MetroidCoop, a C# remake of Metroid that will eventually have Coop

[EagleEye]

I've gotten a decent amount of work done on this so far, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting the rooms loaded correctly. Can anyone help?

(Yes, I know Editroid is C#, and that it loads the rooms too, but I can't make heads nor tails of most of it's coding. It takes an extremely different approach than my project, and the only code it used that I could figure out was the Hi/Lo Bytes code).



If you want to help make this jumbled mess of numbers correct, source is here.

I've gotten a simple structure ready to be built upon as soon as I figure out how to fix map loading, but there's really no reason to try implementing physics and stuff until there's a map to test it with. :)

Once I've finished the engine most of the way, I'm going to add in splitscreen coop. Essentially, you get the Varia suit, and now everyone has the Varia suit. Mainly coop will be just for screwing around.

Speaking of which, I implemented the Playchoice-10 hints into the menu. They're loaded from a file instead of just being a screenshot.

[snarfblam]

Hi EagleEye. I wouldn't expect the Editroid code to be too useful for a Metroid clone. Are you trying to use the ROM as a data source? If so, I can help you use the Editroid source code as a starting point to load (or extract) the data, but as far as drawing screens go, the demands of a level editor are very different from those of an actual game. The Editroid code is largely useless for interactive scrolling areas full of sprites rendered in real-time. What sort of graphic frame work are you dealing with?

In the past, I've thought about making something quite like what you have in mind, but I don't have the time and patience to take it upon myself (at least, not while I have four or so other projects in the works). All the same, I'd be glad to lend a hand if I can help, and I think I probably can.

I'll be on vacation next week (without a computer), but if you're looking for help, let me know.

[personitis]

I know for fact that Romhacking.net has a few documents on the Metroid code. Two of them I can recall are Metroid Source Code and Metroid Source Code Expenaded though, iirc these docs are written in Assembly. Hope it's of some help.

[EagleEye]

Thanks, snarfblam. I know level editors and actual games have very different requirements, though I imagine that it wouldn't take that much graphical horsepower unless I'm aiming for a Pentium 2 (though I'm got a dual core 1.2gh and integrated graphics card, so it should work on pretty much any computer nowadays). That said, you should be able to render an image with a damn palette! Seriously, why can't you do that nowadays?

But back to my rendering scheme: I have a custom library that uses a Rectangle2D or whatever to render the Nth frame assuming that each frame is WxH. I'm going to retrieve each tile from the game and convert it to a Texture2D when the game is starting up. Whenever something needs to be rendered, it's frame is selected from the thing or whatever.

Lost my train of thought. I'll come back to this post later.