidden air tiles, a couple of the flat-green transport enemies, and a single grapple ripper, so, five enemies in total, with three enemies on the species list). The goal is to escape the puzzle before the timer runs out or you die. There are no save rooms or map rooms in the chamber (there is a save room before it in a different area) so I don't think loading would be a problem, nor are there any bosses to contend with.

[Jordan5]

In redesign the lost caverns are on a serparate sub-map (I think) and is represented by in the same way the maridian tube room is represented on the brinstar map. Something else redesign did was once you got to the end of the caverns and beat phantoon it changed a roomstate so that the doors either side of the maze joined together so you only need to traverse the maze once.

I probably haven't explained that well but if you've played redesign you'll know how well it works, I hope this helps!  :^_^:

[Draconis Kenjishiya]

I figured that was how it was done, and had prepared to do so myself; you only have to traverse my maze once as well. I've got it down, thanks all for your help.